http://www.propeace.net/node/1394 Comments for "The Persistence of Illusion" en http://www.propeace.net/node/1394#comment-934 <p>Illusion is such a key issue in our country and foreign policy right now. This is an excellent article with excellent links, and a cause for worry for anyone concerned with reality and/or peace.</p> Fri, 01 Sep 2006 11:07:04 -0400 MTOLincoln comment 934 at http://www.propeace.net http://www.propeace.net/node/1394 <em>by Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus August 30, 2006 <a href="http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3481">http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3481</a></em> The Middle East has always been a place where illusion paves the road to disaster. In 1095, Pope Urban's religious mania launched the Crusades, the reverberations of which still echo through the region. In 1915, Winston Churchill's arrogance led to the World War I bloodbath at Gallipoli. In 2003, George Bush's hubris ignited a spiral of chaos and civil war in Iraq. Illusions once again threaten to plunge the Middle East into catastrophe. The central hallucination this time is that the war in Lebanon was a "proxy war" with the mullahs in Tehran, what one senior Israeli commander has called "Iran's western front." Behind this hallucination is yet another. According to <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2790/">William O. Beeman</a>, a professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at Brown University, there is "a longstanding U.S. foreign policy myth that believes terrorism cannot exist without state support." http://www.propeace.net/node/1394#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:19:14 -0400 propeace.net 1394 at http://www.propeace.net