Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 2:02:22 PM
In
Best of the Web, James Taranto
talked about how Carter's efforts to create a massive peace agreement for the middle east, which might have brought Egypt back into the Soviet orbit inspired private Egyptian-Israeli peace talks, against Carter's wishes, which resulted in the peace agreement Carter eventually hijacked and turned into Camp David.
I had a strange sense of deja vu when
reading of Obama's efforts to bully the middle east into talks with Iran.
Thanks to Iran's nuclear ambitions and expansionist policies, they serve pretty well as surrogates for the Soviets. No one in the middle east, excepting some Lebanese militias, and possibly Syria, want to see Iran gain any respectability. Nor does any nation want the west to stop applying pressure on Iran. Right now, thanks to western pressure, Iran is largely staying out of Saudi internal politics, is reducing support to Lebanon and Hammas, and is somewhat cautious about support for Iraqi and Afghan militias. If Obama succeeds in his "normalization" of relations with Iran, not only will Iran feel they have the green light to pursue nuclear weapons, but their support for Shiite militias in Suadi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, as well as aid to Hammas, will increase, destabilizing the whole region.
Which means that almost every nation involved has reason to try to keep Obama from getting his wish.
So, oddly enough, by trying to force these nations to conduct negotiations with Iran, Obama may actually create greater pressure for Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and others to normalize relations with Israel. First, because without the Palestinian issue on the table, Obama has little political justification for meddling in the region. Second, because if they can present a unified front, they stand a much greater chance of resisting his pressures to normalize relations with Iran.
I know I have been
going on about how much Obama reminds me of Carter, but this is the final straw. If this utterly naive, incompetent approach to the middle east, this invitation for the villains to come to the table in order to get free rein, results, despite Obama's worst effort, in a peace agreement he did not anticipate, he will truly have proven himself the reincarnation of the Man from Plains.
POSTSCRIPT
By the way, regarding that last link, the one to "
Yet More Flashbacks", I saw the recent Star Trek movie, and have to say it was better than I expected. They managed to capture the essence of most of the characters (eg. Kirk's main strength being that he could take a pounding for a long, long time), without making them too modern (Kirk isn't too much of a twenty-something cynic, they kept some of Kirk's righteous indignation, though perhaps not quite enough... hard to say yet). Oh, there are some flaws, and some missteps that I am sure Star Trek geeks will rant about (eg. In the the original series, no one knew what Romulans looked like -- nor that they were related to Vulcans -- until Kirk encountered them), but they have the ready made excuse of "the time line changed around the time of Kirk's birth" to get them out of any such mistakes. So, overall, I have to say it wasn't a bad effort. (Though I am afraid that my comments, especially that Romulan line above showed that (1) I am something of a geek and (2) I am much older than their target audience.)