Entangling alliances in the Middle East

This Politically Dissident column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 33, No. 27 (April 11, 2002). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

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Since the latest Israeli military action a couple of weeks ago, liberal and conservative activists have called for the United States to mediate the conflict, but they don’t realize it was meddlesome intervention that led to this mess in the first place. We should expect such nonsense from the unschooled, but educated people—especially our elected officials—who’ve studied history and learned less seem to prefer repeating centuries of mistakes.

We’ve been too gullible in blindly accepting propagandists’ allegations of so-called anti-Semitism, as though Muslims or members of any other religion would use the extreme tactic of suicide bombing only for the heck of it. Yes, there’s the claim that martyrs spend eternity with virgins—but is that really all it would take to get someone to strap explosives to his chest and blow up a restaurant?

Our unconditional support of Israel is the kind of entangling alliance that George Washington warned Americans against in his Farewell Address. Inhabitants of the Middle East have been trying to teach each other lessons since someone had the great idea of writing down current events. Forcing ourselves into the middle doesn’t work, but it has the nasty side effect of generating anti-U.S. hatred and making it more dangerous for Americans to travel abroad. “A great society should do something,” say the statists. This argument is a classic false dilemma between meddlesome interventionism and total inaction. That sort of “global leadership” gave us all the trouble that President Wilson was dying to get into when he cooked up the Lusitania hoax for a war that would have soon burned itself out without the might of the United States. For all the cowards’ courage of France and Britain, the German people were subjected to the Treaty of Versailles, which was a double whammy that stripped valuable German assets but also set the stage for inflated war reparations. The same people who sing “Edelweiss” when they travel accepted a dictator because he fixed the currency. The end of WWII brought the creation of that illegitimate fiat of the United Nations.