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Friday, August 04, 2006
Rich Tucker :: Townhall.com Columnist
Can We Get Serious?
by Rich Tucker
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Marketing experts know that you don’t sell people what they need, you sell them what they want. That’s why peace sells so well -- everybody wants it.

In the 1950s we had “Atoms for Peace.” More recently, Israel has been encouraged to hand over “land for peace.” But there’s a problem: You can’t trade for peace if one of the participants involved in the deal doesn’t want peace.

That’s the situation in the Middle East today.

Terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas and their sponsors Iran and Syria, have made it clear they want to destroy Israel. Hezbollah’s patron Iran is a country that has atoms but clearly doesn’t want peace. “Iranians today possess the nuclear know-how,” President Ahmadinejad warned recently. “If some believe they can use the language of force and threats they are badly mistaken, and if they don’t realize it now they will when their head hits a stone.”

Still, some are ready to allow their own desire for peace to cloud their judgment. Take William Cohen, former defense secretary under President Clinton and a former Republican senator from Maine. He’s now with the consulting firm The Cohen Group -- but whatever his clients are paying him for his advice is too much.

Cohen was on CNN on July 30 to dissect the situation in the Middle East. “One of the great ironies is that Iran is now in Beirut, acting as a peace broker, apparently,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “Here’s the country that is responsible for arming and supplying the munitions and the moral support for Hezbollah, now in Beirut, obviously talking about ways they can bring about a peaceful settlement, along with the French.”

What’s ironic, of course, is that anyone would put “Iran” and “peace broker” in the same sentence.

Cohen’s correct in his diagnosis that Iran is responsible for arming Hezbollah. Yet for some reason he’s allowed himself to be fooled into thinking the warmongers are actually now interested in seeking peace. If the Iranians are indeed seeking a ceasefire, it’s probably so they can help Hezbollah re-arm for new attacks. Maybe Tehran will even give the terrorists some of the atomic technology that Iran’s president brags his country has developed. Continued...
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About The Author

Rich Tucker is an editor in Washington D.C. and a columnist for Townhall.com.

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Reply # 1
Date: Aug 12, 2006 - 2:06 AM EST
Reality
We need to know that:
Hezbollah is not Palestinean. They are not Lebanese. They are anti-infidel. In a recent Time Magazine, a Hezbollah spokesman was quoted as saying, "We are protecting Lebanon from Israel." Israel would be no threat to Lebanon if there was no threat based in Lebanon. Hezbollah has said for years that they believe they can destroy Israel. If they destroy Lebanon in the process, that eliminates another nest of infidels. Lebanon has only survived this long because the Hezbollah-types are preoccupied with Israel.
Iran cares nothing about the Palestineans. If they did, they would not be talking about nuking Israel--which would be equally devasting to the Palestineans, Lebanon, and Jordan, not to mention the shrines that they claim to revere.
The Lebanese government has no power, at least not enough to do anything about Hezbollah or anyone else. Lebanon is a federation of 17 mutually distrusting subcultures, some Christian, some Muslim.
Israel is not the root problem. It is not even a factor in most of the violence going on in the Muslim world. It did not even exist when a million Armenians and a hundred thousand Assyrian Christians disappeared between 1900 and 1925 (including my husband's grandfather). The root problem is the existence of stubborn infidels.
One of the principles of Koranic interpretation is that later verses supercede earlier ones. The peaceful verses were,for the most part, written when the Muslims were a minority in a hostile city. The later verses come from a period when they had achieved political hegemony--which was intended to be a permanent situation. Another fundamental principle is that political power of an infidel over a Muslim is illegitimate.
"Occupied Palestine" is not the West Bank. When I was there in 1963, nobody in the Jordanian West Bank ever said "Israel" when referring to their neighbors to the west. It was always "Occupied Palestine."
One reason that Osama and friends thought they could attack our interests with impunity was that we had already cut and run in Lebanon and Somalia. Are they right?


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Reply # 2
Date: Aug 7, 2006 - 3:19 PM EST
Raidencraig
If there is anything more offensive than a Nazi, its a long-winded Nazi.
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