Is America Becoming a Third World Country?

Judging by my Comcast service, I would say yes. Egypt isn't this bad.

When It Comes to Innovation,
  By Arianna Huffington

March 31, 2010 "Huffington Post" --  Is America turning into a third world country? That was the provocative topic of a panel I took part in last week at a conference sponsored by The Economist entitled "Innovation: Fresh Thinking For The Ideas Economy."

Once upon a time, the United States was the world's dominant innovator -- partly because we didn't have much competition. As a result of the destruction wreaked by WWII, the massive migration of brainpower to the U.S. caused by the war, and huge amounts of government spending, America had the innovation playing field largely to itself. None of these factors exist as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

America now has plenty of countries it's competing with -- many of which are much more serious about innovation than we are. Just look at the numbers:

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation looked at the progress made over the last decade in the area of innovation. Out of the 40 countries and regions it examined, the U.S. ranked dead last.

A study on innovation by the Boston Consulting Group concluded that America is "disadvantaged in several key areas, including work force quality and economic, immigration, and infrastructure policies."

In 2009, patents issued to American applicants dropped by 2.3 percent. Those granted to foreign-based applicants increased by over 6 percent.

Why are we falling behind like this? For one thing, we've lost our educational edge. America once led the world in high school graduation rates. We are now ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized countries.

And the percentage of 15-year-olds performing at the highest levels of math is among the lowest. South Korea, Belgium and the Czech Republic, among others, have at least five times the number the U.S. does.

Plus, we are no longer investing in innovation. Until 1979, around 50 percent of all research and development funds were provided by the federal government. That number has fallen to 27 percent. And, during the 1990s, the bottom fell out of U.S. funding for applied science, dropping by 40 percent.

The economic crisis is also taking a toll on innovation. Venture capital investment in the U.S. for the first three quarters of 2009 was $12 billion. Over the first three quarters of 2008, it was $22 billion.

These numbers may not place us in the third world ... yet. But the trend is not a good one.

Adding to the problem is the sense that America's best days may be behind us. Many economists and historians are warning that our current economic downturn has created a new normal. That the country will never be the same. Things are, of course, going to be different. But that doesn't have to mean that they are going to be worse. However, if we don't get serious about innovation, they will be. When it comes to our approach to innovation, we desperately need some innovation.

For starters, we need to kick our high-speed Internet plans into high gear. A robust, broadband-charged, countrywide information superhighway is going to be key to staying ahead of the innovation curve.

As FCC Chair Julius Genachowski explains, broadband isn't just important for faster email and video games -- it's the central nervous system for democracies and economies of the future:

Broadband is indispensable infrastructure for the 21st century. It is already becoming the foundation for our economy and democracy in the 21st century... [and] will be our central platform for innovation in the 21st century.

How indispensable is it? In a study of 120 countries, researchers found that every 10 percent increase in broadband adoption increased a country's GDP by 1.3 percent.

Unfortunately, when it comes to broadband, America is also falling behind.

In 2001, the United States ranked 4th among industrialized countries in broadband access. By last year, we had dropped to 15th. As for average broadband download speed, we rank 19th.

Nearly 93 million Americans still don't have broadband in their homes. And while 82 percent of those who attend college in the U.S. have access to broadband, only 46 percent of high school graduates do.

To help close the widening gap between us and the rest of the digitally connected world, the Obama administration has proposed a National Broadband Plan, with the goal of increasing broadband access from around 65 percent currently to 90 percent by 2020.

The proposed plan would make high speed broadband available to 100 million Americans by 2020, and ensure that every high school graduate is digitally literate.

This sounds great. But 2020? Given that we're already behind, how about initiating a broadband version of the Manhattan Project? If it's truly a priority, and, as seems obvious, important to national security and the relative position of the United States in the world, why put it off for a decade?

Another focus of innovation is the green economy. One proposal that would jumpstart green innovation is the creation of a Green Bank, which, according to John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh, would "open credit markets and motivate businesses to invest again," and "enable clean-energy technologies -- in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency -- to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs."

Such a bank would also help loosen the available credit for small businesses, and establish the reliable source of funding entrepreneurs need to know will be there if they devote themselves to green technologies and start ups.

