Drunk Driving in the Middle East

Not so very long ago, drunk driving was an acute problem in the United States. Drivers would swagger into their automobiles in defiance of entreaties by friends and relatives and take off into the world of hapless innocents to wreak havoc sometimes on themselves, but with greater vigor on the innocent.

A surprising coalition eventually took command in this arena and simply stated that the slaughter and maiming of innocents by swaggering intoxicants was no longer acceptable. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was interested in building a civil society in which "friends don't let friends drive drunk."

But in the Middle East, it's drunk drivers who are in charge all along the famous road map. On the slippery slope of violence, swaggering warriors in the Middle East have lost sight of any ghostly image of a civil society. The idea that those in charge try to avoid the slaughter and maiming of innocents is pulp fiction. They're trying to win at all costs. And just what defines winning? We see the deaths and injuries of civilians everyday in newpapers and on television and the Internet. We see the broken societies. Who wins in the wake of this?

If the feckless combatants listened, they would know that most people want to live their lives in the absence of war. But they don't listen preferring to beat their chests and proclaim with emotional bravado their might and right. They continued to imbibe the intoxicating ideas of dominance swaggering through the sands of time and the Middle East laying waste to civilians, to military personnel who have left their families at home to grapple with life without fathers or brothers or sisters or mothers . . . wasting the land and its resources, destroying common infrastructures and economic futures, creating homelessness of enormous proportion and producing hopelessness.

And it's not as though there are alternative solutions for the Middle East.

For me, it's time to tell every military and political leader in the Middle East to stop his drunk driving. Stop the violence. Stop killing civilians. Start building toward partnerships. If the political and military leaders can't come up with a way to start resolving their differences let them slug it out in a field somewhere and leave the rest of us to pursue our lives.