Obama Tackles Mideast Peace: Oh Please, Get Real

By: Rachel Marsden

“Today, the world celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Barack Obama bringing lasting peace in the Mideast.”

Re-read that sentence. Have a peace-gasm. Then get back to whatever it is you were doing in the real world.

Despite Obama’s meeting with Palestinian and Israeli leaders at the White House this week, Arab-Israeli peace (and that sentence) will never happen.

Bush tried, and he was more feared then Obama—and out of fear is born respect. I don’t care what peacenicks say, fear works. Think of your own mother: I’m sure she only had to whack you a few times before a single icy stare was enough to keep you in line.

In political strategy, we call this the “Muammar Gaddafi Phenomenon”—after the sweet boy (previously a holy terror until scared straight by the Iraq invasion) currently running Libya. Obama doesn’t give anyone incentive to smarten up. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would even let you break into his crib and guzzle all the beer from the fridge. “Hey man, make sure you recycle those cans, yo,” he’d admonish you from his couch.

I wish there was one world leader who would just call out this “peace process” nonsense already and say, “Look, we aren’t going to waste any more money and resources because this fighting will never end. So we’re going to concentrate on more promising endeavors—like colonizing Pluto, or maybe something even a bit less ambitious.”

Every attempt at peace in this region has failed. The Palestinians have violated every ceasefire because they just can’t help themselves from firing rockets into Israel. Israel has withdrawn boots from the ground in Palestine, and is only keeping a watchful eye on anything going in and out of the area because the Palestinians have proven themselves untrustworthy and have used the area as a staging ground for attacks into Israel.

What war have the Arabs ever won for this land? They expect it to just be handed to them—even when they have every other country in the area aside from Israel in which to spread out. You’ve got a “homeland,” you fools: the entire rest of the Arab world. At best, the world community has been saying for years that you need to share Gaza. Face it, you suck at sharing. And you really should have learned this when you were about two years old, but when people suck at sharing they lose the toy entirely—they don’t get to have it all to themselves.

One of the most clichéd arguments is that the only reason Israel keeps beating back the Arabs in Gaza is because they’re funded and supported by the USA. Well, they’ve earned it. The Israelis have mostly the same values as America and are a trustworthy ally in the region. And who doesn’t want to help their friends?

The Palestinians, by contrast, are so unreliable and such unsavory characters that their own leadership—the president of the PLO—can’t even bring itself to trust its own parliamentary majority (otherwise known as the terrorist group, Hamas).

When they aren’t busy firing rockets at Israel, they’re making cartoons for the young viewers of Hamas TV featuring a Jew-hating Mickey Mouse doppelganger. Which means that in the very best case scenario, even if Israeli and the Palestinian leadership reach yet another deal, Palestine can’t ensure compliance by its own government.

There are two realistic options that no leader will address because they don’t exactly embrace diplomatic delusion.

Option One: Fund one of the sides of this war (the side with values most closely matching our own) until the enemy is completely wiped out and peace can then have a chance to blossom. A lot of sweating and grunting has to be exuded to reach a satisfying peace-gasm. You can’t just sit back and hope that guys with a penchant for biting are going to gently grace you with one.

Option Two: Accept that war is a natural state of affairs and that peace is an accidental, artificial construct not commonly found in evolutionary science. War isn’t pleasant, but neither is a shark mangling a sea lion. But we watch that play out on Animal Planet without getting too worked up about it. The only difference between them and us is that some of us are capable of rationalizing that humans are innately superior.

The Israelis and Arabs are going to keep going at each other in a war of attrition, as has happened many times before in world history. We could let them have at it and stop worrying about it—and just be ready to get out the gun if the whole mess ever comes careening towards us, much like a hunter would do if a tiger and rhino were in a death lock a few feet away.

One of the reasons much of the Left (and Europe) favored Obama’s election is because his non-interventionist attitude was seen as the antithesis of George W. Bush’s. Obama was going to butt out of everything outside of America’s borders and focus on wreaking havoc at home. Mission accomplished.

All the European leftists with which I’ve spoken here in France are disappointed that Obama hasn’t given much attention to Europe, isn’t showing up at summits here, and didn’t attend the anniversary of the Berlin Wall collapse.

My response: “You got what you voted for – a non-interventionist.” The response of one such leftist I debated on a TV program here was, “But he’s not doing the ‘GOOD’ kind of interventionism: the talking kind!” Point taken. The Left likes useless, unproductive, strictly symbolic intervention. In that case then, he will certainly be delivering on the revival of this Mideast peace charade. Good thing he already has the Nobel Peace Prize* to prove it.

*For attendance

COPYRIGHT 2010 RACHEL MARSDEN