Mr. Bush, Rebuild this Wall!

The Israel-Palestinian truce is dead. Which is to say, the jive about it, the spin, the buzz, the obvious-to-everyone-from-the-beginning deception is over. Sharon, as usual, was right to stay tough. To continue doing the only thing that will have any practical effect. Namely, to build walls. Even Hamas and Co. were right. They are fighting for a piece of the pie they believe, with some justification, is due them.

Everybody is right because such struggles are never about what the other side thinks is fair. This sort of conflict, however horribly bloody, is ultimately and always, all about reaching a deal. Making a peace all can and will live with.

That said, here is what is plain. This is clearly not a time for bridges in the Middle East. To have bridges between people with profound differences you have to have respect. And there is only respect for power and cleverness now. There is no respect for peacefulness…or each other. Not right now.

We can argue endlessly about who was wronged first. But there is a reality on the ground, a geography that is still being sorted out with bloody precision. That has to happen first and it should surprise no one. For the world’s conflicts are always sad and simple matters of real estate.

Good fences, like they say, make good neighbors. Is that a terrible and tragic thing to say? Only if you believe that people, through time, evolve morally. That as a species we have become better with each passing century, more compassionate, less bellicose, more caring.

I do not believe this. I believe that human nature is basically just what it has always been. That such moral and ethical evolution comes little if at all. I am an optimist, however, so I wait and hope for a change in who we are. But in the meanwhile I construct solid fences, some real and some metaphors for clear and ironclad agreements. I make, in my personal life, deals.

In that sense, lawyers are the best hope for the Middle East. For the Israelis and the Palestinians. There will come a time when these armed populations will send their lawyers, or diplomats, to hammer out the ironclad agreements that will keep the peace, establish the fence lines. They will build those fences then, and behind them stand watch, armed and guarding their rights.

In some spots this will be hard. Jerusalem’s geography is messy and will take years to iron out. Some places the fence construction is going along rapidly. In the end, fences will divide and protect. We should get behind it now as the key to the “peace process.” That is how this whole recent crisis will end anyway, regardless of debate or desire for something else.

It is simply that there are limitations built into human nature. We only get along when boundaries are clear. Each of us needs a place of our own. This is not a moral or ethical opinion or belief, but the territorial imperative at work.

So the time has come to act. We can choose to prolong the agony or redraw the lines, build the fences and have each cohesive group hiding in relative safety behind these lines.

In a gentler form we see this in our strange and wonderful democracy each time one of us leases or buys an apartment or house or a piece of land. Once, less than 200 years ago in many places, people shouted and shot at each other over whose land was whose. Finally bankers and lawyers worked out the deeds and contracts and the violence died down.

Build the stout walls now. Divide those who cannot, for many reasons, make peace at present. It worked in the Cold War. Time healed that wound.

The physical separation of a Middle East wall is what is needed now to bring a temporary peace that will be a preamble to something more lasting. Walls to keep people divided will buy precious time, the next best thing to real peace and harmony.

In other words, we can gain a respite in which some progress can be made. For democracy does not mean we all like each other.

It means we have good fences. We have replaced armed conflict with contracts and deeds…and laws. And in this world of moral and ethical relativity, the pen that draws up legal papers is indeed mightier than the sword. ¶ 8:07 AM

  The Quagmire in Iraq…and in New York, Too

No doubt we are in the deep weeds now. The tragic death of Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq marks a new level of all-out guerilla war. And we must now call it that, for that is what it is.

This bombing also marks the end of the neutrality dance the U.N. and its member nations have so far managed to negotiate. The world community has now officially failed in its decade-long effort to rehabilitate Iraq, largely destroyed by Saddam and not the U.S., while steering clear of participating in the “unilateral occupation,” so called.

Note to the U.N.: It’s over. History has moved on and right or wrong, it’s time for multinational military involvement in Iraq. And frankly, it’s now needed whether the U.S. administration actually wants it or not.

The barely suppressed smugness of the U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard in New York that security at the UN site was the responsibility of the “host” country and not the U.N. serves to highlight the “neutral” hypocrisy of that organization. This statement from the misguided mother ship was quickly shown up by the UN’s own Iraqi spokesman, Salim Lone, who told CNN in Baghdad only minutes later that the UN mission there had expressly not wanted, nor asked for, a large US military presence to protect it. This would, he told the network, not be in keeping with the U.N. mission as espoused by Kofi Annan, namely, to help end the US oversight of Iraq as quickly as possible and return the country to the Iraqi people.

This U.N. hypocrisy should not go unnoted. This organization, now suffering tragedy of its own, must at this point recognize that the Iraqi anarchy is and was the enemy of not just the US but also the U.N.

State sponsored anarchy aimed outside its borders was what Saddam’s government delivered for years. Now this lawlessness, such as the urging of both Sunni and Shia leaders and clerics to rise up in armed resistance, is directed inward as well. And the U.N. must step up to the plate now and at least protect its own humanitarian workers by sending in the “blue helmets” to make it clear to all decent Iraqi people and Muslims worldwide that this is no longer just a US occupation.

Everyone knows that the Islamic radicals now causing chaos around the world weasel their way into hearts and minds…and communities… in the poorest and most dangerous countries not with their religious beliefs, but with their charitable and policing efforts. It is not their interpretation of the Koran, but their money, food, schools, policing and public works that give them purchase among the downtrodden.

They offer an alternative to the complete lack of government help and resultant total chaos in regions all over the planet ignored by the West…and the U.N. itself. Only after making a community safe, nourished and habitable do Muslim extremists exact their terrible price: The brainwashing of the young to turn them into human bombs dedicated to destroying throughout the world all alternatives to their iron, totalitarian and despotic rule.

Thus, clearly, for the U.N. to espouse that their humanitarian aid is somehow considered “neutral” is beyond naïve. Such an interpretation is disingenuous, evasive and morally corrupt for an organization filled with so many sophisticated experts. They are fully aware of the cultural war going on at this very moment in every country with a significant poor Muslim population.

In fact, the humanitarian workers of the UN are by far a greater threat to Muslim totalitarians (or any other kind of totalitarians for that matter) than the troops of the US. Aid workers offer hope, and more, a genuine alternative to join the secular world community in which people of all religions, regardless of their suspicions and prejudices, can get along, do business and live their lives in relative peace and quiet.
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¶ 11:03 AM