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rouge77 commented on the blog post Things You Apparently Can’t Tell Your Friends
With all respect, I think the original argumentation is wrong and is part just of the recent tide of in US (and elsewhere) of trying to blame especially the foreign policy setbacks in Palestine as Obama’s fault and not Israeli governments. That Obama should have “romanced” them and made them love himself before demanding anything and all such things.
It’s simply wrong, because we have seen this before. It was the same during the Cold War, US supporting nasty regimes and then asking them to do some reforms and overall being less nasty. But they just went on being nasty, because they calculated that after all the amount of political prestige, money, guns and political rhetoric spent on praising these regimes the US couldn’t really do anything meaningful against them, stopping the largesse from flowing, if they would just continue doing things as they had.
And because US saw them as battlegrounds against Communism, in danger of falling to the Reds, then that too made it seem to US government that it’s options were very limited: It could only continue to support the regimes, even when the reformers it praised were jailed or killed by the regimes it sponsored.
I think we still have the exactly same thing here. By supporting these regimes in the first place US has driven itself to corner, where it believes that the only thing it can do is to continue it’s support, with asking occasionally the sponsored regimes to behave better. Let’s remember for example that even when GWB asked something from the Israelis, he didn’t get it either.
Because the Israelis believe that the US has to always support them, that the US government has no other option but accept everything that Israel does and publicly praise Israel to the heavens. And the US presidents believe them, because for some reason it has become an accepted fact – which I find little support in reality – that unconditional support for Israel is demanded so that presidents and their parties can win elections, and that at most presidents can do is verbally ask Israel to act differently and them ask forgiveness when Israel’s leadership refuses to do so.
Obama’s mistake is believing these claims. If the leaders of Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel don’t jump when he says so he could, if he would wish so, just stop US support for them. Bring troops home, stop the US “protection” that Israel takes granted. But of course he believes that he can’t do this, and thus he binds himself to just those verbal options of asking vassals act differently, and the vassals don’t act differently, because they too think that US must continue to support them, no matter what.
