Sunday, Oct. 20, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Here’s another fine mess you have gotten us into!
Would that this were just another bit of banter from Laurel and Hardy — everyone born after 1990 please turn to Google — so that we could laugh a little and move on. But this isn’t funny and those words, while made famous by the comedy duo a lifetime ago, today speak volumes about the seriousness of the mess President Donald Trump has made and continues to make in the Middle East.
I don’t have to rehash the apoplectic concerns expressed by most thinking and feeling Americans about what is left of the United States’ credibility around the world given Trump’s inexplicable withdrawal from Syria to leave our allies, the Kurds, at the mercy of a few madmen — and Russia.
While the world anxiously awaits the end results of the president’s experiment in “tough love” toward people who believed and trusted and counted on us to have their backs, I have to express some alarm about another country and another people who have placed their trust in this president and about whom we have heard very little since Trump pulled a Trump and upended the balance of Middle East power in the blink of a tweet.
Admittedly, I have a bias toward the state of Israel. I believe it must do all that is necessary to be safe and secure in that very dangerous part of our world. In that regard, I expect I share that concern with the overwhelming majority of Americans who have even the slightest understanding of Israel and her remarkable place among the nations of the world.
I spent the better part of my young adulthood and all of the last few decades being concerned about Israel’s security in the Middle East, a place that has proved most dangerous for the tiny Jewish state and steadfast ally of the United States.
In an unshakable alliance with America, little but mighty Israel has acted as a bulwark against what was once the Soviet Union’s repeated but unsuccessful efforts to insert herself into the Middle East — by fomenting trouble at every turn — to ultimately secure for itself access to the vital shipping lanes that connect the rest of the globe through that part of the world.
At the same time, while constantly and painfully having to defend itself from the maniacal dreams of many Arab leaders intent on driving Israel into the sea, our lone democratic ally in the Middle East helped maintain the balance of power in a very rough but geopolitically essential neighborhood.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War imperatives diminished until, of course, the battle for hegemony in the region heated up and countries like Iran and Iraq and Turkey and their proxies did their best to fill the void. Even then Israel managed to hold her own and even moved toward an unofficial rapprochement with some of her “sworn enemies” in the Sunni Arab world who all of a sudden understood that Israel was the “enemy of my enemy” and, therefore, could be their friend.
I know, it is very complicated in the Middle East.
But what isn’t and must never be complicated is the simple truth that you never abandon your friends and allies and you never put them in harm’s way.
So, what does Trump do on a whim, or a simpleton’s belief in the concept of tough love, or on a misguided understanding of the proper use of American power or, maybe, even after a phone call from a puppet master?
He abandoned the Kurds — our friends and allies — and put them directly in the way of harm that Turkey was all too anxious to inflict upon them.
His acts of cowardice toward our allies did not go unnoticed in Israel where the 70-year alliance between our two countries has never been seriously shaken. Until now.
The man who owns the other newspaper in Las Vegas, Sheldon Adelson, promotes a columnist who has pronounced Trump to be the king of the Jews and the Second Coming of God, or words to that effect.
But while Trump put the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, he also allowed the enemies of Israel to move in right next door.
So now Israel has Syria, Russia and Iran together on her northern doorstep, which boasts a “welcome mat” courtesy of our president — and the very real prospect that Trump, on whim or an order, could throw yet another U.S. ally to the wolves.
I know, I know, that will never happen. The king of the Jews and the Second Coming of God would never do that.
That’s exactly what the Kurds thought.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
