Replies

Those are scart quotes if you're not acquainted with the writer, as I am, and if you take them out of context. In fact, while he indeed supports toppling a number of Arab regimes, he has made it clear that he doesn't support war to do it except in the case of Iraq--and even there, he wanted to wait a bit. In the case of Iran, he's said that he supports diplomatic support for the oppressed people there so that they will be encouraged to topple the ayatollahs. He's also stated that he believes that Arab dictators will topple in a chain reaction, like the one in Eastern Europe, once one of them has had a taste of freedom. Furthermore, even if he were supporting war with all of them, there would be a reason for it, one put forth not by him but by a number of others, not all of them Jewish: to wit, the Middle East is a cesspool of anti-American violence, and past experience usually shows that elected governments rarely fight each other. Modernize these nations and you would undoubtedly cut terrorism by well over half. I'm not yet prepared to endorse such a solution myself, but the point is that you can support taking out all of the Arab governments, even by war, for patriotic American reasons. Keep in mind, too, that if Ledeen's schemes were to pan out, the biggest benefactors would not be Jews, nor even Americans, but rather the Arab citizens of these nations. In any case, I'm sick and tired of hearing Buchanan and others more extreme than him whining about the "neocon strategy," which is so more innocuous-sounding than a "Zionist conspiracy." Enough, I'm going to bed.