You can get a lot more with a kind word and a gun…
… than with a kind word alone. This will presumably be the lesson drawn by the U.S. government from the last couple of years of hand-wringing regarding Iraq. When the invasion of Iraq started on March 19 (see daily summary from CNN) some friends started a betting pool concerning the date on which the last Iraqi military unit would surrender. My guess was April 15. Note that this does not count lone snipers or terrorists. It appears that yesterday was the big day and that the person who bet on April 14 will be the winner. The only comparably quick surrender that comes to mind is France’s 1940 surrender to Germany after about 1.5 months. George W. might well be asking himself “Why did we waste all of that time with diplomacy if all it took was a modest military effort that did not even last one month?”
We Americans are thus faced with the question “Iraq is done; what’s next in the Middle East?” Some friends asked for an opinion of background issues, especially why the U.S. would want to support Israel (a very unpopular policy here in Cambridge, Massachusetts), so I wrote http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/
Let me know if you think it provides any interesting answers.
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