Question: all these voices coming out trying to suggest some universal peace 'tween Muslims and Jews is in the offing - a lot of it coming from Jordan, but whispers all over - how much of this is really about haters of Israel sensing that the 'popularity' of Obama puts Netanyahu betwixt rock and hard place? How much of this is about those interested parties ratcheting up the pressure on Israel to make concessions or else look unredeemable? And how much of this leveraging is coming from the Obama camp?
You see why I say this could lead to disaster - if the real problem is Iran, if the real problem is that there is no poltical solution to the politics of the region, and you force Israel to make nice and accept a sham of an agreement because Obama will have extended himself so much that to not accept would rupture the US/Israeli union and unleash god knows what - well, what you're left with is either Israel violently rejecting this emasculation and taking matters into its own hands - or an empowered Iran emerging armed with nuclear weapons eyeing greedily an enfeebled Israel and an unstable Mideast still rife with age old hatreds and ripe for manipulation.
What I think I'm saying is: if you make Israel pay the price for what will amount to an appeasment of Iran you'll end up with something worse than if you had just confronted Iran in the first place.
[the question does get begged here: why not just dump Israel? Is it really worth the bother? Isn't the smart move to get on board with a nuclear Iran and let Israel dangle? Ah - there's an appealing simplicity to that - of course the US is never going to abandon Israel - but it could start drawing back which would result in a humble and therefore attenuated Israel - what's wrong with that? Well, extremists don't need the US to abandon Israel to exploit a perceived weakness; Israel ain't gonna go quietly into that good night; it's foolish to think that if you give Iran a strategic victory - and nukes combined with a weakened Israel would be a victory - it's foolish to think you'd then be able to form some mutually beneficial partnership with Iran - more likely, armed with such a strategic victory, the extremists in Iran would be raised up and the moderates pushed down, resulting in Iran forming enhanced therefore increasingly volatile relations with unsavory players such as Syria, radicals in Egypt, Shiite extremists in Iraq, Hezbolah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza - not to mention closer ties with Russia and China - in short, an appeasement of Iran likely to lead to increased instability in the Mideast and the fomenting of relations with countries that oppose American power. So, tempting as it may be to consider a post Israel future where all this ugliness is resolved, what you'd get instead I believe is a chain of events that leads to disaster - that's if you value American power and Western ideals - if you hate America and have no interest in the survival of Western civilization, then an Obama foreign policy may be just what you've been waiting for]
