I watched a gentleman on news last night. I wish I had caught his name because he had some of the most quietly brilliant views on the Middle East conflict that I’ve ever heard. If you read this and you watch KRON evening news in the San Francisco area and did catch his name, please let me know what it is.
Meanwhile, this gentleman said things that made a lot of sense, including the fact that he would like to see Sharon and Arafat gone from the picture because both are so concerned with their own egos, their hatreds of each other, that they’ll never work towards peace. If both were gone, perhaps more reasonable people could replace them and peace could be found.
I found this echoed by an article at Time, What are they thinking?, that looks, critically, at Sharon and Arafat. However, a key element in the article, to me, is that both men’s popularity seems to be tied with their more violent actions. Even with Sharon and Arafat gone from the picture, it would take a miracle worker — on both sides of the issue — to bring about peace.
The gentleman on the news also said that we, the United States, could never be a peace broker in the Middle East because we have too much invested in our support of Israel. We are not disinterested.
From CNN today, the Middle East conflict is impacting on our fragile technology rebound. And resulting in higher oil prices. I wish I could say that our government will need to monitor the oil companies in this country to ensure they don’t overly profit from these difficulties, but then I remember whom I speak — Bush and Cheney — and realize that this statement is laughable.
I am not going to focus this weblog on the Middle East conflict, but it does weight heavily on me this week. I don’t see any possibility that war in the Middle East can be avoided. And I don’t see any possibility that the rest of the world won’t get pulled, heavily, into this war. And there will be people in this country who will rejoice the war. And I don’t understand this.