So just to play counterfactual history before history has been completed, what would an ethical US president do to bring Israel to heel financially?
Chris Burford London
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What makes this question interesting is the idea that first, there is no such animal as an ethical elected public official in the US (except mine: Lee, and sometimes Boxer), let alone the president (not elected, not ethical), and second, more interesting still, is why such a proposal is impossible. The US empire is to the non-european (non-white) world at large what Israel is to the Palestinians. This parallel lays at the core of why it is impossible for the US to separate its interests from those of Israel. It is that the US can not separate its interests from itself.
The identification with Israel as white and mostly european and the parallelism with US empire, as a neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist view toward the dusky masses of the earth is so complete that it takes on racist overtones, even when some US spokesman attempts to form a neutral view of the Arab and Islamic world (which they almost never do in any case).
Perhaps calling the US position racist is something of an over-reach, but the current US governing class did ultimately get to power through a sophisticated and elaborate domestic battle that always used and depended on race, specifically white middle class fear of black and brown as a means to its own domestic dominance. Putting Powell and Rice up front is actually an example of this, and those racist themes have not disappeared in the slightest. This is why the southern rightwing fanatics can claim to embrace Israel, and swallow their own mostly latent anti-Jewish sentiments. You can label this a broader anti-semiticism, not in the sense of jews as a semitic race, but as arabs and middle eastern people in general as a semitic peoples.
The only reason that the US wants Israel to stop its current military escalation is so that the US can clear this annoying child's play out of the way, and get back to molesting the rest of the earth---Iraq in particular.
The comedy is that both Israel and the Palestinians understand this entirely, and have used it: Israel to pursue an even more aggressive and brutal military occupation, the Palestinians to deepen their intransigence and war of resistance through terror. In effect, the US global war on terrorism, so-called, is the enabling legislation, the very facilitating body for this atrocity.
The real problem with Yasser Arafat isn't his terrorism or his politics, it is his looks: too damned ugly, Arab looking, bearded, swarthy, with that damned rag on his head all the time---and he mumbles bad English (never mind he is actually Christian---well belatedly).
Chuck Grimes