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Humiliation – the only path to peace for the Middle East
h/t Gates of Vienna[AsiaTimes] For perhaps a quarter of the world’s population, President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem on December 6 was humiliating. Just for that reason it makes Middle East peace more probable. More than President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal of 1979, President Trump is likely to be remembered as the American president who contributed most to peace. Wars end not when the loser is defeated, but rather when the loser is humiliated. Throughout history, as I argued in a 2016 survey of ancient and modern wars, losers have fought on until they lack the manpower to fill their depleted ranks. Typically that occurs after 30% of military-age men are dead, as in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the South in the American Civil War, or Germany in the Second World War. The losing side will not abandon hostilities until all those who want to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so ‐ unless it is humiliated before the physical exhaustion of its resources has run its course. That is why the use of atomic weapons against Japan well may have been an act of mercy. The American fire-bombing campaign had already wrecked most of Japan’s cities and killed far more civilians than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan might have sustained far more damage in a conventional resolution through bombing and an eventual invasion. Atomic weapons humiliated the Japanese by displaying the incomparable superiority of Western technology and the pointlessness of further resistance. There are some defeats whose memory is too painful to bear. As an executive of Bank of America, I spent considerable time at its Charlotte headquarters. My Carolina colleagues needed only a Bourbon or two to lapse into obsessive rehearsals of Civil War battles which, by rights, they should have won. They sounded goofy, but that’s what happens when you sacrifice nearly a third of your young men. IMO, he uses the wrong terminology: "Peace in ME", oh really - look at Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.... Moreover, there won't be peace in ME until Arabs stop being a tribal society - and I'm not sure they can. However, IMO, Trump's act is an important step on the way to the recognition of the fact that there is no such thing as "Palestinian People" - it's just a fiction promulgated by Jew Haters of Europe and Human haters of Dar. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-12-10 |
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