To their credit, Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, have testified that the only thing that can end the violence in Iraq is a political solution between the various parties. Crocker told Barack Obama today that the civil war there is "ethnosectarian competition for power and other resources."
I.e., it’s not a war on terror. We’re not up against Islamofascism.
This is the lesson we need to apply to Israel/Palestine. Whether you think it was a good thing or not, the Arabs have lost again and again in Palestine over the last 60 years. They started out with more than half of the territory under partition plans. They lost that in the ’48 War/Expulsion. Then after ’67, they were down to 22 percent. The settlements have whittled down their portion even more. "A kidney-shaped state, with Gaza on the side," as Saifedean Ammous puts it.
Yes, the Palestinians have responded with suicide terrorism. And Paul Berman called it Islamofascism. But the political scientist Robert Pape said suicide terrorism was about occupation with religious difference. Today Crocker has joined the Pape side: it’s not terrorism, it’s not good vs. evil. It’s a competition for resources.
