Gaza and Afghanistan, a common attitude

The actions of Israel against the aid flotilla headed to Gaza should be no great surprise. If you accept enough premises, you can justify almost any conclusion. The Zionist premise is that God gave them Palestine and the non-Jewish elements are there on sufferance. They cannot accept the notion of large numbers of people who hate them occupying much of Palestine and governing themselves. So they accept any method to defeat this result.

In fact, since the first establishment of a Zionist state in an Arab region, this outcome has been pretty much inevitable. The Palestinians are going to hate them and there are too many to drive away. Eventually, they will have a state and they will deeply hate Israel, even if they decide they need to do business.

Now consider Afghanistan. We refuse to contemplate a country governed by people who once allowed Osama bin Laden to hang out, so we try to change the country through war even though this won't work. We assume that given enough time, money, and American knowhow, anything is possible. All the evidence to the contrary will not change our leaders' minds.

The American view of nuclear weapons is going to be very difficult to sell in the UN now. Everybody knows Israel already has them. We want everyone to view Iran as the worst possible country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons. Today, do we think this is going to fly?

We are living with North Korea's having nukes. We've lived almost 50 years with China having them. Pakistan and India live with the fact that each of them have them. Do we want Iran to have nukes? Of course not. Is it tolerable? Of course it is, and we will soon need to tolerate it.