....anoints to co-exist purposely to destroy Israel just to look nice in the eyes of the Arab world, invites deadly clouds of mushrooms that itchy fingers on nuclear buttons would eventually create.

For, ending the dangerous centuries-old Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting with a two-state Obama recommendation to the world is not only to put an end to the conflict but also to end it all!  

It is another way of saying that the leadership in Jerusalem must be totally insane to accept such incredibly dim-witted and extremely destructive proposal.  

As if something just dropped from the sky lately, which surprised everyone since White House released the joint statements of the Obama-Natanyahu meeting in Washington, D.C. last April 2009.  The on-going international campaign to build up Obama’s image as a new Messiah that the world should accept is getting more impulsively imprudent and astonishingly dangerous. Hilary Clinton’s previous election campaign warning the American electorate that Obama’s inexperience in foreign policy would endanger this country is beginning to rear its ugly head.

In my previous editorial report on Obama dancing the dangerous Paso Doble [NWS 06-04-09], my exposure as a UN diplomat on this worrisome nuclear apocalypse in the Middle East stressed this Obama inexperience that Hilary Clinton, his Secretary of State, had warned the public to be wary about  

And once more sharing more knowledge from this exposure with Obama and his foreign policy advisers is a wake up tap on the head. Middle East Liberal adventurers in foreign policy should not be too reckless to act foolishly that could lead to a nuclear conflagration.

Recall that the United Nations chopped Palestine into halves and left the occupants in each state in limbo – it was a division without frontiers. I have participated in so many debates over this tragic omission years back when I served as deputy permanent representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Each of the divided state determined their own frontier – just the right recipe for both sides to justify their aggression against one another.

To my mind then, the United Nations missed that first and only opportunity to draw new frontiers between the two warring nations and see its authority asserted without the use of force. When hostilities in the Middle East irrupted owing to each of the state’s version of “justified aggressions” [we should take into account that when there were no frontiers, there was no division at all and the fighting protagonists were back to square one], it was too late, especially when murders, kidnapping and mass killings from both sides became complicated with the intervention of Russia and the Western powers led by the United States during the Cold War.

Today the Islamic “Axis of Evil” personified by Hezbollah and Hamas on one hand, and Israel on the other, represent the opposing parties in this cyclical duel for survival. The case of century-old ecclesiastical war between infidels and Islam waged through campaign of terror from both sides had metastasized into a wider ideological and armament conflict that engulfed the entire Middle East and eventually would engulf the whole world. Provocations are intentional to start a new round of conflict.

For example, kidnapping Israelite soldiers to trigger off prisoners exchange that started the firing of rockets from both sides is Hezbollah’s primitive peace-process initiative. They have no civilized sense of settling their religious conflict with Christians other than what they only knew best – the art of killing. How can the world sympathize a community of militants whose daily life is not normal without terror? Whose only sense of success in settling disputes is to kill? Whose vision of progress is to destroy?

My favorite joke on Semitism has always been true to form: Islamic terrorists created a daily menu for the surviving Jewish population in the Middle East – breakfast bombing, kidnapping for launch, and a salad of terror in the evening for dinner. Fighting Jews had never given up their diet of terror to keep themselves healthy and strong, mentally and spiritually.

This is not to say that Jerusalem is not blameworthy of carnage in killing innocent civilians.  Palestinians and Israelites in a tit-for-tat regimes of terror are in pare delicto when the question is asked who is to blame.

To the uninitiated, it may be a surprise to know that to kill or be killed makes this scenario in the Middle East so volatile that almost everything is not only unpredictable but inconsistent. The mother of all inconsistencies is the desire for a peace settlement by killing, and that is happening every time opportunity to kill from both sides presents itself.

It is not an idle statement to say that what is only consistent in the Middle East struggle for power is the never-changing determination of the radical Arab world now led by Iran to eliminate Israel from the map. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of soon-to-be nuclear Iran, may not be too bright in risking Iran’s future and security when he publicly restated this determination to wipe out Israel from the map. What he announced was in fact an open re-declaration of the continuing biblical battle between good and evil.

Diplomatically, Ahmadinejad was raw and less artful yet never condescending of, but was rather frank about, Israel when he was emotional in his intention to wipe out the Jewish nation to the last man that walks the earth. Hitler was more deceptive and hypocritical. The paranoid German dictator publicly viewed the Jews of WWII as merchants of Venice, describing them as enemies with fiery horns in their heads. The dictator fooled the world with a foreign policy declaration that the Third Reich was not mass-murdering millions of Jews but only fighting a war to rid the world of the evil of economic Semitism.

Actually, the Middle East problem has four rounds of major historical conflicts that whirl Arabs and Jews in and out of the war-and-peace orbit. The original round was denominated as the 1947-1949 Palestine War where the Arabs and Jews mutually claimed ownership of the former Turkish Empire otherwise known as Palestine. Under the British Ballfour Declaration, it became the home of the Jewish people following the exodus of surviving Jews from Hitler’s Third Reich in WWII which antagonized the Arab world.

UN then divided Palestine without frontiers whereupon fighting broke out when Russia and the United States agreed to put Jerusalem under a UN-based international regime. Hardly Israel was proclaimed a Republic in May 1948 when an Egyptian army invaded Palestine from the south. Four armistice agreements were signed under the UN Conciliation Commission of December 1948 the last of which was signed on July 20, 1949.

