Old Dogs And New Tricks

Very oddly, one of the events that I have come to really look forward to in my weekend is my weekly phone call with the Parental Units. Mom keeps me up to date on all the day-to-day stuff, including family gossip, reminders about big events (did you get tickets for your nephew's Bar Mitzvah yet?), and how their horse-dog, Leo, is doing.

Dad and I, especially of late, have been having some very interesting, and wide-ranging discussions. My parents are, in many ways, classic neoconservatives, in the original sense of 'Jewish liberals whose opinions about the Muslim world led them to become much more hawkish on this set of policy questions.'

And it's a pretty hard hawkishness. Last summer, my dad told me that the only way you can have civil relations with a Muslim (or maybe Arab - I don't remember exactly) country was to beat the snot out of it militarily. He said that the Israeli/Egyptian peace was a result entirely of Israel completely demolishing the Egyptian military in the Six Days' War. And, thus, he was entirely in favor of Israel's attack on Lebanon, which was taking place at the time, because it was the only way they were going to halt the missile attacks from the Golan Heights.

But, amazingly, while we were talking about Obama this weekend (my dad, not surprisingly, is a Hillary fan, but is coming around a bit), he actually admitted that, to paraphrase, during his 'saner moments', he's able to understand, and maybe even agree, that the concept of attacking Muslim countries may, actually, have some counterproductive, blowback effects.

The specific point I was trying to make is that if you believe, as I do, that a large part of the Muslim antipathy towards the West has to do with the vast difference in relative economic success between the two regions (and the way the Western countries have been so exploitive of the Middle East's resources), then you don't reduce that anger by blowing the already-poor further back in time towards the Stone Age.

And, once again I really cannot overemphasize how unusual this is, my dad actually said that he understands how that needs to be a part of US foreign policy, and maybe even a part of Israel's as well.

Maybe, if nothing else good comes from this trillion-dollar boondoggle, this will be one good outcome of our misadventures in Mesopotamia. If significant numbers of people start to realize that when a group of people really hate you, you don't reduce the hate by blowing them up, that's a pretty good silver lining.