I hereby declare that anyone who believes that Israel is or has been an important "strategic asset" to the United States is ipso facto a Republican Nut-Boy.
There is a different set of nut-boys who support Israel for Fundamentalist Christian reasons--and they tend to support the colonization of Judea and Samaria by settlers and the expulsion of Palestinians as well (cf. Dick Armey).
There is a different set of [insert your favorite characterization here] who, as I said before, support Israel because we have a moral obligation to prevent a second Holocaust. (I find myself in this group. We tend to loathe West Bank settlements.)
There is, now, yet a third group--people who hadn't thought a lot about it before, but now support Israel because Yassir Arafat has failed to differentiate his brand sufficiently from Osama bin Laden.
But the idea that I--that I--would support Israel because it played the important role of containing that Soviet Puppet Syria...
First of all, Assad the Elder was not a Soviet Puppet. He had no desire to be a Soviet Puppet. He was happy to accept Russian weapons, sure, and to make pro-Kremlin noises. But he had no desire to have a Group of Soviet Forces in Syria powerful enough to pull a Prague Winter and thus able to make him dance to the Kremlin's tune, ever.
Nevertheless, Alexander Haig's belief that "Peace for Galilee" was a great victory for the U.S.--our client beat their client, you see, and we gain prestige--came closer than anything else to actually getting Assad the Elder to invite a Soviet motorized rifle core to Syria, in which case Syria *would* have become a Soviet Puppet.
Brad DeLong