Tag: international relations

We Americans now live with an entirely reasonable fear of war and terror. Indeed, there is precious little doubt that our country will become a recurrent victim of new attacks by those who openly seek the genocidal destruction of "infidels."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert now gives guns to Arab terrorists while planning to surrender more of his country's essential heartland. The apparent rationale of Israeli arms to Fatah is to diminish the contending power of Hamas. Inevitably, these same weapons will be used to murder individual Jews. Surely they will do absolutely nothing to help Israel.

Israel's preemptive action could still be entirely law enforcing, even if Iran and the Arab enemies of Israel were not in a declared condition of belligerence with the Jewish state. The customary right of anticipatory self-defense has its modern origins in the Caroline incident, which concerned the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule (a rebellion that aroused sympathy and support in the American border states). Following this case, the serious threat of armed attack has generally been taken to justify militarily defensive action.

At the conclusion of the recent [first] Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), the [first] Bush administration announced plans to sell Saudi Arabia, a country of six million inhabitants, an arms package. Included were over 500 tanks, 48 F-15 fighter planes, Apache helicopter gun ships, more than 30 Patriot batteries, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, multiple rocket-launchers and command/control systems.

As the continuing flow of new missiles to Iran reveals, the Bush administration (refers to first President Bush) remains committed to misconceived policies in the Middle East. Even if Israel were to yield West Bank and Gaza to create a new state of Palestine (with east Jerusalem as its capital), the government in Teheran would persist in planned aggression against the Jewish state. Altogether unconcerned with the fate of the Palestinians, this government will be satisfied only by Israel's disappearance.