Fortunately, such a proposal is already making its way through Congress. Reed Hundt, the former FCC chair under President Clinton, is now the head of a group called the Coalition for Green Capital, whose goal is "to establish a government-owned, wholesale, non-profit bank that would fill the void that exists in clean-energy legislation in America today." Hundt is currently joining Congressman Ed Markey in trying to make the Green Bank proposal part of the next jobs bill. Which makes sense, since, according to Hundt's group, a Green Bank would create about four million jobs by 2012.

Another area ripe for innovation is our immigration policy -- particularly when it comes to granting visas to foreign-born entrepreneurs.

Great ideas come from all over the world, and if we don't welcome the people with those great ideas and make it easy for them to come here, they will go elsewhere. Indeed, they already are going elsewhere. Right now the U.S. has an immigration limit for skilled workers of 65,000, and an additional 20,000 slots for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. This kind of rigid cap doesn't make sense in today's world. The "visa process has been plagued with backlogs resulting from this quota," says Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. "As a result, high-skilled immigrants are looking for opportunities elsewhere in an increasingly competitive global labor market, taking their innovative ideas with them."

Enter the people behind startupvisa.com, a group with an innovative proposal for increasing America's share in the global idea marketplace. They want to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to come to America and start job-creating business.

Our current law allows foreign investors to get a visa if they start a business in the United States with $1 million in capital that creates at least 10 jobs here. The venture capitalists behind Start Up Visa want to shift the emphasis from foreign investors to foreign entrepreneurs who can get funding from American investors. The idea is to reward good ideas. And by requiring those with good ideas to first get foreign funding, you make it more likely they will just decide to create their companies someplace else too.

This proposal is also in the legislative pipeline. The Start Up Visa Act is co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar. Their bill would create a two-year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she would become a legal resident.

Kerry and Lugar made their case in a recent op-ed:

At a time when many are wondering whether Democrats and Republicans can come together on anything, there is at least one area where we're in strong agreement: We believe that America is the best country in the world to do business. And now is the time to reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs -- men and women who have come from overseas to study in our universities, and countless others coming up with great ideas abroad -- to help drive innovation and job creation here at home.

The senators, who hope to pass the measure this month, are positioning it as a jobs initiative, not an immigration reform initiative, and hope to include it as part of a larger bill aimed at helping small businesses add jobs. "This bill is a small down payment on a cure to global competitiveness," Kerry told BusinessWeek.

These, of course, are just three ways of promoting innovation. But they are prime examples of what we need if we are to shake off our complacency and avoid the slow slide to third world status.

America is rich with resources -- both natural and human -- but we can no longer afford to utilize them so inefficiently. We can't afford to be the only nation in the industrialized world in which half the country doesn't have access to broadband. We can't afford to allow other nations to take the lead in creating a green economy. And we can't afford to keep making it so hard for people with job-creating ideas to start their businesses here.

 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Attention Deficit Democracy

One huge marker for the decay of a society is when a people lose trust in their social and economic institutions. It has been coming in America for over 40 years and now we are in a state of crisis
 
By Ralph Nader

March 31, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

Economic decay is all around. Poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, job export, consumer debt, pension attrition, and crumbling infrastructure are well documented. The self-destruction of the Wall Street financial giants, with their looting and draining of trillions of other people’s money, have been headlines for two years. During and after their gigantic taxpayer bailouts from Washington, DC, the banks, et al, are still the most powerful force in determining the nature of proposed corrective legislation.

“The banks own this place,” says Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), evoking the opinion of many members of a supine Congress ready to pass weak consumer and investor protection legislation while leaving dominant fewer and larger banks.

Who hasn’t felt the ripoffs and one-sided fine print of the credit card industry? A reform bill finally has passed after years of delay, again weak and incomplete. Shameless over their gouges, the companies have their attorneys already at work to design around the law’s modest strictures.

The drug and health insurance industry, swarming with thousands of lobbyists, got pretty much what they wanted in the new health law. Insurers got millions of new customers subsidized by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars with very little regulation. The drug companies got their dream—no reimportation of cheaper identical drugs, no authority for Uncle Sam to bargain for discount prices, and a very profitable extension of monopoly patent protection for biologic drugs against cheaper, generic drug competition.

