Accepting Various Truths

No one in the Obama administration is going to acknowledge that our foreign policy in the Middle East has alienated many Arabs.

The U.S. pro-Israel policy and our shocking neglect of the beleaguered
Palestinians underlie almost every initiative or tactical tilt that
comes out of Washington.

President
Obama and his predecessors in the White House have scored domestic
political points by embracing this world view. This is one vantage
point that is truly bipartisan, to the point where no one discusses it.

Michael
Scheuer, a former CIA specialist on the al-Qaida terrorists, complained
on C-SPAN recently that any debate about American support for Israel is
"normally squelched."

"For anyone to say our support for Israel doesn't hurt us is to just defy reality," he added.

Another
former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, says the 9/11 Commission report noted
that Khalid Sheikh -- the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks --
cited his violent disagreement with U.S. support for Israel as the
motivating dynamic behind the attacks.

Obama knows enough about
the Middle East that tightening airport security is not the whole
answer to fighting terrorism. He should try a more even-handed policy
in the region.

Grievances of the Arab man on the street include
bitter criticism of the U.S. for supporting harsh authoritarian regimes
in the Arab world and the failure of those U.S.-backed regimes to help
the Palestinians in Gaza.

Surely after several years of war in
Iraq and Afghanistan, we can dispense with the obfuscation and evasion
that flood forth from official U.S. megaphones.

Terrorism spawned in the Middle East is not the only threat we face.

As
the American economy digs out from the debris of the Great Recession
triggered by the collapse of the housing bubble, we should think about
what could happen about another bubble that invisibly chugs through the
American economy.

I refer to our bloated defense spending.

The
United States spends more for its arsenal than any other 10 countries
combined. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, the U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the world's
total military spending. China is in second place, at a relatively puny
5.8 percent.

If the U.S. defense spending bubble were ever to
deflate, domestic job losses would be catastrophic, a stunning fact
that raises the question of whether we can ever afford peace.

The
American people have long shown they can handle the truth. When it
comes to the Middle East and to threats to our economy, so should our
leaders.