|
|
|
Jewish World Review Aug 30, 2012/ 12 Elul, 5772 The Humpty-Dumpty Middle East By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
America is in the midst of the greatest domestic gas and oil revolution since the early 20th century. If even guarded predictions about new North American reserves are accurate, over the next decade the entire continent may become energy-independent, without much need of petroleum imports from the America's diminishing reliance on the Persian Gulf coincides with mounting Chinese dependency on Middle Eastern oil and gas. So as the Persian Gulf becomes less important to us, it grows even more critical to the oil-hungry, cash-laden -- and opportunistic -- Chinese. After two wars in the The usual Arab complaint against After the Gulf War of 2003, there was widespread new anger about the use of American arms to force-feed democracy down the throat of Let's get this all straight. America has been damned for its Machiavellian shenanigans in supporting authoritarian governments; for its naive idealism in using force to implant democracies; for its ambivalence in not using force to protect democratic protestors; and for its recent isolationism in ignoring ongoing Arab violence. Why, then, bother? There are other growing fault lines. The old conventional wisdom was that Sunni Muslims shared Israeli fears of a Persian bomb on the horizon. The new conventional wisdom is that the Arab masses that are propelling the Muslim Brotherhood into power in The subtext of Middle Eastern anti-Americanism is that the region, if given a chance, will embrace its own brand of freedom But that does not appear to be happening in Newly elected Egyptian President Note that anti-Americanism was often attributed to the unique unpopularity of Texan Yet recent polls show that Obama is even less popular in the Staggering U.S. debt also explains the impending divorce. With Perhaps soon the problem will be that we simply will not have enough power to use it for much of anything -- and would have to ask the U.N. for permission if we did. Usually nothing good comes from American isolationism, especially given our key support for a vulnerable democratic And no one knows how to -- or whether we even should -- put it together again.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. Comment by clicking here. © 2012, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