For all their gouges, for all their exclusions, their denial of claims and restrictions of benefits, for all their horrendous price increases, the two industries have come out stronger than ever politically and economically. Small wonder their stocks are rising even in a recession.

The junk food processing industry—on the defensive lately due to some excellent documentaries and exposes—are still the most influential of powers on Capitol Hill when it becomes to delaying for years a decent food safety bill, using tax dollars to pump fat, sugar and salt into the stomachs of our children, and fighting adequate inspections. Over seven thousand lives are lost due to contaminated food yearly in the US and many millions of illnesses.

The oil, gas, coal and nuclear power companies are fleecing consumers and taxpayers, depleting and imperiling the environment, yet they continue to block rational energy legislation in Congress to replace carbon and uranium with energy efficiency technology and renewables.

Still, even now after years of cost over-runs and lack of permanent storage for radioactive wastes, the nuclear industry has President Obama, and George W. Bush before him, pushing for many tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer loan guarantees for new nukes. Wall Street won’t finance such a risky technology without you, the taxpayers, guaranteeing against any accident or default.

Both Democrats and Republicans are passing on these outrageous financial and safety risks to taxpayers.

Congress, which receives the brunt of this corporate lobbying—the carrot of money and the stick of financing incumbent challengers—is more of an obstacle to change than ever. In the past after major failures of industry and commerce, there was a higher likelihood of Congressional action. Recall, the Wall Street and banking collapse in the early 1930s. Congress and Franklin Delano Roosevelt produced legislation that saved the banks, peoples’ savings and regulated the stock markets.

From the time of my book, Unsafe at Any Speed’s publication in late November 1965, it took just nine months to federally regulate the powerful auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency.

Contrast the two-year delay after the Bear Stearns collapse and still no reform legislation, and what is pending is weak.

Yet the entrenched members of Congress, responsible for this astonishing gridlock, are almost impossible to dislodge even though polls have Congress at its lowest repute ever. It is a place where the majority is terrified of the corporations and the minority can block even the most anemic legislative efforts with archaic rules, especially in the Senate.

Culturally, the canaries in the coal mine are the children. Childhood has been commercialized by the giant marketers reaching them hour by hour with junk food, violent programming, video games and bad medicine. The result—record obesity, child diabetes and other ailments.

While the companies undermine parental authority, they laugh all the way to the bank, using our public airwaves, among other media, for their lucre. They can be called electronic child molesters.

We published a book in 1996 called Children First!: A Parent’s Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators in the Media. This book is an understatement of the problem compared to the worsening of child manipulation today.

In a 24/7 entertained society frenetic with sound bites, Blackberries, iPods, text messages and emails, there is a deep need for reflection and introspection. We have to discuss face to face in living rooms, school auditoriums, village squares and town meetings what is happening to us and our diminishing democratic processes by the pressures and controls of the insatiable corporate state.

And what needs to be done from the home to the public arenas and marketplaces with old and new superior models, new accountabilities and new thinking.

For our history has shown that whenever the people get more engaged and more serious, they live better on all fronts.
 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

US-Israeli Relations at a Crossroads

....and the Likudniks will continue to resist and more people will die. Israel will never be safe as long as angry vengeful peope are running it

How many more generations will it take before people stop hating?

By Melvin A. Goodman
March 28, 2010

Editor’s Note: The long U.S.-Israeli alliance is at a crossroads, with the Obama administration urging renewed Middle East peace talks and Israel’s Likud government refusing to take some of the key U.S.-recommended steps to set those talks in motion.

Though Israel retains much of its legendary clout in Washington – and with influential neoconservatives making its case on op-ed pages and talk shows – there are more voices now speaking out against the old conventional wisdom, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman notes in this guest essay:

Former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once said that the Palestinians "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Well, the same can be said for the Israelis and particularly their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

For the first time, the Israelis are confronting a Palestinian leadership on the West Bank that genuinely wants to pursue a political settlement and a two-state solution. Yasir Arafat envisaged more power in blocking any agreement, but Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his boss, President Mahmoud Abbas, are dedicated to a peaceful solution.

Unlike Arafat, who played to the extremists in the Middle East, Abbas and Fayyad are ignoring Iran's opposition to Israel as well as the firebrands among Hamas and Hezbollah, who favor delegitimizing Israel. Netanyahu's predecessors never had such counterparts on the West Bank.

