Daniel Levy is one of the new stars in Washington, as also in cyberspace. Levy comes to Washington from Israel, where his distinguished record included serving as senior policy advisor to then-justice minister Yossi Beilin and as the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.
Now, under the auspices of The Century Foundation and the New America Foundation, he blogs at www.prospectsforpeace.com on Israel and the Middle East. There is no dearth of such blogs; indeed, under the auspice of Americans for Peace Now, I do one each week. But Levy’s is consistently among the best informed and the best reasoned.
In a blog this past weekend, Levy makes an interesting and somewhat unconventional point regarding Barack Obama’s candidacy. In brief, he proposes that “a strong case can be made that the most important issue for an American politician to have gotten right in the last years from a pro-Israel perspective was the Iraq war. And I mean opposition to that war.”
I well remember my own argument with many friends in Israel as the clouds of war gathered in 2002 and 2003. Those friends were almost giddy from the prospect of a post-Iraq Middle East. When Iraq is defeated, they thought, we will be relieved of the most serious threat we face. And perhaps we may even look forward, as President Bush insists, to a re-fashioned Middle East, one brought to its senses by the removal of its most appalling dictator.
My response left them incredulous: “But what,” I asked, “if America loses?” That seemed to them so outlandish a possibility that they simply dismissed it. It was unthinkable that America would not prevail, and handily.
I would like to think that in the aftermath of Israel’s own failure to succeed in its war against Hezbollah, some learning has finally happened. Indeed, I would have supposed that such learning might have happened in the wake of Vietnam — happened to Israelis, happened to Americans. But if Vietnam was not sufficient to teach the difficulty a high-tech army would experience in seeking to defeat an indigenous guerrilla movement, then there’s no reason to suppose that repeated debacles offer improved wisdom.
Levy, in his blog, goes on to specify some of the costs of the Iraq disaster: “With the removal of its major regional competitor, Iran now has more influence and is emboldened. Al Qaeda was able to establish a new base of operations in Iraq to which it has recruited fighters from across the Arab world and from which it has been able to spread out and conduct attacks in Jordan, in the Egyptian Sinai, in Lebanese refugee camps, and there are reports of Al Qaeda copycat cells in Palestinian areas.
“That is getting very close to home for Israelis and it is a dramatically unwelcome development. America is overstretched and bogged down militarily and its reputation is battered on so many levels. None of this of course is good for America but it is also very bad news indeed for Israel… The combination of an American president deeply committed to Israel but vilified internationally and regionally, who pursues dangerously misguided Middle East policies and does so with woeful incompetence to boot, turns out not to be so ideal.”
It disturbs me that so many Jews suppose that George W. Bush has been so great a friend to Israel. Friendship among nations must be judged by consequences, and the consequences of the Bush policy in the Middle East — most notably but not exclusively Iraq — are calamitous. But the underlying fact of the Iraq matter is more disturbing still. Our fundamental concern, as Obama has pointed out, is less the way in which the war has been fought, less even the lies that begat the war, more the mindset that gave it birth.
Just after the war began, I wrote of that mindset, and what I wrote then, long before the real carnage and devastation began to happen, is valid still: “Let’s suppose weapons of mass destruction and destructive connections are discovered. Let’s even suppose an early ending to the current chaos, and then the emergence of a competent Iraqi government. The reason such discoveries and developments would not vindicate the promoters of the war is that we who opposed it were not in fact opposed to ‘the’ war; we were opposed to this war — this war that from the first so cavalierly dispensed with diplomacy, that treated the United Nations as an obstacle to be overcome rather that as a resource to be recruited… this war whose planners enthusiastically rendered the sometime need for preemptive American action a virtue — nay, a commitment — this war that has soured, perhaps poisoned, America’s capacity for leadership in the family of nations.
“On the morrow of 9/11, Americans asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ By ‘they,’ we meant the maniacal terrorists, the suicide bombers, the cult of Osama bin Laden and his counterparts. But when we ask that question today, so short a time later, the ‘they’ refers to tens of millions of people in virtually every corner of the globe. Nor is the answer to that question a mystery: they hate us because we have displayed contempt rather than regard for the good opinion of mankind. We have courted their hate. The war that might one day have been necessary, the ‘last resort’ war, was not the war we fought; we fought instead a war that gives a new meaning to the word ‘isolationism.’”
Those who say that quitting the war now means accepting defeat are quite correct. What they do not understand is that it is already a defeat. And the courage to acknowledge that and to learn from it marks a transition from childishness to maturity.
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Yasher Koach Lenny! Again you get things right!
