Another View of Middle East Reality

If one ignores the inaccurate and laughably inarticulate Middle East coverage of the last several years on cable news channels (excepting PBS of course), you can still find a few people who know what they are talking about.  While the "ratings press" continues to milk the "Arab Spring" for all it is worth (personally, I think we are well into 'winter' now) the fact remains that the area is probably looking to an unprecedented time of instability and continued war and destruction. 

The various 'new' governments have all failed miserably to bring anything approaching the artificial stability that the US-supported despot dictators they displaced (usually as a matter of iron-fisted suppression of their people...using US-supplied arms of course).

Not surprisingly, Thomas Friedman brought up a different point in a recent column - the situation of Israel which faces being surrounded by unstable (or completely non-functional) governments after a period of at least a tenuous, stable balance in the area.

At first I didn't know if I was going to agree with Mr. Friedman in this column, but in the end I did.  It seemed to me at first that he started out being a bit too sympathetic to Israel, but they do have some very unstable neighbors now...and they just watched their latest "friends/enemies/sort of friends again" (Turkey) destabilize and we really don't know how that is going to turn out. 

I have always been (and still am) of the opinion that Israel is the spoiled brat of the Middle East and should have been taken out to the woodshed and thoroughly paddled by the US at least 20 years ago.  Unfortunately our political system in the US produces neither intelligent thinkers nor conviction in our presidents so we have continued to placate the Israeli lobby and just say "aren't they cute" like embarrassed parents about Israel's illegal shenanigans while the rest of the world is getting increasingly impatient with their arrogance.