I know ...

I know I annoy a lot of people on our side with my criticism of Israel. Let me put this out right now. I firmly believe in Israel's right to exist and its inhabitants right to live in peace, free from harassment. I believe Israel's sovereignty should be defended as we would another ally. What I will not condone is their belief that any action on their part to 'protect themselves' is justified.

Israel has a responsibility, as the most powerful nation in the region, to the people who live under their control. Nothing, I repeat, nothing Israel has done over the last forty years has been the least bit beneficial to the Palestinians and, to a lesser extent, the Lebanese. Israel's safety, tenuous as it is, has been bought at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people who share the land with them. Lives lived without hope, under the boot of the Israeli Defense Forces.

I do not condone the use of terror tactics against civilian poplulations and terror comes in many forms. There is the obvious, practiced by Hezbollah and Hamas, civilians and innocents the primary targets. But there is also the 'soft terror', when the economy and infrastructure of an area is destroyed and the population reduced to living in destitution for generations. This seemingly endless repetition of violent cycles is regressive at worst and stagnating at best.

Israel has to move on, as well as her neighbors. Think about it, this cycle we've been living for forty years. When will it stop? When an all out war decimates the populations of all concerned? Will we go on like this for another forty years? Another eighty? Will it end with Israel setting off a nuke? It's time someone takes a stand and says enough.

I refuse to believe this region of the world will be a meat grinder for the indeterminate future. It is time for the U.S., as Israel's most generous benefactor, to start issuing some ultimatums, not allowing them to rampage over sovereign, democratic nations and tie it to the coveted foreign aid Israel receives that keeps it a sovereign state. It is also time for us to use serious carrot and stick diplomacy with the terror groups as well as their sponsors.

We can have a dialogue with Syria and, with some prodding and a little malleability, Iran. We have been talking peace through the barrel of a gun for more than forty years, maybe it's time to try something different. Bush 41 had a dialogue with Syria before Gulf 1, SECSTATE Baker making many trips back and forth between Damascus and Washington and finally getting the Syrians to join the coalition against Saddam; it can be done.

Opposing Israel in this case is not anti-Semetic, not anti-Jewish. It is about the moral imperative. It is about doing the right thing, for Israel, for the region, and for the interests of the United States in the long run. A commitment to dialogue and economic betterment for the region, not to violence, will settle this and we must condemn the violence where we see it, from whatever side it comes.

It is time for Nixon to go to China.

Update:

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Commander Huber

Glenn Greenwald