Beat swords into plowshares

When I was 8 years old a hornet’s nest began to take shape in the back of our yard. I went out and watched with a combination of fascination and fear

as it grew day by day.

Finally, unable to stand the suspense, I took a big brick and threw it at the nest, breaking off the bottom half and sending the hornets into a swarming frenzy. I ran away as fast as I could as the angry bees swirled behind.

When I think of the relationship of the United States to the Middle Eastern Muslim countries, my experience as an 8-year-old comes to mind. “Why do they hate us?” Americans ask.

Well, we’ve thrown a brick at their hive. A hundred years ago most Middle Eastern countries were populated by nomadic wanderers and medieval city-dwellers, inhabitants who gave not a second thought to the United States or Europe. After World War I President Woodrow Wilson and the European leaders at Versailles drew lines in the sand and created colonial “states” there. These states became shells

to protect the access to

oil for young Western oil companies.

Later, after World War II, the colonies became “independent,” but our oil access was maintained by family dynasties propped up by our government. We bought their oil with money spent by consumers at the pump, and they recirculated our money by buying weapons from our defense contractors. At one time or another, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, have all been a part of the game.

Now we are so addicted to the oil that even when they behave badly (such as Iran today), we still send them billions in consumer oil purchases, because we can’t stop ourselves. To all this we now add the presence, for the first time in history, of American occupying armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are paying for Israel to defend itself from Hezbollah who gets its arms from Iran who gets its money from American consumers.

The original objections of the radical Muslim movement in the Middle East was not to the United States. It was to the corrupt and materialistic dynasties in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Iran (of the Shah). It was only when they figured out that these regimes would not survive without American money and arms that they began to see us as the Great Satan.

We are not innocent bystanders to turmoil in the Middle East. We’ve thrown a brick into

their hornet’s nest, and now they

are stinging us.

What can we do now? One school of thought is represented by those on talk radio who announce that we are now in the preliminary stages to World War III, and that we need to prepare for a great military confrontation. This argument is both misguided and dangerous.

It is misguided in that it presumes that a military defeat will quiet the unrest of Middle Eastern Muslims; the actual evidence to date from Israel and Iraq is that every person (particularly if an innocent bystander) killed in fighting provokes dozens of extended family members to join the radical movement in the next generation.

Military action increases hostility to the United States, not diminishes it.

It is dangerous because, in the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams (quoted in Robert Shetterly’s beautiful new book “Americans Who Tell The Truth”), “we get what we prepare for.” If we believe war is inevitable, and act consistently on this belief, we may inadvertently create

the war that in fact was unnecessary.

There’s a different approach we can take now, that we should have taken 30 years ago. At that time the diplomat and scholar George Kennan wrote that he was “stupefied at the frivolity and irresponsibility” of our leaders in allowing our nation to become dependent for oil upon “a group of rulers with whom we have political differences of a most serious nature.”

He noted that “the accumulation in the hands of the rulers of the oil-producing countries of vast quantities of money, far beyond their capacity to spend to any good effect” would stimulate “a highly unhealthy level of arms purchasing by certain of those governments.” He concluded that “one cannot envy the future historian who will someday find himself compelled to seek a plausible explanation of such complacency.”

It’s not too late to follow this sound advice. Rather than plowing back into the hornet’s nest swinging a bat, we should slowly and carefully back away. We should develop alternative sources of energy. We should stop spending our consumer dollars on Middle Eastern oil. We should stop selling our arms to Middle Eastern governments. We should work with Middle Eastern countries to develop entrepreneurial economies with educated citizens. Less oil money, fewer weapons, more economic hope, will be good for the Arab countries, good for Israel and bad for terrorists.

Forget the rhetoric about World War III. Choose the rhetoric of the Middle Eastern prophet Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Frank O’Hara is vice president of Planning Decisions in Hallowell.