The Brezhnev Doctrine, Iran-style | The Weekly Standard

Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through. Fifteen Saudis kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11, so the Saudis spend even more millions to persuade Americans they are friends and allies. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak presents itself as the very model of stability. There is a vast industry presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as requiring only some tough American pressure for Israeli concessions before peace breaks out​—​not only for the Palestinians but the entire Middle East, whose central problem this is alleged to be.

Funeral in Lebanon for a Hezbollah member killed while fighting in Syria

 

Our own government has a hard time too. It took George W. Bush enormous effort to break through the false descriptions of the war in Iraq his own generals were giving him, and to insist on the surge so that we did not lose the war. When in 2007 Israel proved to us that North Korea was building a nuclear reactor in Syria, unconnected to any electric grid and obviously part of a nuclear weapons program, the CIA would only say officially that it had “low confidence” of this, because it had not only missed the reactor but could not find the other parts of that program. How many secretaries of state have seen Syria’s Assad as a potential “reformer,” spoken of their admiration for Mubarak, or seen an Israeli-Palestinian peace only “inches” away?

FULL ARTICLE: The Brezhnev Doctrine, Iran-style | The Weekly Standard