The Iranians and the Syrians are on heightened military alert as the Russians fuel the Iranian nuclear reactor at Brushehr today and everyone has an opinion about when and who will attack it. If the world wanted to stop the plant from functioning, it could and would have done so long ago.
The military alert is understandable. Israel destroyed an Iraqi reactor that Saddam Hussein was building and a clandestine one being built by Syria.
As anyone who has a World Almanac with its map of the world from the United Kingdom to a tip of Australia can determine, it is a very long way from tiny Israel to Iran. Distance increases the risk along with what is surely a ring of missile defense around the reactor.
While the Israelis have conducted some exercises to demonstrate their bombers could make the trip, they have been rather quiet about the Iranian reactor. A very real part of that involves Hezbollah in Lebanon which is armed to the teeth and Hamas in the Gaza strip, both of which are Iranian proxies in any conflict.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the occasion on Friday to announce that the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority (PA) had agreed to once again sit down and discuss peace. This is kabuki theatre, a charade, a farce. It’s the old land-for-peace swap that has not resulted in a day of peace for Israel since it was founded in 1948.
Mamoud Abbas, the head of the PA, was the right-hand man to Yassir Arafat, famed Nobel Peace Prize winner (thus rendering that award one of the great farces on the international scene) and he has no more power than that which the Israelis grant him. As for the rest of the Arab community, the Palestinians have been completely abandoned.
Writing in The New York Times on August 2, Efraim Karsh cited a recent Al Arabiya television network survey that demonstrated that Arabs have no interest in the fate of the so-called Palestinians. It is a fact of history that there never was a Palestine beyond the name the Romans applied to Israel in order to make people forget its existence.
History also shows that Israel’s neighbors have attacked it since its founding and Arabs repeatedly attacked its Jewish population in the decades preceding it. The notion that Abbas can negotiate anything that would last longer than a day or so is idiotic. The Israelis know this and I suspect so have U.S. administrations since the days of Jimmy Carter.
In Tehran, the hated leaders of the regime have put their Revolutionary Guards “in full readiness to encounter firmly with the stupidity of the U.S. and Zionist regime.” As for Abbas, DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency is reporting that “sources close to the Palestinian Authority quoted him saying that direct talks with Israel were not in the offing because ‘a big military surprise awaits the Middle East.’”
The surprise will come when Israel decides to act and not a minute before. I seriously doubt it will be today, tomorrow, or any time the Iranian ayatollahs expect it. When it comes, if it comes, the Saudis will have opened their air space to facilitate it. With the exception of Syria and now Turkey, few in the Middle East have any love for the Iranian regime.
The same can be said for the regard in which the United States is held. The U.S. has been militarily active in the Middle East since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates, but more recently since 9/11. It has 50,000 combat (training?) troops in Iraq and comparable troop strength in Afghanistan.
The U.S. also has a Commander-in-Chief who has never served in the military, is getting advice from a National Security moron who thinks “jihad” means something other than war, has been openly mocked and insulted by the Iranian leadership, and has demonstrated a hostility to Israel the likes of which has not been seen before and since its founding.
There will be no peace between the PA and Israel. Both sides know it. The so-called Palestinians have not only refused peace, but have conducted Intifadas, terrorist campaigns, against Israel. The one in 2000 killed a thousand Israelis.
Nobody really wants a war in the Middle East except the Iranian ayatollahs and, in the fullness of time, unless they are overthrown, it will come, but just not now.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
