Middle East foreign policies

Disaster! Fear! Terrorism! What seemed to be a scene from Die Hard is what struck home in America on Sept. 11. The attacks on the World Trade Center leads back to many problems with our foreign relations. Our foreign relations policies have been recently getting a lot of countries angry and frustrated, the major problem being that we interfered with Palestinian and Israeli conflicts by offering war support to Israel. Aiding one side or another is a very tricky business, especially when it involves a religious war.

We should have just offered support to try bringing the two countries to peace, not military support. Amazingly, the policy of helping Israel still continues, building settlements on what everyone knew was Palestinian land and selling weapons to Israel. We should not have interfered by helping Israel and for so long. It is hard to sit aside and be a spectator during a war, but when it involves religion, I would stay out. Religious wars are fought with a deep vengeance. It would not be the first time that America has tried to stay out of a war, we have done so in more atrocious wars like the genocide put on by the Nazis. I think America intervened in Israel for more political reasons than anything else.

Due to our foreign policy in the Middle East, over the years we’ve acquired many enemies and adversaries, one of them being Osama Bin Laden. When we set up military bases in Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War, it exaggerated Osama’s anger because Saudi Arabia houses two of the holiest Islamic shrines. The build up of this anger led to the sad tragedy of the September 11th terrorist attack on America. The point I am trying to make is that it could have been avoided if we worked on our foreign policy more with Saudi Arabia and Israel and didn’t let the anti-American resentment get so strong. What’s done is done, and the only thing we can do now is to learn from our mistakes. I believe the first order of business is to prosecute Bin Laden and his terrorist faction. The next step is to slowly remove support in Israel. I emphasize slowly because we previously helped them for many years, and can’t abruptly end it. The first thing we should wean is the selling of weapons to Israel. Selling weapons to one side of the conflict is pretty much an act of war on Palestine.