The second round opened when Egypt’s Nasser dreamed of a United Arab Republic not just for Egypt but for the entire Middle East under his leadership. This was threatened by the West-sponsored Baghdad Pact of 1955 which made rival Iraq a member. Nasser went for a massive arms build-up with the Soviet bloc profiting from the Arab-communist armament deal. The United States withdrew financial assistance to Egypt’s great Aswan Dam project and in retaliation Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company. Britain and France along with Israel resorted to the use of force but was forced by UN intervention to withdraw from the Canal, with the world body stationing troops in Egypt. The weary protagonists rested uneasily until 1967, for the next third round of open confrontation.

The third round began on May 16, 1967 when in a plan to attack Israel, Egypt demanded withdrawal of UN forces from the Sinai border and from Sharm el Sheikh, commanding the critical Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only access from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Indian Ocean, which Nasser closed. Israel was more than prepared for the inevitable and on June 5, launched a swift preemptive strike and in six days destroyed and conquered the encircling entire Arab army. UN then frantically called for a cease fire with its November 22 resolution for a settlement of the six-day war, until the warring parties were back in the warfront in 1973 for the next fourth round of hostilities.

This time the Arab world launched a massive surprise attack on Israel on the Day of Atonement [Yom Kippur] Saturday October 6, 1973 to once and for all completely subdue Israel and erase it from the map. The attack employed a massive army larger than Hitler had gathered to invade Russia, with Egypt and Syria coordinating their combined attacks using more than 5,000 armored tanks.

Israel reeled with heavy casualties under this treacherous invasion and lost substantial territorial grounds to the invaders. But Prime Minister Golda Meir’s resolve not only to resist but to push back the invading hordes was that of an Iron Lady that did not wink in an eye-to-eye confrontation with her Arab adversaries. The Golan Heights was occupied and when the UN called for the October 25 cease fire, Meir’s elite advancing armies, victorious on their trail, were only 25 miles to Damascus and 50 miles to Cairo for an otherwise great conquest of the Arab World had the UN not been quick enough to once again intervene.

The Israel-Lebanon war is just a splinter of the revolving cycle of events from the first to the fourth rounds of this Arab-Jew Armageddon. It was even predicted that the fifth round of conflict would be the “end of the world.” Christians believe that this would immediately precede the Day of Judgment, whereas occult practitioners take reference to Nostradamus’ 666 arrival of the Anti-Christ for the “end of the world”.

This “end of the world” mantra, biblical or otherwise, is oftentimes used as an after-dinner anecdotal digestif, yet quite disturbing to legitimate watchers of events in the Middle East  [not to overnight Middle East experts with their own noisy predictions]. Even as I write this editorial insight, the Hezbollah leadership in Iran has already declared in Fox News on July 19, 2006 that they were preparing the world for World War III. 

If the Israel-Palestinian [ditto Israel-Lebanon] fifth round of conflict is triggering the “end of the world”, whose world is it that is supposed to end? To decipher this, let’s cross swords with other legitimate observers.

We need an eye on the Israeli-Lebanon stalemate.  For Israel, three options may be considered in solving this bloody impasse: First option: Israel to issue an ultimatum to Hezbollah to vacate Lebanon or be annihilated. Second option: Failing this, Israel to launch an invasion and capture dead or alive the terror leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, and occupy Lebanon to clear the state of terrorists. Terror Saddam Hussein was out of the picture after the invasion of Iraq and Lebanon like Iraq could be democratized into the Western fold.

The third option is a repeat of history: Move NATO contingents into Lebanon as a peace-keeping UN-sanctioned policing force. This perpetuates the rounds of conflict – cease fire that would only postpone the irruption of hostilities again to the next round of endless confrontation ad infinitum.

If any of those options is considered, it won’t be a surprise if the next conflict will be nuclear but limited. Syria and Iran would play an important active role in the Arab side in this limited nuclear war, and most likely China and North Korea – that is assuming that the nuclear armament build-up continued to be synchronized between Iran and North Korea -- would get involved but not the kind of an all-out involvement against the United States and Great Britain aligning themselves openly behind Israel.

When Beijing’s arm trade in the Middle East is jeopardized, the Chinese could lose their cool and intervene in support of North Korea and Iran as the latter would most likely continue to flex their tinseled muscles against the United States, which when this happens, Russia, France and Germany would set aside their controvertible economic interests in the Middle East and solidify their positions with the West in an all-out war against terror. The war is on terror, not necessarily against Islam.

No one stands firmly on the ground when predicting what’s going to happen next in this 5th cycle of the Middle East conflict. More so when the next preemptive strike from either side could be nuclear.

Here’s the caveat for this historical perspective and analytical insight: No diagnostic wisdom is ever written in stone. Only the actual happening of events is carved in the hardest of rocks that withstands time. Having said that -- not with temerity but deep consecration -- I think it is wise to refrain from entering the portals of certainty in presenting an analysis of the imponderable even given the historical background of these cyclical hostilities that could end in a nuclear holocaust. But we could dilute the seriousness of this Apocalyptic prognosis with a sprinkle of humor.

Confucian wisdom taught us this lesson … that when predicting events with an aura of certainty, even those who keep their feet firmly on the ground would have trouble in putting on their pants.

With Obama appearing so openly naked with inexperience in foreign policy, this nation’s embarrassment for having trouble getting into its pants is, in the eyes of the world, more than enough.

And I said enough! #

The writer is a former UN diplomat. He is an award-winning journalist of more than 45 years and currently a NWS columnist.  Read more of his writings in the Web or you may send your comment to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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