Real nations, as opposed to romantic visions of nations, have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists. They need the sort of people who show up on time, pay dues to a respectable political party and get along (if grudgingly) with the



neighbors. Having a civil war is de rigueur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

How expensive will your civil war be? It's only a good-faith estimate, but I would guess that 20,000 would do the trick for Palestine, provided that you act quickly. It seems like a lot, but remember that Jordan's late King Hussein killed more than that number of Palestinians (at least according to your own Palestine Liberation Organization estimates) during "Black September" of 1970. Wait, and the bill could be much bigger.

Remember that it costs much, much more if an outside contractor arranges your civil war. It's always cheaper to do it yourself. During the Thirty Years' War of 1618-48, the German princes let the French Cardinal Richelieu take charge. The bill came to more than half the population of Central Europe.Just as I warned, the Palestinian civil war has turned into a proxy war between Iran and the Sunni bloc consisting of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

The emergence of an Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia makes Palestine the odd man out. The Palestine problem has dropped to the bottom of the Arab priority list, and the fate of the Palestinians is to become cannon fodder for proxy wars (Civil wars or proxy wars?, December 5, 2006).

Wars start because no one wants to disown his dog. If your dog bites a neighbor, your neighbor well might come after you with a shotgun. Nicholas II of Russia, I observed recently, did not want war in 1914 and until the end of July insisted that no war would break out. [1] But the Serbian puppies supported by his secret service dragged him into it willy-nilly. The past week's events in the Middle East have a disturbing feel of July 1914 about them.

The old dogs in Tehran and Riyadh can do nothing to satisfy the deeply felt and long-frustrated aspirations of their pups in the Gaza Strip or Baghdad's Sadr City, no more than Nicholas II could requite the nationalist hopes of Serbia without going to war with Austria and Germany. In fact, nothing can dampen the Palestinians' existential outrage against the misery of their circumstances, or fulfill the ambitions of Iraq's Shi'ites without the reduction of the Sunni population.

That leaves Tehran in a dilemma. Iran's power rests on its ability to threaten destabilization, especially in Iraq, and it is counting on this to keep the Bush administration at bay. Even the greatest military autocrat, though, is constrained by the character of his army, and the standing of the region's little powers depends on the outcome of the puppy fights now in progress. The logical result is continued escalation until America and Iran stand off in earnest (Cry havoc, and let slip the puppies of war, July 10, 2006).

The Persians are chess players, and if the constellation of forces (to use the old Soviet term) is against them, they will pull back and wait for another opportunity. That does not imply, however, that they have abandoned the game.

Real conflict, though, is not a chessboard. The pawns have an unpleasant tendency to move on their own and spoil the game ...

In the current round of negotiations between the United States and Iran, Hamas rather than Hezbollah is the odd man out. Iran attempted to insert itself into Palestinian politics by taking over subsidies to the irredentist wing of the Palestinian movement, to the chagrin of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Hamas appears able to make a nuisance of itself great enough to force the Israelis to take action, which in turn will make it extremely difficult for its sponsors to abandon it.

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