Israel's military has whipped the combined forces of all of its neighbors multiple times since and including 1948. That's an asset in my book.
The negative image has a functional value, not just a negative diplomatic one. The functional value can be summed up in the notion, "we can do whatever we like to you and there is no humane reason why we wouldn't."
As for Israel's repellent effect, tell me three things the U.S. has wanted from Arab countries under its thumb that it has not gotten. I see little strategic downside. We know OBL was not motivated by Israel.
The fact that relations are sometimes less than swimming between the U.S. and Israel does not debunk its value as an ally. This has a function as well: the bad cop in a hard/soft cop exercise. Or the performance of dirty work that gives the U.S. deniability.
Defending Israel as a refuge for Jews, which is fine by me, is not the same as a strategic alliance. Such an alliance implies a strategy beyond defense of a refuge. Right now the strategy is turning into boundless ambition for dominating the region.
As for this new realization of the interests of Palestinians, I would say it has never been lower. After all, the U.S. indulges unprecedented repression.
I went to reeducation camp but they sent me home.
mbs
>Aircraft carrier my fanny. Can you put 4,000 tanks and 11,000 APCs
>on a aircraft carrier? It's a regional super-power and has been since
>1948.
>
>mbs
*Sigh.* Our Beloved Citizen Maximilian B. Sawicky is in error--and not for the first time. Israel is not a "strategic asset" in the Middle East for America. Israel is a "strategic liability." As a card-carrying member of America's Power Elite, I assure you that this is so: Likudniks in the White House and elsewhere may assure you that Israel is a "strategic asset," but they lie about this as they lie about so many other things--the evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11. whether budget deficits raise interest rates, whether George W. Bush visited the Johnson Space Center while Governor of Texas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The fact that the Likudniks say it does not make it true, or even remotely probable.
It's as if... as if... Citizen Max objects to the "aircraft carrier" analogy on the grounds that Israel is much more powerful than an aircraft carrier. And that is true. But the analogy is still useful, in that we can use it to see how claims that Israel is an American "strategic asset" in the Middle East are incomplete.
It's as if... as if... as if... as if we were to send a fully-armed and loaded aircraft carrier to the Middle East, and to paint on its flight deck a *HUGE* picture of the Prophet Muhammed (Peace Be Upon Him!) being sodomized by a dog. That's the effect of the U.S. "strategic alliance" with Israel on our relations with the rest of the Middle East.
And I haven't even gotten to the fact that none of Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, or Sharon knew or knows how to be a proper puppet. And I haven't even gotten to the fact that the OEOB is so infested with Likudniks that this U.S. administration has no clue how to be a good puppetmaster...
Will Citizen Max Sawicky please report to Reeducation Camp #3782 immediately.
DISCLAIMER: After writing the above, I want--I need--to make it very clear that I *support* the U.S. strategic alliance with Israel. I think we in the U.S. are under a moral obligation to irrevocably commit our support to the right of Israelis and Jews who want to immigrate to Israel to live in peace behind secure borders in a national homeland established within the borders of the former U.N. Mandate of Palestine which Israel and Israelis share with Palestine and the Palestinians, whose right to a national homeland established within the borders of the former U.N. Mandate of Palestine also receives the irrevocable support of the United States of America.
We were late to the party that was World War II after all (although when we arrived, we did bring a hell of a lot of refreshements). And we were late to realize that there was a "Palestinian problem": that there was never "a land without a people for a people without a land."
Brad DeLong