re: #222 blueraven

Well what about General Petraeus?

[Link: mideast.foreignpolicy.com…]

I wanted to comment on this. I started reading the article and I can’t get past this statement:

The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander … Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. … The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

The Arabs won’t listen to Mitchell? Em… who did they listen to again? No one, that’s who.

The U.S. is incapable of standing up to Israel? Did I read that right? We’re incapable of standing up to the Arabs, not to Israel!! That’s been a policy of every president since the conflict. What I thought was a simple dustup, or at least should have been, was made worse by the U.S. We could have handled it a lot better. You don’t escalate tensions, even if caught off guard. Especially if caught off guard.

When the U.S. can go to the Arab world and demand they abide by the first rule of the Road Map, which is for the Arabs to stop lobbing missiles into Israel, then we can talk about what Israel should or shouldn’t do. But you can’t demand from one and not the other.