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Middle East Mess Isn't about Settlements

(Bloomberg) Jeffrey Goldberg - In an interview in Politico, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, appeared to worship at the Church of Linkage, which holds that Israel's settlement policy on the West Bank is the primary cause of Middle East instability and of the U.S.'s troubles in the Muslim world. Yet Israeli settlements did not provoke Iranian leaders to build the infrastructure of a nuclear weapons program. The Syrian civil war is not traceable to Israel's West Bank settlement policy. The region-wide schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims was not caused by settlements. Continued political instability and violence in Egypt was not triggered by settlements, nor was Libya's descent into gangsterism and chaos. The willingness of esteemed foreign-policy thinkers such as Brzezinski to scapegoat the Jewish state for problems it did not cause is myopic and dangerous.
2013-12-06 00:00:00
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