Originally written by David Kallans on November 18, 2008 7:58 PM ... Joe Lieberman to remain as chair of Homeland Security.

That lingering resentment should help guarantee his cooperation. "It is the iron law of reciprocity. He will remember and help those who helped him at a critical time in the future," says James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. "It is politically smart. The president and the Democrats will need him in the future. It is part of building bipartisanship and political capital." http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1860396,00.html

Right. Look about these full-time zionists:

-Rahm Emanuel.

-Robert Rubin

-Hillary Clinton

 Is Obama thinking at James Petras? I think NO.  Obama is not a centrist, I think he is a rightist.

Roger Cohen: Olmert to Obama: Think again

Imagine Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, saying this to Barack Obama:

"The United States has been wrong to write Israel a blank check every year; wrong to turn a blind eye to the settlements in the West Bank; wrong not to be more explicit about the need to divide Jerusalem; wrong to equip us with weaponry so sophisticated we now believe military might is the answer to all our problems; and wrong in not helping us reach out to Syria. Your prospective secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said during the campaign that 'The United States stands with Israel, now and forever.' Well, that's not good enough. You need to stand against us sometimes so we can avoid the curse of eternal militarism."

Perhaps that seems unimaginable. But Olmert has already said something close to this. In a frank September interview with the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, reprinted this month by The New York Review of Books*, the Israeli leader chose to exit with a mea culpa for his country's policies.

Those policies have been encouraged by the Bush administration, whose war on terror was embraced by the Israeli government as a means to frame Israel's confrontation with the Palestinians as part of the same struggle. No matter that Al Qaeda and the Palestinian national movement are distinct. The facile conflation got Bush in lock step with whatever Israel did.

So, by saying Israel has been wrong, Olmert was also saying the United States has been wrong, even if he never mentioned America. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/opinion/edcohen.php

----

* 'The Time Has Come to Say These Things' by Ehud Olmert

An excerpt from http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/01/06/gaza_war/index.html?source=newsletter

Much of the rest of the world is outraged by Israel's assault on Gaza. But the United States -- the beacon of democracy, the champion of freedom, a nation founded on revolutionary anti-colonialism -- is applauding it.

The Bush administration has placed the onus for the Israeli assault entirely upon Hamas, and blocked a cease-fire proposal in the U.N. Security Council to give Israel more time to crush its foe. Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- is almost unanimously behind Israel's war. This, despite the fact that polls show that American citizens are closely divided on whether Israel should have attacked Gaza. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has noted, there is no other issue in which "citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice." ...

After five years of George W. Bush's "war on terror," a war whose ideology and methods followed Israel's militarist approach to the letter, and which has failed in every conceivable way, America has still not learned that there are no military solutions in the Middle East.

America is backing Israel's assault despite the fact that it is seriously injurious to our national interests, and ultimately to Israel's as well. Israel's actions will not make it safer, and in the long run could endanger its very existence. But Israel, surrounded by a sea of enemies, has far more reason to cling to its belief in militarism than America does.

Why does America give Israel a blank check to do what it wants, even when its actions are so manifestly contrary to our self-interest? Because we hold Israel to a different standard than other states. We follow what we might call "the Israel rules."

In their groundbreaking 2006 book, historians John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt popularized the term "The Israel lobby." The term is useful as far as it goes, and applies accurately to powerful lobbies like AIPAC. But as one of the more perceptive commentators on Middle Eastern affairs, Time's Tony Karon, noted in his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, the term is insufficiently dialectical -- that is, it fails to capture the way Americans have internalized received opinions about Israel. "The Israel rules," on the other hand, avoids imputing coercive power solely to an entity or group of entities, and highlights the fact that many of the constraints that govern discussions of Israel are self-generated.

"Pro-Israel" commentators -- I use the scare quotes because many of them are Likudnik hawks whose policies are, in fact, harmful to Israel -- argue that Americans have always felt an affinity for Israel because it is a plucky, embattled democracy, a national soul mate. While there is a lot of sentimental "land without a people" nonsense in this argument, it is not entirely devoid of truth. There is much to admire in the astonishing self-creation of the Jewish state. Had it not been for the inconvenient presence of an indigenous people, it would have been cause for unalloyed celebration. And this feeling of kinship is immeasurably strengthened and sanctified by the most potent historical fact behind the special status America has accorded Israel: the Holocaust.

Because Israel came into existence in the shadow of the Holocaust, and because it was immediately attacked by Arab states bent on destroying it, it has become an eternal victim in America's eyes. The historical truths of Israel's creation, above all the fact of Palestinian dispossession, simply cannot compete with the tragic, beautiful myth of an embattled people, the survivors of one of the worst genocides in human history, returning to live in their historic homeland. The enduring power of this myth is understandable. The idea that history's "ultimate victims," as the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said sympathetically called the Jews, created their own state by expelling its native inhabitants, is appalling. It seems almost cosmically wrong: A story this dark should not, cannot, close without a happy ending.

That is the emotional and psychological nut. Throw in geo-strategic reasons (the U.S. embraced Israel as a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansion), a powerful domestic lobby, and the singular ineptitude of the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, and you have the ingredients for an enduring myth. When other states refuse to make just compromises and insist on smashing their enemies into submission, we call them rogue states. When Israel does it, it is fighting off an eternal Holocaust, and that gives it carte blanche to do whatever it wants. Never mind the fact that the Palestinians do not pose an existential threat to Israel, and that over the last eight years between 200 and 300 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli. As the occupation grinds into its seventh decade and Israel's enemies have become ever more fanatical, it becomes easier to fit them out with Hitler masks. The Palestinians have played the role of villains beautifully, making the myth seem increasingly plausible. ...

Originally written by John Bunch on January 7, 2009 3:31 PM So what would you have Israel do, Jacek?

I would start with what was proposed years ago: a two-nation state and return of the occupied land. If you say it's too late, it's the problem of the politicians who made it be too late and should be [...], well, penalized accordingly. (The same with Afghanistan, BTW, for which I would [...] the politicians accordingly.)

I don't know, John. I just heard that while 'being willing' Israel was at the same time continuing with its policy of settlements on the occupied territories back then. Don't ask me now how to clean the mess, please. I knew from the start (see my 2003 posts) how not to start the mess in Iraq, for example, and had you asked me, a teenager in 1967, how not to esclate the ME mess then, I would have told you. So before they start bombing next time, have them ask me beforhand, not afterwards, and I will be happy to reply.

Jacek