Netanyahu's frustration is not with his unwieldy coalition that was responsible for the outrageous dust-up over the expansion of settlements, but with the Obama administration.

Netanyahu is now facing a U.S. government that genuinely wants to return to the peace process and to the two-state solution. This has not been true for nearly ten years because of opposition by the Bush administration to Israeli-Palestinian (or Israeli-Syrian) negotiations.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were opposed to any movement, even the creation of a three-year period to create "provisional" Palestinian statehood. Even former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon favored creation of provisional statehood.

Netanyahu, however, longs to return to the days when the United States stood by Israeli intransigence. The willingness of the Netanyahu government to embarrass its only genuine ally in the international community points to the weakness of Israel as a strategic partner for the United States.

Like a long line of Israeli politicians, Netanyahu favors total humiliation of the Palestinian people; this attitude is the major roadblock to any movement toward a solution. President George W. Bush supported this position because he wanted nothing to do with either Arabs or Israelis.

According to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush simply didn't want to take the time to deal with the issue. Powell's view was that Bush considered the "prospects of success ... quite low" and, with "two wars going on ... why fuck around with these people?"

Netanyahu and Bush were obvious soul mates. Israel and the most influential Israeli lobby, the American Israel Political Action Committee, cannot abide the peace process because it always complicates U.S.-Israeli relations.

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren wrote in Thursday's New York Times that US-Israeli relations were neither in crisis nor at an historic low point. This is true! Relations were much worse in the 1950s, when Israeli agents bombed a United States Information Agency library in Egypt and tried to make it look like an Egyptian act of violence.

And relations were worse in 1967, when Israel broke its commitment not to preemptively attack to start the Six-Day War and, in the war's first days, Israeli fighter planes bombed the USS Liberty. Relations also plummeted at the end of the October War in 1973, when Israel wanted to humiliate the Egyptian army and broke a cease-fire agreement that Henry Kissinger had carefully orchestrated with the Soviet Union.

The invasion of Beirut in 1982 and crimes against the Palestinian camps led to intervention by U.S. Marines, with terrible losses for the United States, and the invasion of Gaza in 2008 led to war crimes against innocent Palestinian civilians.

In most of these cases, Israel's modus operandi was the use of total force to create total humiliation of the Palestinians.

President Barack Obama is at a decided disadvantage at this juncture. He has the empathy to deal with both sides in the dispute, but not the tenacity of a Kissinger, a Jimmy Carter or even a Bill Clinton to give the issue of Palestinian statehood the attention it deserves.

Kissinger, Carter and Clinton were pursuing U.S. national interests, but the Obama administration has not arrived at a strategic consensus for its interests in the Middle East.

Moreover, Obama has a weak foreign policy team that lacks understanding of the process and the substance to work the diplomatic side of the street. Unlike some of his predecessors, National Security Adviser James Jones has never taken hold of the strategic picture, and now the administration is preoccupied with withdrawal from Iraq and the briar patch that we call Afghanistan.

What should the president do? Since Obama is probably unwilling to take on Netanyahu and his hard-line government, he should call a time-out on the peace process. The proximity talks are essentially a farce because Israel refuses to discuss anything but procedural issues.

Netanyahu has ignored the U.S. call for a temporary halt in all settlements, which could have been the path to direct negotiations. President George H.W. Bush was successful 20 years ago, when he halted loan guarantees for the building of such settlements, but today the United States provides virtually no economic assistance to Israel and has few non-military tools of influence.

A time-out by the Obama administration could be used to forge an approach to providing serious economic assistance to the civilian victims of Israel's harsh measures in Gaza, where families and children are suffering from poverty and deprivation, as well as in the West Bank.

There also needs to be a reassessment of U.S. military assistance to Israel. The United States provides far too much military assistance to Israel, which has not faced a serious threat from the Arab world since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat courageously concluded a serious peace agreement more than three decades ago.

And Israel receives this military aid under terms that are not available to any other country in the world.

The United States will always have a special relationship with Israel, but it is not an exclusive relationship; we should stop taking actions that tolerate Israel's brutal behavior against neighbors who have little means of self-protection.

