Fair enough, but if you could kindly let me know how that works with Obama’s support of Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. Is Obama gung-ho for a militaristic remaking of the map of the Middle East, so long as it other nation’s doing the remaking?

“It’s just that changing policy towards Israel is not part of his change-agenda in foreign policy.”

Iraq, then, stands out as the only glaring exception from status-quo groupthink that so dominates official Washington thinking on such matters, and then only around the margins.

No, I don’t think Obama is hoodwinking anyone re Israel. I think he genuinely supports Israel. It’s just that changing policy towards Israel is not part of his change-agenda in foreign policy. He certainly does want to change the mindset that got us into the Iraq war, but that wan’t based on support for Israel, it was based on the notion of a militaristic remaking of the map of the Middle East. Obama has no such plans. He’s no neocon, and if that’s the measure of what “support for Israel” means these days, then yes, he’s definitely not as “strong” a supporter of “Israel” as McCain or Bush. But then “Israel” is just code for colonization of the Middle East, which is what it’s worst critics fear. Supporting the actual state of Israel and its people might mean rejecting the neocon notion of “Israel” as a way of remaking the Middle East in western, “democratic” ways, since the first Israel is put in greater jeopardy by the pursuit of the second.

If I am reading each of you correctly, Obama is, in effect, shading the truth when it comes to one of the most critical foreign policy questions, essentially hoodwinking the rubes so as not to get branded “anti-Israel” so that he can offer real change later on, or at least hope to move the ball forward so as to open some room for the Israelis and Palestinians can solve this problem themsleves?

“Does Obama reject the bipartisan foreign policy consensus? No. Is he more skeptical than the average politician? I think so. Is he better than McCain? Oh my, yes. I don’t have to agree with him 100% to understand that he is by far the best option available.”

Without question, leaps and bounds better than McCain. But this limited praise seems to contradict the candidate’s own stated desire to not only “end the war” but end the mindset that got us into the war. Is this just a rhetorical flourish up there with “Mission Accomplished”?

As for bowing to AIPAC, well, it’s suicide not to, not just politically, but to have any hope of actually influencing Israel later on. The only way to get the Israelis to budge is to show them support first and foremost. And let’s be honest, only a crazy person actually thinks that a US President is going to solve this conflict. He can be marginally better or worse for the situation, but solving it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. And neither side seems very determined to resolve this soon on mutually agreeable terms. The idea that Obama should be slammed for not parting the waters of the Red Sea is a strange kind of criticism.

Does Obama reject the bipartisan foreign policy consensus? No. Is he more skeptical than the average politician? I think so. Is he better than McCain? Oh my, yes. I don’t have to agree with him 100% to understand that he is by far the best option available.

One can always ask of a candidate who slithers toward the center for the general, “Was he lying then or is he lying now?” In BHO’s case, even as he goes beyond conventional wisdom to pandering absurdities such as undivided Jerusalem, parts of which Jews never set foot in, he gets tagged as an “isolatonist”.

Perhaps this pander’s as meaningless as the repeated promise to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which never hapens
The fact is, he’s a Kumbaya internationalist, who no doubt prefers child-raping UN peacekeepeers to sending in the Marines, and while he may have a few anti-interventionist reflexes, in the end he really seems to stand for only modest changes in foreign policy.

Too bad, if true. One is reduced to the hope that he’s lying now, as opposed to before.

So something that infects all of our foreign policy, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nothing to do with trouble elsewhere in the region? Oh, okay.

What he was criticizing was the idea that that conflict is the root of all the region’s troubles, not that it has – as it obviously does – something to do with them. Nevertheless, this falls far short of change I can believe in.