One of the more eye-catching incidents in the Biden-Israel fracas last week was the revelation that the Vice President told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel's settlement activity was endangering the lives of U.S. troops. Now, Mark Perry reports that this same sentiment was communicated in no uncertain terms to the administration by none other than Gen. David Petraeus earlier in the year, following an extensive CENTCOM survey of the region.
This is a provocative accusation, but it's also a self-serving one. It's true that the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes a security threat to the United States, in that it is a grievance that resonates with many in the Arab and Muslim world. The more the Arab and Muslim world has reason to dislike the U.S., the easier it is for radical movements to gain recruits. But the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a problem among many, not the problem.
Perry writes:
While commentators and pundits might reflect that Joe Biden's trip to Israel has forever shifted America's relationship with its erstwhile ally in the region, the real break came in January, when David Petraeus sent a briefing team to the Pentagon with a stark warning: America's relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America's soldiers. Maybe Israel gets the message now.
Naturally you wouldn't expect the commander of CENTCOM to acknowledge the rather large elephant in the room here but the fact is that the larger problem is the presence of so many U.S. troops in the Middle East in the first place.
The decision to deploy military forces in the Middle East and to back-stop regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the principle political grievances of the Islamist terrorists that threaten America, a fact well documented by the University of Chicago's Robert Pape. Sorting out who lives where on the West Bank strikes me as a second-order concern.
(AP Photo)