If we are not going to treat the problem as a national security problem, then at least we should adopt a humanitarian stance that puts social justice and human rights at the forefront. We have ignored Israel's criminal behavior for too long.

There have been times in the past when Israel and the U.S. Israeli lobby have overestimated their influence on the Congress and the Jewish-American community, and have overplayed their hands. It is particularly sad that the progressive and democratic values of so many American Jews seem to vanish when the subject of Israel is introduced.

Nevertheless, there appears to be a greater recognition today of the need for fair-mindedness on Israeli-Palestinian issues; finally, there are Jewish-American groups such as the J Street Lobby calling for negotiations and a two-state solution.

President George H.W. Bush survived his refusal to subsidize the illegal settlements. President Obama may find that there is more support out there for a tougher stance on these issues. Only a U.S. president can force the Israelis into good sense.

Hopefully, one of these days, there will be an Israeli leader who will understand that their illegal settlements are far more dangerous to Israeli (and American) national security than anything the Iranians might develop or even deploy. 

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. [This story originally appeared at Truthout.org.]

Israel and The Status Quo

Ain't That The Truth!

Israel Won't Change Unless the Status Quo Has a Downside

Tuesday 23 March 2010

by: Tony Karon  |  TomDispatch.com

Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -- who represents the interests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry -- called for a halt. "Let's cut the family fighting, the family feud," he said. "It's unnecessary; it's destructive of our shared national interest. It's time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the U.S. and Israel. It just doesn't serve anybody's interests but our enemies."

The idea that the U.S. and Israel are "family" with identical national interests is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow Israel partisans have worked relentlessly to promote -- and enforce -- in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed familial, however, last week's showdown between Washington and the Netanyahu government may be counted as one of those feuds in which truths are uttered in the heat of the moment that call into question the fundamental terms of the relationship. Such truths are never easily swept under the rug once the dispute is settled. The immediate rupture, that is, precludes a simple return to the status quo ante; instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends up on the agenda.

Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now working feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on from a contretemps that began when the Israelis ambushed Vice President Joe Biden, announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. He was, of course, in Israel to promote the Obama administration's failing efforts to rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal regularly spurned by Israel's continued construction on land occupied in 1967.

Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from the Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand that they completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead, they will shamelessly offer to continue their settlement activity on a "don't-ask-don't-tell" basis, professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to placate the Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects on the ground.

There is, as former Secretary of State James Baker has noted, no shortage of chutzpah in this Israeli government. "United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government," Baker said in a recent interview. "Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect U.S. policy on settlements."

The General Joins the Fray

Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over, but make no mistake, it opened Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional wisdom of unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public arena the way U.S. administrations over the past two decades have enabled that country's ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such a policy is compatible with U.S. national interests in the Middle East.

Back in 2006, the realist foreign policy thinkers John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad hominem abuse for suggesting in their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, that the goals pursued by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds -- and that partisans motivated by Israel's interests lobbied aggressively to skew U.S. foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also heaped derision on the suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned by President George W. Bush that the U.S. would not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East without first settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Response to the reiteration, last week, of the idea that Israel's behavior might be jeopardizing U.S. interests has been strikingly muted by comparison. That's because it came from General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which oversees America's two wars of the moment. He is the most celebrated U.S. military officer of his generation, and a favorite of those most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neocons.

Petraeus told Senators on Wednesday: "The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in [Centcom's] AOR [Area of Responsibility]." He added, "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas." He also stressed that "progress toward resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the 

Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom."

Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neocons and other Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest that those who argue for the linkage made by Petraeus are naive in their belief that al-Qaeda would give up its jihad if only Israel and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the way, is a straw-man argument of the first order: The U.S. has done plenty on its own to antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for repairing relations between the U.S. and the citizenry of many Muslim countries.

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a profession of trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of (or hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured that "Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel." His conclusion: "This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive."

You can, in fact, hear the pain in Foxman's admission that "it is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero." That Petraeus chose to make his concerns public at the height of a public showdown between Israel and the U.S., and to do so on Capitol Hill, where legislators seemed uncertain how to respond, signaled the seriousness of the uniformed military in pressing the issue.

Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark Perry caught the special significance of this at Foreign Policy's website: "There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers -- and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military." He noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested the Palestinian territories -- over which Israel continues to exercise sovereign military control -- be included under Centcom's area of responsibility, a prospect that would make Israel's leadership apoplectic.

It's not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular animus, or affection, for the Jewish state. It's that, in his institutional role as the commander of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops stationed across what Washington strategists like to call the "arc of instability," he is concerned about aggravating hostility towards the United States.

The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and force a political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is hardly novel for America's unsentimental men in uniform. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former U.S. Mideast envoy General Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their formative experiences of the region in the course of massive U.S. military deployments there, were on the same page as Petraeus is today.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the U.S. officer responsible for creating and training the Palestinian Authority security force that has cracked down on West Bank militants and restrained them from attacking Israel over the past few years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in a speech in Washington last year. He emphasized the premise on which the force was built, and withstood charges from within its own community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: its soldiers believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be taken for granted: "There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you're creating a state, when you're not."

Vice President Biden, too, was quoted in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -- behind closed doors -- over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it would put at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The Tough-Love Solution

In public, of course, Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Joe Lieberman's "family" album: "From my experience, the one precondition for progress [in the Middle East] is that the rest of the world knows this -- there is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to security, none. That's the only time that progress has been made."

In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama administration is now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in the unconditional American support for Israel that has become a third rail in national politics over the past two decades. They lie in the national interest-based tough love of the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across the Middle East -- at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops on the ground there -- the first Bush administration recognized the need to balance Israel's reasonable interests with those of its Arab neighbors. That's why, in 1991, it dragged Israel's hawkish Likud government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference, and so broke Israel's "security" taboo on direct engagement with Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The Bush administration also made it clear that there would be immediate and painful consequences for Israel if it continued building settlements on land conquered in the war of 1967, construction which the U.S. was then willing to term not only "unhelpful" -- the preferred euphemism of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama -- but illegal. Under the direction of Bush family consigliere and Secretary of State Jim Baker, Washington threatened to withdraw $10 billion in loan guarantees if Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory continued. In the resulting political crisis, Israelis -- mindful of their dependency on U.S. support -- voted Shamir out of office and chose Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.

Rabin has been rightly lionized as a leader who took a courageous decision to change course in the face of bitter domestic opposition. To understand how Israel started down the path of peace, however, it's necessary to clean the Vaseline off the lens of history and quiet the string section.

Only three years earlier, Rabin had ordered Israeli troops to use baseball bats to break the limbs of stone-throwing teenagers in hopes of stopping the Palestinian intifada or uprising. He certainly did not embrace the Oslo peace process with the PLO out of some moral epiphany. He changed course thanks to a cold-blooded assessment of Israel's strategic position at the time.

The United States then had a growing stake in creating a regional Pax Americana that required Arab support. Given the end of the Cold War, Israel's value as an ally was diminishing, while its expansionist policies, antagonizing Arab public opinion and making it more difficult for vulnerable regional governments to ally with Israel's enabler, were increasingly a liability for Washington.

Rabin had reason to believe that U.S. support for Israel at the expense of its neighbors would prove neither unconditional nor eternal. At the same time, the PLO had been weakened by years of Israeli military attacks and by a disastrous diplomatic blunder -- it had aligned itself with Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. It was a fortuitous moment, he concluded, to press for a political solution with the Palestinians on favorable terms, by trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.

Where are the Consequences?

Rabin acted because the consequences of maintaining the status quo seemed increasingly unpleasant, which takes nothing away from his courage in doing so. The same could be said for South Africa's last white President, F.W. de Klerk. He opted to negotiate an end to apartheid with Nelson Mandela's ANC because the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed the most persuasive rationale the U.S. and other Western powers had for backing his white-rule regime. Similarly, it's unlikely that the Soviet political system would have put Mikhail Gorbachev in power if the KGB hadn't determined that far-reaching changes were necessary to prevent Moscow from being eclipsed as a superpower, thanks to Western economic and technological advances.

If U.S. pressure and the specter of isolation and opprobrium pushed Israel onto the path of a two-state solution, the easing of that pressure and the creation of the "familial" notion of U.S.-Israel ties have coincided with a steady movement away from completing the peace process. Even at the height of the Oslo era, coddled by Clinton, the Israelis kept on expanding the settlements that jeopardized geographic prospects for Palestinian statehood.

