It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see Israel's actions in Gaza as creating an existential threat to the US for its support of the Gaza massacre.
If you step back and survey the scene, you can begin to see much more than an existential threat; you can see outright subversion on the part of Israel.
With Bush's help, Obama has just had his foreign policy shaped for him by Israel.
I have been poking around many military blogs over the last couple of weeks looking for an answer to why Israel has chosen to be particularly nasty in this war.
There are many straw-man arguments to this, with the favorite one being that Israel has the right to defend itself. No one can argue that, but what the hell did they really expect would happen when they blockaded Gaza? Israel could have at least offered a deal on lifting the collective punishment in exchange for Hamas stopping the rocket attacks.
Any number of alternative paths could have been tried before resorting to a massacre. That is why I have been looking for an answer. Some pretty clear thinkers are wondering the same thing, and pretty much all of them agree that Israel's tactics are wrong in the context of improving security. There is no playbook that says the way to improve security is to make sure many civilians are killed while the cameras are rolling.
Nothing in the playbook says to prominently show the controversial weapons your sponsor has supplied to you, such as phosphorus shells.
Nothing in the playbook says to enrage the region by bombing schools, hospitals, killing aid workers, and 'accidentally' destroying the stores of what little food remains in the territory.
Nothing in the playbook says to make sure a camera is rolling when you happen to mention picking up the phone to call in what Condi Rice's vote should be at the UN.
Do you see the pattern here?
What Israel is doing is enraging the Arab nations, and making sure they see the US as a tool of Israel. It's not the leaders they are enraging; it's the populations of those countries.
Can you see why they would do this?
Obama has already said that he will hit the ground running and start opening dialog with various Arab nations. That's the kind of thing that would scare the shit out of Israel. What possible good can come from the US cultivating better ties with the Arab nations?
I mean, what good for Israel?
By enraging the populations of the Arab nations, and by explicitly linking the US as the enablers of the Gaza massacre, Obama does not stand a chance for open and direct talk with Arab leaders; their people will not stand for it at this point.
To me, it looks like Israel is running our foreign policy, and not in a helpful way at all.
If this is so, did Bush help them do it?