THE MIDDLE EAST: COLD WAR OR HOT?

There has been a hiatus of a few months since the last posting on this site, and events have confirmed what was already obvious, that what has existed in the Middle East since 1973, and what Israel is now starting to prosecute more effectively, is, in fact, a Cold War. Or, to be more accurate, a low-level "hot" war.

The question is, will this de-facto strategy work, or will a "hot" war, in the end, be necessary.

In previous posts, I considered several "thought experiments" that illustrated the impossibility of "peace" between good and evil – that is, as long as the neo-Nazi Islamists constitute the majority of the "Palestinian" population, there can be no peace between Israel and those on its borders. A gun in his hand or not, brought to his knees or not, as long as a Hitler is a Hitler, he will always try to find a way to perpetrate his "final solution."

(I put the term "Palestinian" in quotes because it is an adopted name improperly used, given the proper historical context).

Or as I said in a previous post, "it’s the ideology, stupid."

So, what exists is a state of war, an expression, through force, of the contradiction between tyranny and freedom – between Arafat the tyrant and Israel the free.

A Cold War or low-level conflict is won, essentially, by attrition. Victory in the sort of drawn-out, "cold war" conflict that terminated with the demise of the Soviet Union is, in effect, victory through siege warfare conducted along extended fronts. It is victory achieved primarily by means of exhausting the resources of the losing side.

It is also a fact that in any drawn-out siege conflict between a free state and a tyranny, the free state will inevitably win. As long as incursions across borders – traditionally, armed raids or skirmishes, or in the case of the "Palestinian" population, incursions of suicide killers - can be minimized, then victory may be achieved, in the long run, by exhausting the other side.

Let me put the emphasis on "may."

Irrational hatreds in certain populations have been proven to die hard. Witness the recent wars in the Balkans. Croats and Serbs went at each other’s throats after decades of "peace" and the birth of generations since WWII.

For the true hater, battles come and go, but the war goes on forever. After any setback, the unreconstructed Nazi or Islamist or Communist vows to live to fight another day. In Osama bin Laden’s mind, he is merely executing delayed revenge on the West for the centuries of humiliation inflicted by the West on Islam.

Exhaustion of the other side alone is thus insufficient to guarantee victory in a Cold War - if the exhausted enemy is only plotting how and when to rearm, even as it lays prostrate.

The attraction of a Cold War is that it appears to be a lower risk strategy than a Hot War. Invasion of the enemy’s territory and occupation, if it happens at all, is intended to be the exception. The main principle of a Cold War is to win an arms raise that exhausts the opponent’s economy, with arms that are preferably seldom used by either side.

In the context of the Middle East, a Cold War is also perceived to be far, far less objectionable to "world opinion" than a Hot War. And given that the reality on the ground today, a Cold War, has resulted in such an avalanche of hatred against Israel anyway, it is hard to imagine what would happen if Israel attempted a good, old fashioned military Hot War victory against its recalcitrant enemies.

The assumption of a Cold War strategy is that once the other side recognizes the futility of its position, the epiphany alone will lead to a renunciation of the deadly ideology that led to the conflict in the first place. In other words, once the broken and exhausted enemy realizes its dreams of destruction are impractical, then it will also realize its dreams were immoral.

But is this really true?

In the case of the United State’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, it would appear that there are in fact the beginnings of a cultural sea-change in the population of what is again Russia and some of the former Soviet possessions. It would appear that Russia is finally becoming more Westernized.

But the truth is that the jury is still out. There are promising signs, but it is a fragile transformation.

History shows us that many more conflicts were fought to a standstill, with at least one side unable to continue, only to see the conflict flare up again years, decades, or centuries later.

What the experience of WWII tells us, by contrast, is that as long as there are Werewolves at large, they can feed and multiply.

In Germany during the occupation, the Werewolves were an underground organization of Nazis plotting to continue the war by other means. It was in part because of the potential for the "Werewolf" effect that the Allies had planned and executed a strategy that was not only essential in occupied Germany, but essential in occupied Japan as well.

That strategy was "De-Nazification." It had another name in Japan, but the essence was the same.

Re-build the culture from the ground up - re-educate and indoctrinate the population in the principles of democracy and capitalism.

If Israel does succeed in achieving a Cold War victory, and the majority of the "Palestinian" population decides its goal of destroying Israel is impractical, then many would say that would at least be the beginning of peace.

But without "De-Nazification" of the population on Israel’s borders, without forcibly dismantling the schools teaching the "Palestinian" children to adopt the "dream" of destroying Israel, without smashing every institution and organization of the Islamists, such a "Cold War Victory" may by Pyrrhic indeed.

In fact, such a victory might be the worst kind of Trojan Horse of all. Because the thing such a victory leaves untouched, the ideology of sacrificing children’s lives to purportedly reclaim a house left behind fifty years ago, or a hectare of desert, is a ticking time-bomb.

There is an evil, deadly ideology at work in the region that allows the surrounding Arab countries to sacrifice anyone and everyone to the cause of destroying Israel. Including the "Palestinians." Everything Israel has been unjustly accused of in its treatment of the "Palestinians," the Arab countries in the region have actually been guilty of themselves. The primary sacrificial victims of this sick ideology, should it succeed, would be the Jews and Israel, but the tyranny will sacrifice anyone else necessary to achieve that goal, including the "Palestinians."

It is a giant cult of sacrifice, in which all are subjects to a terrible tyranny, individual Jews and Arabs.

"Drive them to the sea" (or slaughterhouse) is how the enemies of Israel wish to sacrifice the Jews on the alter of Islamist rule over "historically Islamic lands." And because the Islamist ideology is one in which the individual is an expendable pawn, any individual – Jew, Muslim, Christian, anyone – and any "Palestinian" - is fodder for that goal, too. All would be sacrificed to the "greater good" of the supremacy of Islam in the Middle East.

It is all too terribly consistent. The same nations who cry about their "Palestinian" brothers expel them, oppress them, and kill them. Anything and everything may be sacrificed by the Islamist for the triumph of Islamist rule. Sacrifice is the common denominator.

Beware this creed, because the Islamists are only awaiting the day when there will be an "Islamic Bomb," and they have said that sacrifice of the "Palestinians" in the explosion of such a bomb is but a small price to pay for the triumph of Islam over Israel.

This is why a "Cold War" victory, as opposed to a "hot war" invasion and occupation, is such a danger.

There may come a day, when a "Palestinian State" living "peacefully" side-by-side Israel, secretes in its womb an "Islamic Bomb" to achieve the unrelenquished dream of Hamas and its grim comrades. Why would the same mentality that would send a legions of children to their deaths, blown to bits for the sake of real estate, which also sent a generation to its death in Iran’s war with Iraq, stop at sacrificing a generation of Palestinians to rid "Palestine" of the "Zionist entity"?

Only a fool would play this waiting game.

The hard reality is that a Cold War, as we understand it from the victory of the United States over the Soviet Union, can not be won between Israel and the "Palestinians" without at least a "hot" finale. And the longer the Cold War lasts, the greater the danger of an Islamist Bomb being smuggled into the territories to sacrifice one and all to the "greater goal" of Islamic supremacy over a region that now lives free as Israel.

What is needed is "De-Nazification" now.

The next post will examine how this can be done. Hint: the secret lies with Attaturk.