Managed Instability

Pop Quiz:

What President said: “Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish.”?

What Jewish leader said: “There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel.”?

What Leftist “thinker” said: “People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”?

What US religious leader said: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”?

Answers at the end of this post.

It came as a real surprise that a number of readers reacted to the last post by admitting that they knew very little about the history of the Levant. As such we will continue our ongoing effort to enlighten those who have navigated the American school system without running aground on any actual knowledge. Is it any wonder that Harvard has apparently discontinued the practice of education?

The Middle East had been, for the better part of the last 500 years, a land of mystery. It was, based on ignorance, perceived to be a land of sand and nomads. In part this can be explained by the fact that there was little contact between Europe and Asia Minor. The high water mark of the Ottoman Empire was the defeat of its invading army at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Thereafter the Ottoman army retreated south and by 1900 Turkey marked the northernmost point in the Empire. Little was known about the Middle East and its people at that point in time. In fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1929 has no entry for either Iran or Saudi Arabia.

In 1908 there occurred one of history’s confounding variables, the discovery of oil in Persia by George Reynolds. This single event bent forever the curve of history in the region.

How else do you explain the decision by the German leadership in World War I to include the Ottomans among the Central Powers other than to secure a source of oil?

How else do you explain the Allies dividing up, in their own best interest, the Levant at the end of the Great War?

How else do you explain the continuing active promotion of instability in the region by the West?

After The Creation of the State of Israel

The State of Israel was established by the United Nations in 1948. This was, at the time, seen by some as a controversial decision. A book written by David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal, makes the argument that Forrestal, the first US Secretary of Defense, was killed because he opposed the establishment of Israel. It is alleged that he saw the Jewish state as a risk to the stability of the Middle East because it put at risk access to the vast oil reserves. General George C. Marshall, who served as Secretary of State and Defense under Truman, also saw Israel as a destabilizing influence.

Yet US policy has done much to destabilize the region which has put Israel at risk time and again.

Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected premier of Persia in 1951. He was a popular leader. He became a threat to the West when he decided to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In response the British government decided to remove Mosaddegh from power. President Truman, to his credit, refused to support the British plan. President Eisenhower, after taking office in 1953, reversed Truman’s decision and ordered the CIA to support the British plan to remove Mosaddegh and restore Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to the throne. As a result two things were accomplished: (1) Iran agreed to share with Britain the profits generated from the export of oil and (2) the West managed to embitter the people of Iran. The short term result was that a measure of stability returned to Iran and the Middle East. The Iranian government did not, for example, openly support the various attacks on Israel in the 1960s and 1970s.

President Carter’s Middle East policy was positively schizophrenic. In 1978 he engineered the Camp David Accords negotiated by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Sadat and Begin shared a Nobel Peace Prize for this achievement. But alas President Carter subsequently elected to completely destabilize Iran by forcing the exile of the Shah from Iran and supporting the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran on February 1, 1979. This resulted in the establishment of an Islamic theocracy based on Sharia Law. Shortly thereafter Iran became the largest state supporter of terrorism in the world. We continue to this day to pay the price of Carter’s ignorance and naivete.

Carter managed to cripple our energy markets by allowing OPEC to hold America hostage through the implementation of an oil embargo. Our intrepid President even predicted that the world would exhaust all oil reserves by the end of the century. This heightened the strategic value of the regions greatest natural resource.

Obama refused to be outdone by Carter. In fact, following Obama in search of international incoherence is like following a lighted fuse in search of an explosion…you never have long to wait. Our courageous former President turned a blind eye in 2011 to the removal of Hasni Mubarak, President of Egypt. Mubarak was a US ally. Obama supported the imposition of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist group, on the Egyptian people. The Egyptian military was forced to remove President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Also in 2011 Muammar Gaddafi incurred the wrath of Obama and his wrecking ball Secretary of State Brunhilde. These twin towers of diplomatic incompetence triggered the removal of Gaddafi from office creating a power vacuum in Libya and the nation that had been effectively neutered by Reagan became a dysfunctional entity. Obama pointedly ignored the unrest in Iran which was aimed at removing the Ayatollah from power. In August of 2016 Team Obama dispatched some $400 million to Iran with no strings attached. It is fair to say that the Obama Administration was a period where “no breath of intellectual life stirred for” eight years. (hat tip to Francis Walker who used these words to describe Eastern Europe.)

Compare and contrast the administration of President Trump which worked assiduously to bring stability to the region through the implementation of the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Middle Eastern nations. This good work ground to a halt as he was interrupted by the levitation of the somnambulent Biden regime. The actions of Trump were not favorably received by Iran or its terrorist proxies and the recent attack on Israel may be an indefensible reaction to Trump’s attempted peace settlement across the Middle East.

So these events beg the question: Why does the US government, when managed by Democrats, seek to de-stabilize the Middle East? Invariably it is Israel that bears the brunt of the terrorist unrest that is supported by the government of Iran. Are we no longer interested in protecting access to oil from the region?

It would appear that this ongoing US destabilization of the region has inevitably resulted in an aggressive effort to eradicate Israel and the Jews in the region…From the River to the Sea is the phrase you hear throughout the world. It is interesting to note that the hapless Rashida Tlaib did not realize that the execution of that mindless chant required the destruction of Israel…geography is apparently not her strong suit.

It can be argued that the continuing assault on Israel’s existence is the product of decades of US policy in the Levant. The Nixon and Trump Administrations have been the exception…they were friends of Israel and the Jewish people. We are now witnessing the worldwide spread of genocidal mania directed at the Jewish people. On college campuses from coast to coast attendees (the term students has no application here) of major institutions of higher indoctrination are engaged in a full throated attack on all things Jewish…from restaurants in the City of Brotherly Love (may be time to lose that moniker) to violent protests in major cities worldwide. The invertebrate governor of California canceled the public lighting of the state Christmas tree because a mob of genocide supporters threatened to disrupt the ceremony.

The presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn appeared before a Congressional Committee and gave a performance that made Bert Lahr look like Steven Seagal. Claudine Gay did to the value of a Harvard degree what the Weimer Republic did to the value of the Deutschmark in the 1920’s.

This devolution of civility in the land where three great religions were founded is disheartening to say the least. Time to dust off another phrase: NEVER AGAIN.

Answers to the pop quiz:

What President said: “Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish.”? John F. Kennedy

What Jewish leader said: “There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel.”? The irrepressible Golda Meir

What Leftist “thinker” said: “People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”? Noam Chomsky, Communist/Nihilist

What US religious leader said: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”? Martin Luther King