Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Yet we are completely and unabashedly supportive of Israeli strategy. To me that's the issue. How do we minimize the costs of wedding ourselves to an unsuccessful strategy that produces perpetual conflict?. (Now that resolving the conflict by spreading democracy on the Arab side has proven to be an unrealistic pipe dream.)
That has been an overarching question that this Adminstration ignored altogether for the past 7 yearrs, partially at least in the belief that one could transpose democracy elswhere in the region and solve this issue. That is not to say that all problems in the region are monocausal. They certainly are not. But as you question above, I do not buy a strategy built on the assumption that we are hated so we will convert that hate into fear.

It is a negative image of the those who want everyone to love us. That does not work either because the world is much too complex.

Tom