Muddle Eastern Affairs

Now that the administration has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, seeking to find ways to pacify the region and make everything fine and dandy for everybody, reality is beginning to kick in, and it isn't pretty.

No matter where you look in this benighted area, there is trouble and, in some areas, sheer chaos. That shouldn't surprise anybody who has ever contemplated the joys of life in a cauldron that has been simmering with hatred and conflict off and on for a few thousand years at least.

The late John Lodge, a former movie actor, onetime Connecticut governor and, like his brother the late Henry Cabot Lodge, a U.S. ambassador to sundry nations, used to tell a story about the area that well-illustrated what you find yourself dealing with in the land of turbans, turmoil, terrorism and oceans of fossil fuel under the sand dunes.

A frog was poised on the banks of a river getting ready to swim to the other side, when he was approached by a scorpion, who asked if the frog would carry him across.

"Of course not," the frog said. "I'd no sooner get halfway across when you'd raise that venomous tail of yours and plunge it into my back and kill me."

"I'm not that crazy," the scorpion said. "If I were stupid enough to do that you'd sink into the river and I'd go down with you and drown."

Agreeing that the argument made sense, the frog allowed the scorpion to climb on his back and jumped into the water. Halfway across, the scorpion raised its tail and plunged it into the frog's back. As the dying frog began to sink, he moaned, "Why? Why?"

Said the scorpion, as both went down, "Didn't you know that this is the Middle East?"

Right now we've got a mess of scorpions on our back.

Afghanistan

Let's start with Afghanistan. As we are wont to do, Americans tend to imagine other nations as being just like our own, places with big cities and small towns and Wal-Marts and sandlot baseball teams.

Afghanistan is NOT a nation like America. Afghanistan is not even a nation. Instead, it is a collection of feuding feudal societies where offing one's neighbor is considered a jolly good sport – not as much fun as playing polo using a human skull as the ball, but still a great way to spend an afternoon.

As seems to be the case in the neighboring areas, everybody is armed, usually with automatic rifles and the omnipresent rifle-propelled grenades they give their kids when they reach the age of seven. The place is one huge mound of rubble, the product of endless wars, civil and otherwise.

Law and order is provided by what we call "warlords," in actuality the local version of Mafia bosses, but somewhat less genteel than our homegrown criminal capos.

We have installed one Hamid Karzai as president, surrounded him with American bodyguards (we can't trust the homegrown kind) and done our best to keep him alive and kicking – not at all a simple task, since large numbers of his countrymen seem to want him dead. For that matter, they seem to want just about everybody dead.

He allegedly is going about the hopeless job of nation-building. In the meantime, out in the hustings, chaos – the normal state of affairs – reigns supreme, so much so that there are those who yearn for the good old days of the Taliban, who at least managed to maintain law and order by the simple expedient of offing large numbers of Afghans who committed such heinous crimes as wanting to watch television or shave off their beards.

Iraq

What can one say about Iraq? Unlike their neighbors in Afghanistan, Iraqis are a more or less civilized people. Sure, the Shiites hate the Sunnis, the Sunnis hate the Shiites, they both hate the Kurds and the Kurds hate the Turks, who hate them just as much.

The place is nominally a nation – or it was under Saddam, who forced it to be a nation. Actually, it is an artificial nation, pasted together after WW I by victorious Western nations that hadn't the foggiest idea of the kind of mischief they were setting in motion.

As it is becoming increasingly obvious, the place is a mess. Fortunately, however, it can be cleaned up and set off on the road to a free and productive society which, thanks to all that oil underneath, it would have been long ago, absent Saddam.

BUT there is one small problem. The Shiite majority is very much under the thumb of the mullahs, who want Iraq to become an Islamic republic, just like neighboring Iran and, for that matter, the former Taliban regime.

That cannot be allowed to happen, and the administration has no intention of allowing it to happen. And in order to prevent it, we are going to have to hang around and crush it under our heels, just as Saddam had to do, but hopefully with less brutality. Need I say more?

Iran

Iran is another powder keg waiting to explode. The mullahs are running the place with an iron fist, but the natives are getting restless under their theocratic dictatorship.

Sooner or later pubic discontent is going to set off some kind of rebellion. The mullahs know that and can be expected to resist by creating some kind of diversion, such as throwing a nuclear-tipped missile at Israel or even at us in hopes of uniting the population against the great Satan and our client state, Israel.

Israel/Palestine

As I write this, crazed suicide bombers are blowing up both themselves and Israelis every couple of hours. It is no coincidence that this sudden escalation in terrorist bombings is taking place when the so-called road map intended to bring peace and create a Palestinian state is supposedly in the process of being implemented. Or was.

It is patently obvious that there are people among the Arabs who don't want peace. They want Israel driven into the sea. Nothing else will satisfy them. Try to create a peaceful settlement and they'll strike, even though by so doing they will prevent the Palestinians from having a homeland of their own.

They don't want a Palestinian state, they want Israel – all of it – without any Israelis.

The terrorists have not merely created a detour in the road map, they've torn it up. And they'll keep doing so as long as there's any danger of peace breaking out between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Baksheesh

Finally, if we are going to get more deeply involved in this region, we are going to have to deal with baksheesh. Throughout the Muddle East there is the peculiar custom called baksheesh – bribery. It is embedded in the culture. As any American businessman can tell you, if you want to do business in the region, a lot of palms need to be greased.

When President Eisenhower sent Marines into Lebanon on another of those pacification missions, nothing much happened after they landed. Lacking any real news to cover, the late NBC correspondent Frank McGee wandered the streets of Beirut asking people what they knew about a scandal then rocking the U.S. – the Goldfine-Sherman Adams case.

Goldfine, a shady New England textile merchant, had been handing out gifts to politicians, including Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's White House chief of staff, when he was governor of New Hampshire. Goldfine had given Adams a very expensive vicuna coat and the Democrats, smelling White House blood, were charging that the coat and other gifts were bribes.

When McGee asked Lebanese citizens what they made of the widely publicized case, they all said that it was obvious that Goldfine had paid baksheesh to his cousin Adams (everybody over there is everybody else's cousin), who shamefully failed to produce the required official favor and was therefore in serious trouble for what over there was seen as official misfeasance.

Such is the state of affairs in the Muddle East. Say a prayer for George Bush before you go to bed tonight. He needs it.

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Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers He can be reached at