Skip to main content

Obama and Israel

I find it unsettling that people are apprehensive of Obama's foreign policy as it pertains to US-Israel relations. Many have declared Obama's willingness to negotiate with Iran as a lack of commitment to Israel. While I can understand Israeli/Jewish people's initial reservation to endorsing a man with a Muslim sounding name, I disagree with the idea that he will be any less of a friend of Israel. Here are my reasons for not fearing diplomacy and Obama.
  1. Diplomacy and negotiation rarely hurt. A policy of refusing to negotiate leads to dead ends in a world that desperately needs paths for peaceful resolutions. While Bush's commitment to Israel is very strong, it has appeared very blind and stupid to a fault. Most people would agree that Israel's security is worse off now than it was in 2000 mainly because Bush's Iraq policy has strengthened Iran which poses the greatest threat to Israel.
  2. It is ironic that while the Bush administration is busy not talking to Syria, Israel has gone ahead and started fairly promising negotiations with Syria.
  3. It is ironic that while the Bush administration largely dismisses diplomacy against terrorist nations (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria), the one notable foreign policy success they had was achieved through diplomacy with North Korea.
Thomas L. Friedman's article articulates the relationship between Obama and the Jews much more intelligently. He also discusses an equally significant component of this equation which is the [im]balance of power, or the shift thereof. In a world transitioning from the one-superpower state of the last 20 years to a more diverse balance of power, cowboy diplomacy fails even more disastrously. That's why the diplomacy and negotiation Obama advocates is critical to the future of the US and the world. An America weakened and isolated due to bad foreign policy decisions will not be able to give Israel any sense of security.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Distribution of Wealth in the US

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I heard this statement quite a bit lately particularly in light of the sub-prime mortgage and general housing crisis in the US. The country has enjoyed significant economic prosperity and both Clinton and Bush boasted economic growth under their reign. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of the economic boom are not people from all economic backgrounds, but rather the top 10%. To make things worse, Bush gave tax cuts mainly targeting the top 10%. Being more of a numbers guy, I always wanted showing the validity of the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer statement. Thanks to Wikipedia , I have finally found it!! Both the mean and median net worth of families for the bottom 50% of the population has remained absolutely flat while the 75th-90th percentile see a decent growth and the top 10% enjoy the most appreciation on their net worth. So, if you factor in inflation, the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer probably holds true. The g...
1 comment
Read more

Correlation Between Finger Length and Aggression/Success/Homosexuality

I came across an interesting article on BBC (Finger length 'key to aggression' ) today and The Economist has a similar article ( Neuroeconomics: Digitally enhanced ). They report a positive correlation between the length of mens' ring fingers and their success in high-stress securities trading. Actually, the more correct comparison s between the ratio of the ring to index finger and success/aggression. In women, the ring and index fingers are comparable, however the ring finger is significantly longer than the index finger in men. In this study, the researchers only looked at men's fingers. Apparently the level of testerone in a fetus is exposed to during pregnancy affects length of fingers as well as the level of aggression. More aggressive traders tend to have longer ring fingers and they happen to be more successful, after factoring out the effect of experience. They also reached a similar conclusion when looking at college students. Having a short ring finger...
Post a Comment
Read more

Online Storage Solutions

Problem: I often need to have some files readily available online so that I can access them from any computer. There are many ways to go about solving this problem and each comes with its set of shortcomings: Yahoo! Briefcase - 30MB limit Online storage services like Box.net, Xdrive, MediaMax - usually cost money; signing up is cumbersome Email to myself as an attachment - enough said there It's time to find a home-made solution. The solution I am about to suggest is intended for -- A *NIX user someone with access to a *NIX web server Solution: I am a linux user and I have user level access to a web server. The web server is configured such that the public does not have access to directory structure. So, I would need to write a script that copies my files to the web server and creates an index listing my files. Password protection of the storage would follow after that. Client Side: Use the following script to transfer file to server, make the file readable by public and execu...
Post a Comment
Read more