Saturday, July 10, 2010

"Land for Peace"

The biggest mistake in my mind, that Israel continues to commit is continuing to withdraw from territory with the hope of peace. It is a clear failure yet Israel continues to do this. It is Israel's solution to everything. Withdraw from more territory. And I can't stand when they do this. It actually drives me crazy. Experience has shown that when Israel withdraws from territory,there is never more peace, only more war.

Let's take Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon. It actually boggles my mind how stupid some Israeli government officials are, chief among them, defense secretary Ehad Barak. Stupid, stupid, stupid leftist. Stupid. I admire his bravery in combat, he is an extremely decorated soldier and I respect that. But his decision, strongly supported by his friends and fellow travelers on the left to abandon south Lebanon to Hezbollah terrorists and to betray Israel's allies among the Christian Lebanese was beyond stupid and actually criminal in my mind. So Israel withdraws and their is all of this talk about how this will bring peace. Weakness never brings peace. Whoever promotes this is actually deluded or on drugs. Or doesn't know anything about how the Middle East works. Or a combination of the above.

Israel under Barak's direction abandons south Lebanon and betrays its allies, the Christian Lebanese. The Christians, lacking any friends, completely abandoned and stabbed in the back by Barak and his leftist friends, join the emergent power in south Lebanon, Hezbollah, not necessarily because they agree with their ideology, but of course in the world of the Middle East, you have to either be powerful or have powerful friends in order to survive, especially for a relatively weak community like the Christians are. Hezbollah builds up military might in the south, now assisted by the Christians who of course, have no choice but to support this and they begin attacking Israel, since their purpose is to exterminate every Jew everywhere starting with Israel. This action puts Israelis living in north Israel under rocket attack, the IDF responds and the Christians are caught in the crossfire.  Thousands of people die, who did not need to die if Israel would have done the right thing, the thing that they promised the Christians they would do when they first moved into Lebanon, which is help the Christians expel the terrorist Muslims and restore the government to Christian rule. But of course leftists can't face what it actually takes to achieve victory. And they seem to always be confused when their stupid solutions backfire on them. Now we have Barak and his friends on the left demand that Israel withdraw from more territory which is complete suicide.

Everything above applies to the Gaza withdrawal. It is true that Barak doesn't bear complete responsibility for this, it is another stupid move by the Israeli government which has brought about more problems. Before the Gaza disengagement, there were problems in Gaza, but nowhere near the problems that we have today,with rockets being fired into south of Israel and a terrorist organization ruling the land. Israel has to go into Gaza in order to stop the rockets. Roughly 1300 people die, 600-700 of them were terrorists, but a lot of innocent people died as well, which breaks my heart because one of my good friends is from Gaza. And none of these people had to die. None. If Israel had simply done the right thing and stayed in Gaza, there would have never been any rockets. But no, Israel has to bend to the will of the anti-semitic "international community" instead of doing the right thing, the moral thing.

And yet, today, for some strange, crazy reason, many Israeli leaders are calling for giving Arab terrorists yet more land. Now looking at what happened in Lebanon and Gaza, what do these people think is going to happen once they get land. Are they going to make peace with the Jews? Are they going to adhere to any peace treaties? No. Absolutely not. They haven't so far, so why would they once they got more land. This is a complete idiocy.

The whole idea of land for peace reminds me of this story. A criminal keeps breaking into a safe and stealing thousands of dollars. The bank hires a security guard who tries to stop the robber but is ultimately ineffective in stopping all of the thefts. The security guard goes to the president of the bank and says, "There is no way to stop a bank robber. He steals two thousand dollars a week so the only way to stop him is to give him $10,000 a week." It is actually that stupid. It is rewarding misbehavior and when you do that, all you get is more misbehavior. In the above theoretical example, the bank robber, once he starts getting $10,000 a week from one bank manager will take this money and work on extorting more money. In other words, the problem doesn't end it only gets worse.

It boggles my mind that the state of Israel, with more PHds per capita than any other country can't grasp this simple truth. Reward bad behavior get more bad behavior. Punish bad behavior and get less bad behavior (terrorism). When I see more Arabs joining anti-Israel organizations I can't say that I am totally surprised. If Israel and America show themselves to be weak partners, liable to changing their mind and betraying their allies, naturally people won't want to support these countries. They will go with a group that appears to be a long term partner that will defend them. I'm not saying this is right, I'm simply saying that this is the way the Middle East, and  much of the rest of the world, works. 

A Problem with a "Non-interventionist" Foreign Policy

Radical Leftists, Ron Paul supporters and many people in between advocate what is called a non-interventionist foreign policy. In other words, we should never get involved with the internal or other affairs of another country unless they are attacking the United States. That we should trade with every country equally and treat repressive regimes like that in the Sudan the same as we treat democratic allies such as France with the assumption that everyone will be friendly towards us if we are friendly towards them. I understand the attraction of that point of view, things are much simpler in the world if you believe this. But unfortunately life doesn't go that way. Ignoring evil doesn't make evil go away. Evil can't be reasoned with and it must be confronted and destroyed. And ignoring evil, allowing evil and injustice to persist is what is at the heart of a the so-called "non-interventionist" foreign policy.

In fact, as I have extensively covered in past posts, in many cases, a non-interventionist foreign policies can lead to far more deaths to our current foreign policy, which is, as I have also covered before, extremely flawed. But if their were a choice between our current foreign policy and a non-interventionist, completely pacifist foreign policy, I would choose what we have now. The reason for this is clear when you actually face evil, when you actually confront it and understand it for what it is, you will realize that there is no actual reason, that exists for evil actions. While evil individuals and groups tend to make up reasons for their actions, they are all imaginary, the only place they exist is the mind of the person doing the evil actions. When evil is not confronted and handled, this leads to more injustice, harm and deaths. For example, let's take Vietnam, there were a stream of Leftists who protested around this nation during the 1960s and early 1970s to end the US involvement in Vietnam. The propaganda of the Leftists clamed that all of the US was committing attroicities on the people in Vietnam and everything would be perfect if we simply left. Non-interventionist propaganda, adding up to the "fact" that the US should not get involved in conflicts with countries that are not directly attacking the US was spread around. The US government foolishly followed this advice. In the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, the Communists committed crimes against humanity, in three years they killed as many innocent civilians as had been killed by both sides in 15 years of fighting before this point. So looking at this, what was better, to stay a few years and actually win the war or cut and run. Obviously staying would have reduced the number of civilian deaths. Yet leftists will choose the path which leads to more civilian deaths and say that this in fact is the more humanitarian path, which is of course a lie. Now having said there, if there had been a way to break the will of the communists without resorting to war, if there had been a way to get them to leave alone Vietnam without resorting to war, of course that would have been better. And I also believe that the war was grossly mishandled, there was no need to drag it out for 20 years. When a war needs to be fought, the enemy needs to be overwhelmed with heavy force (not an atomic bomb, but lots of conventional bombs on strategic, military targets) and quickly forced to surrender. Not piecemeal attacks here and there.

So what we can learn from this is confronting and destroying evil leads to peace. It leads to fewer deaths than waiting for evil to develop and then attacking or even worse, allowing evil to develop.