The voice of eloquence. Over to you, Yoel Marcus of Haaretz:
The American decision to sell billions of dollars’ worth of cutting edge weapon technology to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and to compensate Israel by increasing military aid to $30 billion over the next decade, boils down to an admission by President George W. Bush that after two botched terms, he is leaving behind a lot of scorched earth. The situation in Iraq is gridlocked; Iran is still developing the bomb; al-Qaida continues to stalk the earth; and the two-state solution in our neck of the woods is still far from being implemented, if it ever will be. His push for democratic elections in the territories has produced Hamastan in Gaza. Bush is ending his failed career the only way America knows how: Here, take the money, and work it out yourselves.
A two-state solution by the end of 2008?
Sure, and the Pope really loves Jews, too.
This is the world we live in. We obliterated Iraq for weapons it did not possess. And then we supply stupendous amounts of the same weapons of mass destruction to regimes, Jewish and Arab alike, with horrendous human rights records. Oppression in the 21st century has been institutionalised such that even the most wicked contraptions devised by human minds can be palmed off as instruments of peace. This is such madness.
It is worth contrasting this with the Haneef scandal. Basically there’s a lot of attention on a man who did nothing wrong, and yet is ostensibly still considered a possible security risk by the Australian Government.
So effectively, whether or not you shrug it off as leftie conspiracy theories, what we have is an elaborate system which creates phantom menaces while very real menaces, like the boost in the militarisation of the Middle East, remain hidden.