"Oracle," Or Just Reading The Handwriting On The Wall?

Hal Lindsey in World Net Daily, January 5, 2007:

I predict 2007 will be the year the West formally switches tactics from offense to appeasement. The Iraq Study Group proposes abandoning Israel and negotiating ways to appease Iran and Syria in an effort to dissuade them from destabilizing Iraq. One idea being floated is to force Israel to give back the Golan Heights.

Another is to pressure Israelis to abandon ambitions for a unified capital at Jerusalem. To minimize Israeli interference, the ISG recommends excluding them from the conference. [emphasis added]

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, less than forty-eight hours ago:

In a bid to open a channel to the Arabs, Israel's premier is embracing a long dormant Saudi peace proposal that would divide Jerusalem and could flood the Jewish state with Palestinian Arab refugees with family claims to land evacuated in the 1948 war that created the state.

Speaking in Tel Aviv yesterday, Prime Minister Olmert said Israel was prepared to make "sweeping, painful, and tough concessions" in order to forge open contacts with Arab states that offered in 2002 to acknowledge Israel's right to exist in exchange for its full retreat from the territories it won in the 1967 war.

"The Saudi initiative is interesting and has many sections that I would be willing to accept — though, predictably, not all of them — and it could certainly be a convenient basis for continued dialogue between us and Arab moderates," he said.

Heck, who needs the ISG when you've got this panzy and the U.S. State Department?

Condoleezza Rice has another round of diplomatic visits in the region, and she is expected to push the moderation of rhetoric about Israel as a forerunner to regional talks. Rice and the US have likely pushed the Saudi initiative as a replacement for the so-called Roadmap; it's doubtful Olmert would have embraced it on his own. It's hard to understand why the US keeps pushing this on Israel when the Palestinians won't support the treaties they've already signed, let alone agree to bargain in good faith with Israel now.

I don't consider Olmert submitting to nationally suicidal terms to be "doubtful" at all, not after Israel's defeat at the hands of Hezbollah last summer. What I find perplexing to this day is how the Bush Administration can claim to be committed to fighting a "war on terror" and yet mindlessly bulldoze its closest Middle East ally into surrendering to those very same terrorists in the name of a "peace" that will never come.

General Douglas MacArthur said it best (paraphrased): "Appeasement only begats new and bloodier war; peace only comes from victory." Or, to reprise my modification of the old Maoist adage: "Peace comes out of the barrel of a gun. That gun must never slip from the grasp of the United States of America."

Or its allies, until we drive them to defeat.