Posted on 05/28/2013 2:36:07 PM PDT by neverdem
The thrice-promised land it has been called.
It is that land north of Mecca and Medina and south of Anatolia, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.
In 1915 — that year of Gallipoli, which forced the resignation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill — Britain, to win Arab support for its war against the Ottoman Turks, committed, in the McMahon Agreement, to the independence of these lands under Arab rule.
It was for this that Lawrence of Arabia and the Arabs fought.
In November 1917, however, one month before Gen. Allenby led his army into Jerusalem, Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Rothschild, declared that His Majesty’s government now looked with favor upon the creation on these same lands of a national homeland for the Jewish people.
Between these clashing commitments there had been struck in 1916 a secret deal between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot. With the silent approval of czarist Russia, which had been promised Istanbul, these lands were subdivided and placed under British and French rule.
France got Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq, and carved out Kuwait.
Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies — the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires — were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”
Imperial hypocrisy stood naked and exposed.
Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, announced early in 1918, were crafted to recapture the moral high ground. Yet it was out of the implementation of Sykes-Picot that so much Arab hostility and hatred would come — and from which today’s Middle East emerged.
Nine decades on, the Sykes-Picot map of the Middle East seems about to undergo revision, and a new map, its borders drawn in blood, emerge, along the lines of what H.G. Wells called the “natural borders” of mankind.
“There is a natural and necessary political map of the world,” Wells wrote, “which transcends” these artificial states, and this natural map of mankind would see nations established on the basis of language, culture, creed, race and tribe. The natural map of the Middle East has begun to assert itself.
Syria is disintegrating, with Alawite Shia fighting Sunni, Christians siding with Damascus, Druze divided, and Kurds looking to break free and unite with their kinfolk in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Their dream: a Kurdistani nation rooted in a common ethnic identity.
Shia Hezbollah controls the south of Lebanon, and with Shia Iran is supporting the Shia-led army and regime of Bashar Assad.
Together, they are carving out a sub-nation from Damascus to Homs to the Mediterranean. The east and north of Syria could be lost to the Sunni rebels and the Al-Nusra Front, an ally of al-Qaida.
Sectarian war is now spilling over into Lebanon.
Iraq, too, seems to be disintegrating. The Kurdish enclave in the north is acting like an independent nation, cutting oil deals with Ankara.
Sunni Anbar in the west is supporting Sunni rebels across the border in Syria. And the Shia regime in Baghdad is being scourged by Sunni terror that could reignite the civil-sectarian war of 2006-2007, this time without Gen. Petraeus’ U.S. troops to negotiate a truce or tamp it down.
Sunni Turkey is home to 15 million Kurds and 15 million Shia. And its prime minister’s role as middle man between Qatari and Saudi arms shipments and Syria’s Sunni rebels is unappreciated by his own people.
Seeing the Shia crescent — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad’s Syria, Nuri al-Maliki’s Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Iran — imperiled by the potential loss of its Syrian linchpin, Tehran and Hezbollah seem willing to risk far more in this Syrian war than does the Sunni coalition of Saudis, Qataris and Turks.
Who dares, wins.
Though the Turks have a 400,000-man, NATO-equipped army, a population three times that of Syria and an economy 12 times as large, and they are, with the Israelis, the strongest nations in the region, they appear to want the Americans to deal with their problem.
President Obama is to be commended for resisting neocon and liberal interventionist clamors to get us into yet another open-ended war. For we have no vital interest in Assad’s overthrow.
We have lived with him and his father for 40 years. And what did our intervention in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi produce but a failed state, the Benghazi atrocity, and the spread of al-Qaida into Mali and Niger?
Why should Americans die for a Sunni triumph in Syria? At best, we might bring about a new Muslim Brotherhood regime in Damascus, as in Cairo. At worst, we could get a privileged sanctuary for that al-Qaida affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front.
As the Sykes-Picot borders disappear and the nations created by the mapmakers of Paris in 1919-1920 disintegrate, a Muslim Thirty Years’ War may be breaking out in the thrice-promised land
It is not, and it should not become, America’s war.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
Look here. He wrote it, and he still has it web site. You think it's unfair to hold something he wrote, and he still stands behind against him? Then the marketplace of ideas has no meaning. I'm sure a modernist idea like that would appeal to Buchanan. But, unfortunately, for you and him I have the right to be against moral relativism. Sorry. Right there, in his own words. Anti-American. Anti-Catholic. Historically ignorant. Sorry, I won't be silent when he tries that.
“Well, you are talking about something else completely”
I’m talking about one of the longest running smears in the conservative movement and you just happen to be a current practitioner of the vice.
Let’s see you provide a quote to defend your accusation and then we’ll check the context.
Every time I’ve seen an accusation like the one that you are making it turns out to be something carefully snipped out of a paragraph in order to misrepresent what Buchanan has actually written.
Why would he have a smear against him and a misrepresentation of his views ON HIS OWN Web site?
You are completely illogical. Pat Buchanan's own Web site is a Jewish conspiracy against him!! Anyone who criticizes Buchanan is a liar, even if what they say is true?
Read his Web site. If you believe, like him, that the U.S. and England were the bad guys in World War II and Germany was the good guy, why don't you leave this country?
So, is Buchanan shamefully ignorant on a subject he chose to write about? Or did he deliberately LIE in a major way? Either way, it says something terrible about him. But it's hard to believe he is so woefully uneducated on a topic he writes about so much.
