Just now on "Meet the Press," Tom Ricks said that what American commanders had in essence done with the surge was to buy up the Sunni insurgency, thereby achieving a military solution in Iraq (held together with baling wire). I continue to insist that this is very dangerous knowledge in American foreign policy. The Sunni insurgency used suicide bombing as a principal tactical tool. And then we work with them, necessarily, to try and arrive at a political solution to the manifold issues of creating a nation state from diverse elements. This knowledge applied to Israel/Palestine is devastating to current thinking. It means: We work with Hamas. It means suicide bombing is understood. And yes, too, it undermines the whole idea of partition.
Can Americans absorb this teaching? Can the media provide it? These are the great questions, and go to the heart of the issue. Our foreign policy-makers have overlooked Arab terrorism in the Middle East that claimed American lives in an effort to bring peace to a ravaged nation. Can we make the same leap with respect to Jewish lives in Israel?
(Phil Weiss)
