US, Israel Caught in Traps

[kalian]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/polner.php?articleid=2792

Did American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq, and Israeli soldiers killed and maimed in Gaza and the West Bank, die for nothing? Americans are dying now because of ideologues and zealots. Israeli soldiers are dying for settlements and unattainable goals. Both are trapped.

Take the United States, for example, bogged down in a war and occupation that should never have happened. The Bush administration and its amateurish, rigidly ideological neoconservatives and Christian right have recklessly dug a dark, apparently inescapable pit.

Anthony Cordesman, the astute military analyst of the Center for Strategy and International Studies, in his oral testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, put it perfectly when he condemned the "illusions" of the influential and incompetent neoconservative living-room warriors who listened to no one but themselves. And much as the arrogant neoliberals of the '60s brought us Vietnam and all those war dead and wounded in body and mind, ardently pro-Likud neoconservatives have now gotten us into a lethal and unwinnable situation.

Armed with scads of money from ultra-right-wing billionaires, neocons believed they alone possessed the absolute truth. Long before 9-11 they urged an invasion of Iraq, and spread fabrications about Saddam's possession of WMDs and his alleged connection to al-Qaeda rather than looking soberly at the true source of terror, namely Osama's fanatics.


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Interesting article.

[bemildred]

1. This fellow seems dangerously "even-handed". nt

[Gimel]

2. The bottom line

The conflict's legacy will fuel and sustain Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jews for generations.

As I noted, and this author also finds the hatred has been engendered. It is not just because of a zoo, however. The hatred fueled the Intifada just as greater trust was needed. It's Arafat's tragic flaw which he inflicted on these hapless people.