“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain is credited with saying, “at best it rhymes.” As the president spoke to the United Nations today, offering warnings about dictators unchecked and wars unfinished and international demands unanswered, I couldn’t help but recall Twain’s quote.
To be sure, 2006 is not a perfect parallel for 1938 or 1948. But there is a hauntingly familiar rhythm playing in the background.
The summertime war along the Lebanon-Israel border, neither won nor lost by any side, has the feel of a dress rehearsal. Like a latter-day Spanish Civil War, many of the major players were there—Israel and Iran and Syria and Hezbollah—with others watching nervously just off stage.
But don’t take my word for it: The London Sunday Times reports that Israel is now preparing for the main event with Syria and Iran. “The conflict with Hezbollah has led to a strategic rethink in Israel,” the report begins. “A key conclusion is that too much attention has been paid to Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank instead of the two biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the region, who pose a far greater danger to Israel’s existence, defense insiders say. ‘The challenge from Iran and Syria is now top of the Israeli defense agenda, higher than the Palestinian one,’ said an Israeli defense source.”
Likewise, the Telegraph reports that Hezbollah is arming Palestinian militant groups in preparation for Act II.
From Iraq and North Korea to Iran and Lebanon, the UN has failed as badly and completely as the League of Nations. The main difference is that tomorrow’s historians will blame America for being part of the problem this century, whereas they blamed America for not being part of the League in the century past.
Contributing to the UN’s failure is a Europe bent on appeasement and unwilling to face up to the threats all around it. One almost expects Jacques Chirac or Javier Solana to emerge from some conference room in Brussels and wave a piece of paper solving the crisis with Iran and declaring “peace in our time.”
Finally, as Churchill observed at the onset of the Cold War, “The whole world is divided intellectually and to a large extent geographically.” In his day, as in ours, the world was split along the jagged fault lines of fear and freedom—on one side, a toxic mix of mass-murderers masquerading as holy men and gangsters masquerading as gods; on the other, a loose and bloodied band of democracies wondering when or if the rest of the world will notice the familiar cadence of history.
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