USING FRICTION AS CURRENCY

Does the United States only appear to be playing footsie with the Arabs, using the friction generated against Israel as currency in a vast game of Oil Country Monopoly?

Could the rational be that to side openly with, to be fully supportive of Israel (and prove it), would cost the United States, in the short run?

Every American president sees himself as the Middle East Peace Messiah -- why?

Could it be that it's an easy way, he appears to assume, to make a foreign policy name for himself. Why else interfere, right-out-of-the-gate, in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation -- a true ally and friend?

Question: Does Israel unofficially play along, at least at first?

Is it actually just a deadly game, where lives are used as board pieces (I get the race car, you get the PLO?)

Bush, Jr, talked tough, but was mostly "hands-off" and bless him for that, at least. Here, he was smarter than our current president, in my opinion, who may, at last, be learning the lesson every American president learns, as I predicted he would in my very first or second blog post, some time ago.

If you don' take a side, you can't be effective, and only a fool would choose to back a people who use their own women and children as walking bombs and shields as the side to support.

America adds to the problem, rather than detracts from it, and would best stay at home, quietly supporting the only true Middle Eastern democracy in existence, Israel. I say only because: who does not believe that Iraq's new Democracy will bow to, and become an Islamic regime once more, given the chance?

This is bitterly cynical of me to say: I hope that the Post World War creation of Israel was not merely a means to bring Jews into one place where they could be picked off more easily than spread about the planet, or to be used as fodder in a perpetual game for power with the, oil-rich Islamic nations and their ever-expanding fanatical population.

With America pressuring Israel to limit growth, to stop adding homes and schools and infrastructure for it's children, and their children, and demanding that Israel place it's very existence in jeopardy by recreating itself as a non-defensible entity, beset on all sides by enemies, too close to avoid -- it is one, very sad, possibility.

America is offering no alternatives. The EU is even worse, in my opinion. I say, unless another country has something really helpful to offer - stay out of it. Israel has been around this long, it will still be around a long time from now.

It belongs to G-d.

Personally, I believe the first-term president who takes care of his own people and rigorously defends his domestic agenda at home will carry more weight with the rest of the world in his second term (assuming he gets one) -- than one who allows his ego to drive him to vainglorious attempts to form the world's future to his own ideals, (particularly when they are suspect).

Of course, there could be many things which we-the-people don't know. If it concerns us, then we should know. If we make assumptions based on an incomplete picture, whose fault is that? If we blindly accept the unacceptable, we truly are the real losers in the game.
DAL