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: : (Wolf) I said that [Israel] forfeited their claim of legal statehood for the reasons given. I didn't say anything about Israeli human rights, which are presumed to be equal to everyone else's on the planet.
: (Bob) I think you're splitting hairs here. If a nation which guarantees human rights has no right to exist and is, in fact, dissolved...
(Wolf) I did not propose anything be dissolved. If we set aside power politics, which human rights trumps anyway, Israel's legal status never changed since 1948, and a defacto partition of Palestine by force still exists. Israel is a defacto occupation, at least in large part, of Arab land. What the world community wants to do about it is another matter, but European diplomats recognize that the solution in Palestine, unchanged since 1948, is that Israel and her heartless legions must be contained within defined territorial borders. Pretty simple solution. Its implementation is entirely up to the United States for the reasons given. If and when Israel has defined borders, they will then have a lawful state and peaceful relations with adjacent states is possible.
: : (Bob) You complain about the apathy of Americans. What would you have us do? ...write my congressman and ask him to stop funding Rumsfeld?
: : (Wolf) Yes. No foreign wars. Provide for the defense of U.S. territory from attack by enemy armies or missiles.
: (Bob) That's a neat but impossible trick. If September 11 proved anything, it proved America's vulnerability to being attacked by a covert army of suicidal soldiers...
(Wolf) Twenty unarmed men is not an "army," Bob. The 911 hijackers relied on the shock of one or two slashed throats to cow a hundred passengers into rabbit-like frozen terror, which I don't think they could have gotten away with on an El Al jet. The attack relied on American obesity and effete luxury, on our decadent imperial privilege of "fighting" in B52s and Apaches, or by proxies (local cops, Afghan mercenaries), rather than hand-to-hand when the chips are down. In WWII, the Americans delayed invasion of Europe for more than a year until they had overwhelming strength echeloned in Britain, which drove Churchill berserk with angry impatience because the Americans wouldn't fight until they were assured of waltzing to victory with chocolate bars, cigarettes and motorized transport for every soldier. The civil liberties and prosperity enjoyed by Americans are a product of geography in 1776 and are a background to our foreign policy, which made WWI optional and WWII practically painless, compared to the toll suffered by other nations. Nobody bombed our cities in WWII, or the Korean War, or Vietnam, or Desert Storm. I'm sure you know it is true that most Americans are rich, pampered "sheeple" who expect to travel anywhere they please with fresh sheets every night, which puts us at a disadvantage when threatened with sharp objects -- and our genteel decadence is understood throughout the world, especially by our most savage, resourceful enemies.
: (Bob continues) ...able to surreptitiously smuggle conventional and nuclear weapons (potentially, at least) across our borders. No homeland militia or SDI can stop such an invasion.
(Wolf) I have no opinion about SDI, which is a technical matter. I haven't studied it. Smuggling bombs from Canada or Mexico? -- to blow up what? WTC was a target because of Cantor Fitzgerald. It required several attacks to succeed. If I understand the situation, our greatest security threat today is mountains of cargo containers piled up in New Jersey and California. I don't think it's a good idea to form military cadres like SS to police the highways, looking for a bomb smuggled on an 18-wheeler or in a nondescript Chevy van. Better to have an isolationist U.S. foreign policy, so that the injustice ends (Israel, Saudi tyranny) and make our borders less porous. One of the unintended consequences of running a steep trade deficit is that we have an enormous inward traffic of shipping. Better to produce our own goods with our own hands, like we once did -- but that would mean getting our hands dirty again in factories. See? The basic problem is cultural. Americans are too soft to do anything except hide in the closet and pay surrogates to enforce the imperial status quo, price in blood no object, so long as it isn't American. We don't even want our "fighting men" to get hurt, so we send in pilotless missile platforms. Very brave.
: : (Wolf) The so-called 'war on terrorism' is not a military matter. It is an international police problem that our combined police and intelligence agencies worldwide have not done and are not doing extremely well at.
: (Bob) There are no international "police" as that term is commonly used in society. There are only agents of various sovereign nations who have promised by prior agreement to cooperate with each other.
(Wolf) Right. Every country has cops, who cooperate. But the G7 also have supercops -- FBI, MI5, etc -- whose mission is and has been the suppression of cross-border terror attacks, especially in Britain, Germany and France. It's not like 911 changed anything. The police problem hasn't changed since Munich in 72, which coincided in history with the introduction of cheap passenger jet transport. I have friends in Special Branch and MoD. The threat of terrorist attack ain't new. It is emphatically a police problem, because policemen are trained to look for civilian suspects and they are infinitely smarter than soldiers. The FBI had specific jurisdiction and ought to be keelhauled for 911.
: (Bob) So, what do you do about a nation like Iran or Syria (or a rogue nation like Afghanistan) wherein people are trained to be covert suicide bombers? We have no reciprocal policing agreements with these countries. If you can explain to me how the U.S. could have extricated bin Laden and his terrorist trainees from Afghanistan without dropping bombs, I'd be happy to listen. Or do we simply respect Afghani sovereignty and stake bin Laden out, waiting for an opportunity to nab him? In the meantime, bin Laden sends more and more of his charges here to kill civilians.
(Wolf) Hmm. We've arrived at the vital question for our time, and perhaps all time in global policy. Thanks a lot. Next time I want to embarrass myself in reply, I will certainly ask Bob. That said, and allowing for better advice from the diplomats who are engaged upon this matter as a very real life-and-death struggle, the answer for me is and must be constitutional. The U.S. has no constitutional authority to be an empire, nor a world cop, nor a friend of some people but not others. The United States was founded on the proposition that all men were created equal -- a standard of individual human rights that took us almost 200 years to achieve in practice in the U.S. and Western Europe, and which may never govern Arabia or the Islamic world. I think we sometimes expect too much from others. Israel has a more realistic (if evil) assessment of the Palestinians, who are a tribal people, like the Israelis themselves are. There isn't going to be any U.S.-style democracy in Palestine or Syria or Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Israel uses this as a specious excuse to make war on what they deem to be an "inferior" tribe, who are incapable of "civilized" behavior (elections, rule of law, etc). So, our U.S. foreign policy of inculcating democracy everywhere is especially idiotic. We have to stop our airhead Stars And Stripes jingoism and get some straight answers from the CIA. They've known all along who gets oil money and who doesn't, where the accounts are hidden, which tribe is about to change monarchs, etc. Somebody like Henry Kissinger needs to step forward and say the obvious: we cannot change the Arab world. We can, however, quit waging war upon them and declare peace as an American initiative: "The United States of America hereby ceases its support of Israel and will henceforth refrain from bombing Arabs" -- or something like that.
Thanks, Bob. Please don't put me on the spot ever again. I was a high school drop-out.
Wolf DeVoon
[EDITOR'S NOTE: At the author's request, you can read here a "peer review" discussion that took place as he submitted this op-ed piece to The World's Magazine. --RA]
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