https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/when-conventional-wisdom-gets-downright-dangerous/?utm_source=
T he problem with conventional wisdom is not that it is always wrong. The rub is that the majority of “experts” unthinkingly and habitually mouth its validity until they ensure that it becomes static, unchanging, and immune from reexamination and dissent — an intolerant religious orthodoxy that finally become dangerous.
The recent Middle East breakthroughs are a perfect example. Both the Obama and Trump administrations sought quite different ways of navigating through the nearly 75-year-old “Middle East problem,” usually framed as the Israeli–“Palestinian” question.
Obama, in radical fashion, sought to empower and elevate Iran. The so-called Iran deal, the dropping of sanctions, the nocturnal infusions of cash, the exemptions for clear violations of the deal’s protocols, the nefarious work of Hezbollah — all that and more was excused on the theory that a growing Persian Shiite Iranian nexus from Tehran to the Mediterranean was inevitable and would “balance” both Israel and the so-called moderate Sunni Arab states. That realignment might prevent a Middle East war and end the leverage of America’s former Arab allies and Israel over us.
What destroyed the fantasy was not just its sheer idiocy — ensuring that a revolutionary, anti-Western theocracy would soon get nuclear weapons and become “moderate” while empowering its terrorist minions in their destructive agendas in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf states, as well as Europe and Latin America.
Instead, we see the futility of embracing Iran in its corollary — the old saw that the Palestinians were still central to the Obama administration’s gambit. That is, an empowered Iran, as the self-described revolutionary and chief patron of the Palestinians, would use its new clout to pressure Israel to offer concessions to the Palestinians, without any corresponding recognition of the Jewish state or reduction in Palestinians’ anti-Zionist bellicosity.
The Arab world then would be forced to rival Iran to regain its anti-Israel credentials, further bolstering the power-broking ability of the much-courted Palestinians. Eventually, Israel would concede and usher in a defiant and completely autonomous West Bank nation. Palestine Inc. would then reciprocate Israeli magnanimity by concluding peace with the Jewish state now confined within its 1967 borders. And so Middle East peace would reign.
