For a half century so-called geopolitical realists and their handmaidens, British Foreign Office and State Department Arabists, told us it were possible to find accommodation. The U.S. made contractual arrangements with corrupt regimes for supposedly realistic modernization they had not accomplished for centuries. The Europeans even invited workers not that unlike 18th and 19th centuries indentureds, to ghettos in the pre-digital revolution Western industrial societies.

As it has been for ages, Iraq is the keystone in this arc, and without a stable, democratic Iraq, there would be little or no progress toward blocking this retrogression.

In a series of events to which realists largely turned a blind eye, seeing them as normal "police actions", this arrangement came under attack in the 1990s — even as petrodollars flowed without end as "a tax" [the realists told us] on Western economies. The apotheosis came in 9/11, in London and Madrid bombings, and the 1991 aggression of a pint-sized Iraqi dictator to take over Persian Gulf oil.

The realists told us a brutal slap on the wrist for Iraq's Saddam would do the trick. Saudi Arabia, incredible construct of religious primitives and second and third generation technocrats trained in Western universities, urged caution, restoration of status quo ante. The realists agreed. The world looked away while Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands of Shia — whom like the 1956 Hungarians — Washington realists had promised liberation from the brutal regional Sunni Establishment.

But the realists said okay since oil continued to flow — until it appeared to all intelligence agencies in the world Saddam was using revenues [manipulated by corrupt UN officials under Secretary General Kofi Anan's aegis, much as he presided over the holocaust in Ruanda earlier] to amass weapons of mass destruction. Whether he did and moved them out to Syria or simply played into naivetι of realists, we won't know for decades. Certainly we cannot rely on experts like Hans Blix who, then head of the fatuous UN International Nuclear Energy Agency's realistic inspectors when the Israelis bombed Oistrak in 1981, Saddam's first effort, said ut oh! he had not looked on that floor of the building.

Smaller than some, larger than others, today Iraq — as it has for centuries — is the keystone of this arch. And without a stable, democratic and Western-allied Iraq, there will be no solutions to the present megacrisis.

The realists tell us we must get to "fundamental problems" to end the spilling of young American — and Iraqi blood. That's code for the Arab-Israeli feud much as throwing around the label of "neo-con" is Gentlemen's Agreement anti-Semitism still stalking the West, now transferred, curiously from extreme right to left — including drunken Hollywood denizens who graduate from reading other people's lines to authority on international politics and careen down the highways or rant through TV talk shows.

And the realists — until it became a more effective Western propaganda stick — disregarded how Islamofascists including Osama Bin Laden long ignored the wretched Palestinians. The realists abetted Arabs/Moslems in abandoning the Palestinians [after producing them when they attacked and were defeated by the Israelis after the UN partition in 1947] to fester in fetid UN refugee camps supported by the U.S. and Europe. They exploded in "suicide bombers" while Arab elite luxuriated in casinos and bought Western real estate with their petrodollars, Nor could the realists explain how Israel had taken in an equally large, destitute, deprived refugee flow from Arab/Moslem countries, incorporated them into the region's first modern state. Nor could realists explain how in some three dozen regional wars since World War II, only three or four have involved Israel at all.

It's piling on time now for President George W. Bush, having been tackled by the 2006 midterm elections. But alas! There are no NFL/UN referees to enforce rules much less demand penalties. Instead we have everything from rogue media — the New York Times printing secrets from the President's files — to talking head TV bimbos telling us the realists are right; it's all about the Israelis and the Jews.

As a 15-year-old in a small North Carolina mountain village high school in 1942, it was my task to go from classroom to classroom, relaying the horror of the American and British position in January 1942, earlier explicated by our principal, with retreats and defeats everywhere and Britain waiting to be invaded by the Nazis. [I sounded like a pint-sized H.V. Kaltenborn whom my mother called "Jeremiah."] My peroration: despite great sacrifice and heavy losses our physical and intellectual resources would win out.

Luckily, the realists then [we called them isolationists] were in full retreat; One has to wonder if they hadn't been, whether the American people could have been mobilized to save the world from Eurofacism, no less fiendish than the enemy we now face. Luckily there was FDR with his bully pulpit echoing Winston Churchill. The State Department realists were hiding under their desks from their realism harvest expressed in the long series of defeats of the 1930s, from Manchuria and Rhineland and Abyssinia to Poland.

Hopefully, Bush lying at the bottom of the piling on, can see the goalposts through a prancing if always ill-informed media cheering squad, however camouflaged and egged on by the realists.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.