The way I see things

With the majority of the Senators openly calling for the President to accept the resignation of embattled US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the day played out on the Senate floor with multiple questions and open hostilities. Between all parties.

The secondary headline, which greeted me at the Taipei Times, was short, simple and to the point, `INCOMPETENCE': Hillary Clinton and her colleagues directed withering criticism at the defense secretary over the administration's `strategic blunders' in Iraq. I fully understood this was not going to be an open support statement of Defense Secretary’s strategies for Iraq and I was not let down.

The article was not a scathing attack of the Bush administrations polices, it did not have to stoop to that level of reporting, merely reporting the facts as they occurred was ample evidence of what remained, dissatisfaction with the progression of the war to new levels of civil unrest in Iraq and additional growing military losses. I am not going to lower myself to that level either as I have made my feelings perfectly clear in the past and my political beliefs, pro or con have no baring on what the outcome will be in Iraq.

What I do have to offer are my suggestions, my treatise on achieving peace in the Middle East and it is not based on pure speculation, but observation and reading of the Iraqi peoples’ past and their history, which once united them in a common cause and goal.

The entire situation currently facing our military is a difficult task, not because of the administration’s plans or lack of participating military forces, but because of the fact that we do not understand the concept we are presently facing, we have failed to comprehend what we are working with in Iraq. The warring sides within Iraq have been at odds with one another since the dawn of time. What kept them separated was not goodwill or the common love of their faith, but fear of reprisal from the dictator regime of Saddam.

No, I am not stating nor even refereeing that this form of rule was positive, on the contrary I feel it regulated the two sides to the plane of war they are presently on fueled by hatred and a willingness to vent that upon any powers that be.

In the history of this area, the only positive influences, which held the two sects together, were men ruling as a King. The banner they commonly united under and willingly served was a war against Christianity and their desire to recapture Jerusalem. This form of rule and only this form will commonly unite them and nothing else will suffice.

Not the common bonds of a war against Christianity which is what they are presently united in, or the ruling by a king or self-serving dictatorship to gratify or feed the ego of a megalomaniac, but a united rule under religious rulers who are willing to lead them on the path to a peaceful coexistence.

Herein lays the problems of the Middle East, an ancient hatred of one another’s religious values, beliefs and dedication, not the ground on which to walk or build their lives, but the people themselves, what they believe. Children are raised from birth spoon fed hatred of others until as adults they turn to the only acts ingrained within their mind, violence, hatred, disenchantment with their lives and an unwillingness to change them.

We cannot ever hope to impose our democratic values on a country which is united only to destroy those values, to succeed they must be superimposed with a core religious belief that will act as the uniting lever and nothing more. We still have this as an available option, an ace in the hole to use to bring the people together and allow them to survive as one in the path they must follow to achieve a lasting peace and we must play this card soon before all is lost.