The Israeli opposition, led by Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, sought to prove Rabin wrong. They were convinced that American support could be maintained without conceding Palestinian statehood -- by making constant end runs around the Oval Office and appealing directly to Capitol Hill and U.S. public opinion.

Sharon and Netanyahu were vindicated in spades when the suicide-terror strategy taken up by the second Palestinian intifada and the attacks of 9/11 led George W. Bush's administration to reconceptualize the world on the basis of its "Global War on Terror." This, in turn, led Washington's political class to accept Israel not as just another ally in that war, but as a model for how to conduct it.

In the Bush years, the peace process and the two-state solution became a hollow catechism that could be mouthed by Israeli leaders (and their supporters in Washington), while getting on with the task of smashing the Palestinian national movement and expanding settlements. In real terms, the peace process -- the series of reciprocal moves designed to build confidence for concluding final status talks and implementing a two-state solution -- died when Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001.

Even his 2005 withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza was never conceived in terms of a peace process; it wasn't even negotiated or coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, in fact, imagined his unilateral withdrawal as a substitute for a peace agreement. It was designed, as Sharon's top aide Dov Weissglass so memorably explained, as a dose of "formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

Despite mounting Arab exasperation, the Bush administration put no pressure on Israel to bring the peace process to a conclusion, limiting itself to the Grand Guignol of the "Annapolis process." With all external compulsion to conclude a peace agreement removed, domestic political pressure in Israel not surprisingly collapsed as well. The Palestinians were now largely locked behind the vast separation wall that winds through the West Bank and the siege lines of Gaza. Their plight is once again invisible to Israelis, only 40% of whom, when asked by pollsters, even express an interest in seeing the peace process restarted. Only around 20% believe that such a move would bring any results.

"Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights," wrote Israeli political commentator Gideon Levy in Haaretz last week. "Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation doesn't just endanger Israel's future, it also poses the greatest risk to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel's most dangerous enemies. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and condescending Israel of today."

The Obama administration can't be under any illusions on this score. And they are being forced to confront it by another kind of pressure. The bills are coming due for Bush's War-on-Terror adventurism. Those responsible for maintaining the U.S. imperium in the Muslim world are now raising warning flags that the price to be paid for continuing to indulge Israel in evading its obligation to offer a fair settlement to the Palestinians could be high -- and, worse than that, unnecessary.

Israel's leaders, and its voters, have amply demonstrated that they will not voluntarily relinquish control of the Palestinian territories as long as there are no real consequences for maintaining the status quo. Sure, you can tell them that the status quo is untenable, but the whole history of Israel from the 1920s onward has been about transforming the impossible into the inevitable by changing the facts on the ground. Building settlements on occupied territory in violation of international law after 1967 seemed untenable at the time; today, the U.S. government says Israel will keep most of those major settlement blocs in any two-state solution. It is precisely in line with this sort of improvisational logic that Sharon calculated he could hold on to the settlements of the West Bank if he gave up the settlements of Gaza; the same logic allows Netanyahu to say the words "two states for two peoples" while always winking at his base that he has no intention of allowing it to happen.

A peace process that requires Israel and the Palestinians to reach a bilateral consensus on the distribution of land and power under the prodding of U.S matchmakers is a non-starter -- and therefore unlikely to lead to a goal which is of increasing urgency in America's national interest. Arguably, it's increasingly important even for the Israelis, since the status quo has already eroded prospects for a two-state solution to the point where both sides may be consigned to an even longer and bitterer conflict.

Hence, the necessity of correcting Vice President Biden: progress in the Middle East will not come until the U.S. changes Israel's cost-benefit analysis for maintaining the status quo. The only Israeli leader capable of accepting the parameters of a two-state peace with the Palestinians, which are already widely known, is one who can convincingly demonstrate to his electorate that the alternatives are worse. Right now, without real pressure, without real cost, with nothing but words, there is simply no downside to the status quo for Israel. Until there is, things are unlikely to change, no matter the peril to U.S. troops throughout the Middle East.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. He also runs his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Copyright 2010 Tony Karon
 

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