The Metaphorical Coin of Gen. James L. Jones

Before mentioning his coin, I suppose I should first briefly explain who this Gen. James L. Jones is. He's our current National Security Advisor. (I checked with those about me, people who I consider fairly well read, and discovered that most of them didn't recognize this man's name or position.) It's the same position occupied by Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration and Brent Scowcroft, who, if memory serves me had the job during the elder Bush's administration.

Everyone knows about Brzezinski and Scowcroft. They've written books that make clear that they have little use for Israel. It now seems that Gen. Jones is following in the same tradition. Perhaps, after he's written some books, he'll become a little better known. Oh, one more thing; Gen. Jones is a highly regarded and highly decorated military man with a distringuished record of service. But, then again, so was George C. Marshall, who also didn't care much for the idea of a Jewish state.

Recent press reports had Gen. Jones expounding that Iran and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict were two sides of the same (metaphorical) coin. His idea, if I understand him, is that these two problems are linked and that if you make progress on one, you automatically make progress on the other.

And, while this may surprise those who follow this blog site, I actually agree with Gen. Jones. These two international problems are indeed two sides of the same coin, and that coin is irrational bigatry and anti-Semitism. This coin has been passed around for hundreds of years. It can be found throughout the Islamic world. It was also once quite common in the West. Jews had hoped that, with the end of Hitler and Nazi Germany, we would have seen it destroyed for all time. That, of course, has proven to be wishful thinking.

So, now that we concur with Gen. Jones's model tying together Iran with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, what does it tell us. First, it tells us that it gets us no closer to a solution than telling those with hatred and bigotry in their hearts that "we should all get along." Hatred and bigotry are irrational. They do not lend themselves to reason.

When the Israelis left Gaza, they did not destroy the greenhouses that had supported them financially. Indeed, there was a hope in Israel that the Gazan leadership would realize that these Israeli greenhouses (now a Palestinian asset) would help them in providing their people with a means of improving their livelyhood. Or, so you would have thought. That would have been the rational thing to do. But, no, they destroyed them.

It seems hard to admit, but the Islamic culture is simply not rational. Abbas is presented to the world as a moderate and yet under his administration, in Palestinian territories, Arab schools teach their children that the Jews are to be hated. It's pretty much the same curriculum that's used in Iran. The only difference is that in one place they teach it in Arabic and in the other in Farsi.

American generals like Gen Jones are often slow to learn. They don't get that losing in Vietnam, a war we entered to safeguard a corrupt French colony, was the same as the British losing in our war of independence. They didn't get that you can't fight a war against Islamic guerilla forces the way you fight against coherent states. (Here we must give credit to Gen. Petraeus, who did learn the lesssons of Vietnam; one of the few American military men to do so.)

But there are lessons that remain to be learned. Using Mafia forces, as we did in WW II, may improve the immediate problem, but it left us with bigger problems later on. In seeking to defeat Russian ambitions in Afghanistan, we turned to the Taliban. And, that did indeed prove helpful. But, now, it's bitten us where it hurts.

Will we never learn?