Falling into line?

A few days ago, I mentioned this article from the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, which explains why the candidacy of Joe Lieberman will promote Arab interests by eroding U.S. support for Israel. Interestingly enough, the same day, this incredibly lucid editorial appeared in the same paper: "Why The Baghdad Regime Does Not Deserve To Be Defended."

. . . What is wrong is the fact that we have chosen the worst and the most erratic of regimes, and one that has created the most tension in the region, to defend. Protecting the Arab regimes by using the Iraqi regime as an example makes all the Arab regimes a subject of ridicule for the whole world. It places them in a spot where they will be ignored by the rest of the world because this regime, in the eyes of the world, is bloody and has committed crimes and stupidities that make striking it and changing it altogether easy to justify. Why should we hide behind this losing regime today or tomorrow? It does not matter who the rival is in either case.

I am fully convinced that barricading to defend the Baghdad regime has weakened the Arab case, because the Iraqi regime is an easy target and it is easy to expose it and prove that it deserves to be crushed. This is what makes implementing the principle of protecting Arab regimes by defending a regime that we know is living in an ongoing domestic, regional, and international crises, wrong. We must choose a regime that deserves to be defended and it has an honorable history, which would make it easy for us to use it as a high wall that protects others, rather than choosing a regime that is sinful in its very foundation and practices. Instead of the United States, it ought to have been us who took the initiative pulled it out ourselves all together.