Before September 1, 2009, I might have believed Buchanan was a decent man, but misguided in some areas. After that, BECAUSE OF HIS OWN WORDS, I could no longer consider that a viable position. He is a malignant and anti-American person. He does not deserve your support. He is not a conservative, a paleoconservative, or any other kind of conservative.
A favorite writer of mine, Jerry Pournelle, refers to “The Egregious Frum” because of the way he treated conservatives who disagreed with him in any way.
.
Buchanan, the communist?
What he’s doing is downplaying the nudge that Obama’s been giving to the creation of pan-state Muslim Brotherhood rule in the region—as a rising force against Israel.
What he gets is that WWI and WWII were the same war. In WWI, we were essentially duped into fighting for the British, and French empires. Unfortunately, it wiped out entire generations, except in this country. That left us uniquely poised to enter WWII to save them and their tottering empires again, (they thought), in which, Japan having attacked us, and Germany and Italy having declared war, we wound up with little choice.
Pat always makes the sane argument, "Well, why fight alongside Stalin and the Soviets, who were if possible, far more brutal than Hitler ... and who at the beginning of the war were ALLIED with Hitler?"
Result? The British Empire and French Empires collapsed in FDR's communist-inspired post-war "democracy movement." We're still paying the price for the Europeans, whom we forced to cut loose colonies that will never be ready for democratic self-government because bankrupted by the wars, they know longer could sustain them.
Take PB cum grano salis, if you must, but listen to him. He gets it ... probably too late to our Republic any good ... but he gets it.
Thanks and you get it too. Pat is condemned because he puts America before all countries. To some, he's locked into the past against the new world order. To others, it's anti-Semitic. I say it is what is needed, defend America, not the world.
Hey, I agree aiding the Soviets was not a good idea. But did you see the article I posted. Soviets were not good guys. But neither were the Germans. In fact, Hitler and the Soviets were making common cause. They were officially allies. U.S. communists were criticizing Americans who were against Nazi Germany as imperialists. Yes, England made mistakes. Everyone did. But if someone believes the Germans were the good guys and wanted peace and the U.S. and England were the bad guys, they have a particularly warped view of history. Hitler invading Russia did not show that he was benevolent, it showed how truly crazy and destructive he was.
Hitler wanted to rid Europe of Christianity, and particularly Catholicism. Just like the EU today.
I deplore that the United States ever got into World War I. But after the Zimmerman Telegram and unrestricted submarine warfare, it was a tough situation. I still think it would have been better to avoid WWI, but I don’t have an answer as to how the U.S. could ignore the Zimmerman Telegram, and U-boats attacks. Even Brazil declared war on Germany, just because of the submarines.
Assad needs to hire the top DC PR firm, pronto.
Wrong. This neo-con urge to spread democracy is precisely the Trotskyite doctrine of using socialism, globally, to incrementally morph into communism.
Any mention of Christianity in politics is to manipulate the support of idiots.
I don’t want a link. I want you to post the very words that you claim support your accusation.
It’s time for you produce the evidence.
At this point you have not done so. All you do is repeat your charges as if that is supposed to be sufficient.
You’re simply demanding that we accept your accusations as being true because you believe them.
If you can back up your charges then it shouldn’t be hard at all for you to produce the evidence. The ball’s in your court, boy.
Jerry Pournelle is being much too polite to the egregious Frum...
One of my friends shares your admiration for Jerry Pournelle. I wasn’t familiar with him because I never read much science fiction, but I’ve been impressed with his political writings.
I think you’re wasting your talent trying to explain PB around here, Kenny.
You’re being much to subtle for the mud chuckers. As you can see they now have him being an “anti-western neopagan modernist”. When you are confronted with ignorance that profound you have to conclude that it’s invincible and there is no point in confronting it.
They much prefer Mondale’s speechwriter to Reagan’s. They prefer repackaged Trotskyites and red diaper babies like Muravchik to a pre-Vatican II mackerel snapper like Pat.
But I enjoyed your post.
We are an adversarial society. Whatever one's POV, there will be someone agin' it. We are also, mostly for the better, a commercial society. That is, no matter one's POV and the facts, or no facts backing it up, it has to be sold to a majority of our fellow citizens.
PB, who is naturally pugnacious ... physically when younger ... an elitist ... a controversialist ...an iconoclast ... and just generally an all-around brilliant, if intellectually unfashionable, PIA ... just ain't a broad-market salable phenomenon in the marketplace of ideas.
Said marketplace, namely the Liberal MSM, has not changed PB's ideas. However, it IS a business, and they have generally figured out how to make money with him ... and for him.... as a sort of bogey-man they can use to help along their marxist agitprop.
Thank God he can use them to reach us.
Lord Palmerston. WWI was fought because Britain did not wish to share the world with Germany. And also because the Kaiser was a bit of an idiot.
PB is a sort of throwback to the 1890's, when the debate was over America becoming an international imperial power. The losing camp, in which PB would have been, maintained that a true republic cannot be an international imperial power.
Naturally, us being us, this drive toward empire was cloaked in the "spread of democracy" concept, and even further cloaked as "civilizing ..christianizing ... etc" even if we had to kill you ... as in the Phillipines.
PB is unique. I do not totally disagree with your somewhat jaundiced view of him, but would rather counsel you to relax and take the PB good with the PB bad. We disagree as to the ratio.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.