Global Paradigms

I was talking today with a former U.S. diplomat and a Washington "insider" who made the following comment: "I'm beginning to suspect that the Israeli military has been 'Americanized.' They seem to repeating our mistakes in Iraq. Very discouraging for them and for us." This is coming from someone who is a critic of the Bush administration's policies and has been opposed to the Israeli response in Lebanon. My guess is that the Bushies and the neocons are hysterical. After all, much of what the neocons have been pushing for has been the "Israelization" of Americnan foreign policy and national security, in a sense that the Americans should adopt the tough Israeli methods in dealing with global threats, especially vis-a-vis the Arabs who supposedly "only understand force." The problem is that both in Iraq and Lebanon (now and earlier) and in the West Bank/Gaza this approach has proved to be a total failure in terms of policy (forget fo...

I've been busy working on several projects and haven't had the time to write a long item on the "situation." But Tony Karon has been reading my mind, so to speak, and has raised some of the arguments I've been discussing for quite a while. In "Is Israel Fighting a Proxy War for Washington?" he stresses that Bush and Condi have not only given a "green light" to Israel in Lebanon; that they have encouraged that (“Don’t hold back on our account, in fact, make sure you finish them off…”"). And he points out that: I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in kee...