First off for the "why they hate us". We were not engaged with a war in the Middle East. There was NO justification for that type of hate that killed 3,000 of our innocent citizens- NONE. Weather it might be a "right" war or not- were in it, it was started and we are there. I guess one could say what are the ways to win in iraq? or what constitues as win in iraq? However, I think the fact we have gone this far in Iraq and have over 9 provinces out of about 18 under Iraqi control is a good sign. We are ready to hand over the former-deadly Al Anbar province which was deemed "lost" late last year is now one of the most peaceful places. It is a very sizeable (the largest) province and is scheduled to be given control to the Iraqis in March/April. This is true of many former war-zones where killings took place everyday. If the anti-war critics got their wish and pulled out of Iraq Al-Qeadas former stronghold in Anbar would have soldified and so many more people would have died, and continued to die. Thanks to our military they turned it around to one of the safest places in Iraq. While I can see, and very much understand why many Iraqis hate us, as I stated before we are there, and if we continue to change the Anbars of Iraq, which many are not left (Mosul, Diyala, etc) then Iraq will become a peaceful place and not a place where every terrorist can roam free and solidify their activities freely. I say we just let the troops to the great job that they are doing, and stop complaining about why we are in Iraq where people on the GROUND, not the people sitting in their homes and reading about the past-Iraq and how bad Bush is, tell us we are winning. However, who really cares? It is because of our troops over there and the people going in that we have the right to complain that their job is worthless and we are ultimatley defeated such as many say. Mike
Would it be so terrible for a Forward columnist to admit that America is winning (indeed to paraphrase Publishers Clearinghouse-may have already won?)
<p>The Democrat candidates have virtually stopped talking about the war. It's all about the economy and health care now. It's because things are going much better since the surge. The Arabs need their butts kicked. It's the only language they understand. When things were going poorly the Democrats were giddy with the possibility that America would loose so that it would hurt Bush. How patriotic. Party trumps country. The Democrat leadership's irresponsible behavior throughout this war borders on sedition. Regardless of what your stance was before the war we are there. The mature thing to do now is to do whatever it takes to win. Contrary to what Fein believes, at this point the childish thing to do, not to mention the immoral thing to do, would be to take our toys and go home. I guess liberals don't care about the massacre that will ensue if we abruptly leave as happened in Vietnam and Cambodia. We can not allow Iran to walk in and take control.</p>
Fein is right. The Surge is a Potemkin village of victory, crafted merely to impress the "embeds" of the media and decorated with uncheckable stats about reduced casualties-- ours, not theirs, natch. As in the Balkans, we have facilitated sectarian cleansing and called it peace; but 4,000,000 or more Iraqis remain in internal or foreign exile, the equivalent of 40-50,000,000 Americans displaced. Another 1,000,000 Iraqis have died untimely since our illegal intervention in 2003. Any strategy for winning which entails farming the most serious terrorist threat out to Saddam's loyalists to tackle is no credit to the nation which spends as much on military force as the rest of the planet put together. The Surge was meant to buy time for a political settlement among Iraqi factions over the winter-- before low level civil war could break out afresh in the campaigning season of 2008 (theirs, and ours White House-wise). No such parliamentary kiss and make-up has occurred. Maliki's government remains a joke. Baghdad is not yet quiet. Large tracts of Iraq are being turned into Islamic sharia regimens, or the prey of warlords and semi-criminal gangs. Unemployment and power shortages remain rife. You cannot afely travel from the airport to the capital's downtown. Sunnis in Anbar have been re-equipped for the fray by us, in order to settle the minor problem of "al-Qaeda in Iraq", while Shiites are now urging the Mahdi Army, their largest militia, to take up arms afresh. It will be another long, hot summer. The Surge will peter out because our troops are too tired or new to keep it going, small though it was: &lt;a href="http://www.action3news.com/Global/story.asp?S=7829406&nav=menu550_2"&gt;http://www.action3news.com/Global/story.asp?S=7829406&nav=menu550_2&lt;/a&gt; Army suicides and desertion rates are rocketing. The National Guard is close to mutiny about constant tours in Iraq. Obama and Clinton admit the scale of our humiliation only to the extent that they wish to keep 50,000 or more troops in Iraq, one-third of the current deployment, and have them hunker down in bases unless the civil war becomes too bloody to ignore. McCain just wants to go on fighting an fighting. Some choice for the two thirds of Americans who want the whole fiasco liquidated.
I would agree David N. I voted for Ron Paul this week in Tuesday's IL primary. Of course Paul won't be the nominee but at least he has the courage to call for an end to this Iraqi farce. It's time to bring our troops home now and reign in the seditious Likudnik Israel Lobby and neo-con wreckers who got into Iraq in the first place.
The United States cannot be defeated, and obviously has not been defeated. Are you out of your mind? Where is the enemy? There is no effective enemy. They have been crushed. Only scattered pin pricks remain. Only in your demented defeatist mind is there defeat. The world still needs the oil. Oil dominates world economics, and represents a strategic necessity for world economic stability, including our own. There is no obvious alternativeat present. Do you see one on the horizon? Until Liberals allow drilling in our own land, or the equivalent in other energy sources, we are completely dependent on Middle East oil. To assert that Israel is worse off with The Dictator gone is absurd. Have you forgotton the Scuds landing on Tel Aviv? Any hope for a stable secure Israel, and secure supplies of a strategic necessity,require U.S. remaining in Iraq for the forseeable future. No body likes that irreducable fact. To deny the obvious is intellectually dishonest. No body is persuaded.
Why do the terrorists hate America? Why do the terrorists hate Israel?
simply , because you support Israel against Muslims and you killed about 2 millions.
If you want the truth answer just put yourself in oue shoes and you will find the answers, you will never need us to answer.
hate you.