By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, November 07, 2017
There is currently a real Asian pivot as the president
completes one of the longest presidential tours of Asia in memory. Three
carrier battle groups are in the West Pacific.
America at home is in one of its periodic frenzies — did
Ben Affleck grab the behinds of actresses, and is Kevin Spacey a pedophile or a
pederast, or both? — as it snores through existential crises such as $20
trillion in debt, or the sale to the Russians of 20 percent of its quite
limited domestic uranium reserves.
In contrast, Americans lately have gladly almost
forgotten about the Middle East, except for occasional updates on the
systematic destruction of the once “jayvee” ISIS.
They are certainly relieved that Fallujah is no longer in
the news much. It is a relief that no one catches any more Al Jazeera clips of
ISIS cowards burning, drowning, decapitating, blowing up, and hanging women and
children. More likely, ISIS jihadists are bedraggled, soiled, and drifting
about asking for clemency from their betters.
There is no more official American talking head assuring
us that the jihad is a personal journey, that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
is largely secular, that the red line took care of all of Assad’s WMD, that
terrorism is mostly a right-wing, returning-American-vet thing, that man-caused
disasters and workplace violence are scarier than a young mass murderer from
the Middle East screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he runs down, shoots, or stabs
unarmed Westerners.
There are no more U.S. troops in a supposedly “sovereign,
stable, and self-reliant Iraq” — and hardly an Iraq at all. So much for Vice
President Joe Biden’s pre-pullout boast that a post-surge, consensual Iraqi
government was likely to be the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement”.
After Barack Obama was embarrassed by his faux-red-line
in Syria, then–secretary of state John Kerry sought to address a loss of face
by fobbing off the region to the Russians after their 40-year ostracism from
the Middle East. The last few years, Vladimir Putin seems more the arbiter of
peace and war than does an American president.
Few liberals now defend the Obama-Clinton-Rice-Power
bombing of Libya and the mess that followed. After Benghazi and the failed-state
terrorist sanctuaries, who could?
As for Egypt, the Obama administration managed to be
despised all at once by the old Mubarak kleptocracy, by the administration’s
once-favored Muslim Brotherhood “one-election, one time” cabal led by USC grad
Mohamed Morsi, and by the junta of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Who can keep
track?
Until recently America apparently favored an ascendant
Iran-Shiite-Hezbollah-Assad nexus over the ossified and estranged Sunni Gulf
monarchies. The prior administration pushed through the Iran deal that sent
billions of dollars into the Iranian terrorist pipeline and eventually will
guarantee an Iranian bomb — on the promise that the bomb would come later
rather than sooner. Who can count all the masked side deals, hidden cash supplements,
and unspoken corollaries in the agreement?
The U.S. is now exporting vast amounts of oil, coal, and
natural gas, and is the world’s largest producer of fossil-fuel energy. It
eventually will have little need for Middle East energy, although it is still
worried that belligerents do. We rarely hear much anymore of the old
petrodollar stories about revolving-door government officials and lobbyists
selling out to Saudi interests.
Iran now has the cash to buy almost all the weapons it
needs. With ISIS gone, the Kurds increasingly isolated, and the U.S. not likely
to remain much longer in the region after the demise of ISIS, Iran will finish
building its pathway to the Mediterranean. There will be lots of jihadists,
terrorists, and insurgents out of work and eager to fight Israel, much as they
did in 2006. Eleven years is a long time without a major Israeli–Islamic Arab
war — and so plenty of time for a foolish new generation of Islamists to
believe that they can destroy the IDF.
So this much-needed respite from the Middle East madness
may be coming to a close. An empowered Iran is getting richer, and it is
watching closely how nuclear North Korea fares in its threats to the U.S. and
its allies. Hezbollah, the Assad government, and Iran are waging a veritable
proxy war against Saudi Arabia. Lebanon may soon become the Lebanon
battleground of the 1970s and 1980s again.
Which brings us to Israel, out late, great — but most
dependable — ally.
Over the last eight years, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was demonized by the Obama administration to the point that
Democratic operatives interfered in a foreign election in hopes of defeating
Netanyahu at the polls. Israel’s strategic worries were often written off as
neuroses by the U.S. security apparat.
Yet Israel still quietly rises to growing existential
threats as if they were the same old, same old “death to Israel” boilerplate.
While we fight over the cost, efficacy, symbolism, and ethics of building a
wall along our southern border, Israel long ago shrugged and simply built a
440-mile barrier to fence out terrorists. It worked quite well and stopped most
suicide bombing. When the U.N., the EU, and the International Court of Justice
condemned Israel for doing what now much of Eastern Europe and the Gulf
monarchies routinely do to protect their borders, Israel just shrugged.
When North Korea, as is its weekly habit, threatens to
blow up Seoul with “ten-thousands guns,” South Korea and the United States all
but declare that they are strategically emasculated by the specter of 250
square miles of Seoul instantly vaporized — as if that were a given.
Yet when Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas brag that they can
collectively send more than 200,000 rockets and missiles of various calibers
and payloads into Israel cities (Israel’s entire population is a third of
Seoul’s), Israel shrugged. It apparently remembers that in 2006 its enemies
launched more than 4,000 rockets into Israeli cities, killed about 50 people,
and hardly prevented Israel from retaliating as it saw fit.
When North Korea promises that a nuclear-tipped missile
will land on the West Coast, we rightly go into near panic. When Iran promises
that very shortly it will have the ability to do the same and wipe out the
“one-bomb-state” of Israel, Israel shrugs. If facing Armageddon, it is
apparently determined to take out quite a large portion of the radical Middle
East with it — if anyone would be so foolish as to test whether Israel, as
reputed, really has an arsenal of 100 to 200 nukes.
In any future war, the Sunni “moderates” may be a bit
more eager to press Israel to hit the Iranian Shiite forces harder. And they
may be a bit more restrained in their loud but empty Pan-Islamic denunciations
of “Zionist aggressions” against non-Sunni Muslims whom they despise and fear
more than they do Israel.
For all its bluster, Iran might be a bit more careful,
given that no one quite knows what Donald Trump will do, though they can see he
likes Israel a lot more than Barack Obama did — and radical Islamists a lot
less. Russia is now right in the way of a new version of the 2006 battleground,
but Putin’s method seems to back likely winners if it does not too
ostentatiously erode Russian credibility.
Again, the most likely next war may not be missile
exchanges over the Korean DMZ, or Russian divisions pouring into the Baltic
States, but instead an Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-sponsored rocket and missile
attack on Israel, with a dug-in and fortified army of terrorists prepped for
Israeli ground retaliation into Lebanon.
Such a renewed Middle East war is likely to be something
much worse than a second round of the 2006 attempt to rocket Israel into
concessions and to kill as many Jews as it can before Islamic jihadists run to
Russia, the U.N., and the EU to cajole or force Israel to stop.
We are awfully tired of the Middle East, but it is not
quite tired of us.
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