Carlos Alberto Montaner, a Cuban—Spanish writer who lives in Spain, has an extraordinary essay in today's Miami Herald about the roots of the Palestinian crisis, pointedly showing why most violence through the Middle East over the years has had nothing to do with either America or Israel. Instead, the bloodshed is rooted in Palestine's choice to make war over peace in 1948, squandering huge opportunities. Much of Montaner's logical argument is well known to Middle East—watchers, but it's a great pleasure to see expressed it so eloquently from a writer in Europe who knows the facts so perfectly well. He lays the blame squarely at the feet of Arab terrorists and explains their intractability this way:

Anti—Americanism and anti—Semitism are attitudes based not on an objective analysis of facts but on hallucinatory beliefs contained in conspiracy theories of history that are based almost always on the paranoid suspicion that a small group of villains pulls strings throughout the world to seize all wealth and bring misfortune to their victims.

Once that powerful imbecility adheres to the brains of those who propound it, there is no antidote capable of eradicating it. Just as there is no such thing as a former idiot, there are no former anti—Semites or former anti—Americans. The disease in incurable.

Speaking of other voices of reason from Spain, if you haven't seen it already, Ana Palacios, Spain's Foreign Minister under the much—missed government of Prime Minister Aznar, outlines the high price Spain has paid in lost global influence, going from an amazingly resurgent near—superpower with a unique role in bridging Europe and the Americas, to a shrivelling colony of France with little national mission other than irrelevance. It's a sad story but such is needed if Spain is to recover its lost achievements now disappeared under the current socialist government run by a buffoon.

A.M Mora y Leon 02 15 05