I've Lived In The Middle East For

So Here's A Question From One Who Believed, Only A Week Ago, That Baghdad Might Just Collapse And That We Might Wake Up One Morning To Find The Baathist Militia And The Iraqi Army Gone And The Americans Walking Down Saadun Street With Their Rifles Over Their Shoulders. If The Iraqis Can Still Hold Out Against Such Overwhelming Force In Umm Qasr For Four Days, If They Can Keep Fighting In Basra And Nasiriyah – The Latter A City That Briefly Rose In Revolt Against Saddam's Regime In 1991 – Why Should Saddam's Forces Not Keep Fighting In Baghdad?

Wasn't Saddam Destroyed? Wasn't Gaddafi Liquidated? Didn't Milosevic Go To The Hague? All True. But Stalin Survived. Kim Jong-un Isn't Doing Too Badly, Either - Though That's Probably Because He Actually Has Nuclear Weapons, As Opposed To Iran Which Might Or Might Not Be Trying To Acquire Them And Thus Remains On The Israeli-american Target List.

After The Allied Victory Of 1918, At The End Of My Father's War, The Victors Divided Up The Lands Of Their Former Enemies. In The Space Of Just Seventeen Months, They Created The Borders Of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia And Most Of The Middle East. And I Have Spent My Entire Career — In Belfast And Sarajevo, In Beirut And Baghdad — Watching The People Within Those Borders Burn.

And It's True, You Hear Things In Damascus And, After A Few Hours, The Human Double-take Stops Operating.

We Live In A Society In The West, Where, When Men Do Violent Things, They Do Them Under Orders. They Are Soldiers Carrying Out Orders Or Mafia Men Carrying Out Killings For Bosses. But The Way Things Happen In The Middle East Is Not The Same As In The West.