Must Read IMHO

A fine article. A snippet:

After 7 months of besieging Tyre, the legendary Greek King Alexander the Great built a bridge to connect the insolent island with land. He stormed the high walls with newly invented war machinery and killed every person in the city (333 BC). He provided future foreign conquerors with an important lesson: in the Middle East you have to kill everyone or they will battle with you till the end of time.

The crusaders remembered that lesson when they captured Jerusalem in 1099; they killed all of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. In 1258 the barbaric Mongol King Holako stormed Baghdad and burnt it to the ground. President George Bush conquered Baghdad in 2003 but left most of its people alive. He was a kind invader who gave people a choice: convert to a new religion called democracy or be killed. Most of them did not convert and they persisted in their old creed. He is now reaching a fork in the road and it is befitting that he went to Jordan this week to seek the inspiration of the gods for a new direction.

The Middle East has been and will always be the cross roads of all human conflicts. A more optimistic term is usually used when referring to the Middle East as the cross-roads of all civilizations. It is the birthplace of human civilization and human misery. History has shown that any nation that wants to be on top must be in control of Jerusalem. When the British controlled the world Jerusalem was under their yoke. Before them, the Ottoman Turks possessed Jerusalem and they controlled half of Asia and Europe. We can keep going back in history to the Muslim Arabs and before them the Romans and before them the Persians and before them the Greeks. Every great empire is lured to its demise in the Middle East.

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At this highly inflamed juncture in the Middle East, if Bush and Olmert are not prepared to do what Holako had done then they better sit down with their enemies and work out their differences, sooner rather than later. Delaying the inevitable will make the loss that much greater for the American people who never asked for a hundred year war with Arabs and Muslims. Staying the course to get “the job” done that was laid out, yet again, by Bush after his summit meeting with Al-Maliki, leads straight through the gates of hell.