[Mr 5 0]

Mustang17:

You wrote:

Please, someone tell me I'm wrong, and our money is being spent for good cause.

Yes, you're wrong, our money is being spent for a good cause.

Here's why.

There are 350 million Arabs surrounding less than 6 million Israelis on a sliver of land that the Israelis have made productive and habitable over the past 50 to 75 years. The Israelis are fighting for survival. Not land, not oil, not power. To say we fund the state of Israel because of 'oil' is to totally misunderstand the mid-east situation at this time in history.

It's easy to dismiss this seemingly endless conflict as a bunch of strange people who don't matter to us having a war we shouldn't have to care about.

Actually, we do that in Africa. There have been many bloody, horrible civil wars in Africa over the past ten years and the U.S. has done little to intervene other than to send humanitarian aid, which was stolen and wasted. So, yes, the U.S. is quite capable of ignoring messy situations when the countries involved don't have an impact on America in any substantial way. Feel better now?

Unfortunately, the mid-east is mostly comprised of dictators, kings and millions of Muslim fanatics who do matter to us, very much. Israel is a tiny democracy in a sea of despots and we choose to support democracy. We've done so since we recognized Israel as a sovereign nation 13 minutes after they declared themself so in 1948. You could say that the U.S. and Israel go way back. We also agree that Israel has a right to exist, something the Arabs - violently - disagree on.

Yet we try to maintain decent relationships with the Arabs (we send hefty humanitarian aid to the Palestinians all the time) and we do send Israel 5.5 billion in aid every year, half of it for military aid, most of which comes back to us when the Israelis buy our weapons. Money well spent. It's also helpful to note that Israel has never asked for U.S. troops to help them in their various conflicts with the surrounding Arab states. They are quite willing to go it alone in that regard, to their credit.

The U.S. also funds 'moderate' Arab states like Eqypt (1.3 billion in 2001) and Jordan (75 million the same year). We do this, partly as a reward to those Arab countries who have signed peace agreements with Israel and partly to maintain a working relationship with them and to be able to act as a broker in the ongoing disputes between the Arab-supported PLO, er, sorry 'Palestianian Authority' and Israel.

Oil is a part of that, for sure. Tell the Democrats that next time President Bush wants to drill on one tiny section of a deserted Alaska plain in order to at least begin to decrease our dependence on foreign oil and the Democrats kill the bill that would allow this to happen, crying about 'the environment' in a frozen wasteland that no American will ever even come within a thousand miles of.

Yes, we do need oil, but not simply for those SUV's you despise so much (or high-performance Mustangs, either). Industry runs on oil, my friend. Many American homes are heated with oil, too. Did you forget that? Oil products are used in thousands of industries as lubricants and the list goes on. It's more than SUV's...a lot more.

Frankly, if it was 'just about oil', all the U.S. would have to do is abandon Israel (they have no oil) and the Arabs would be overjoyed and probably cut oil prices way down in appreciation - as they destroyed Israel and the hated Jews. No, it's not that easy.

It's also about disputed land; the much-touted 'occupied' Palestinian territories on the West Bank and Gaza. Try to stay with me now, this gets involved.

These areas were originally part of Israel and were seized by Jordan in the late 1940's, shortly after Israel was granted statehood by the U.N.
They were used by Eqypt and Jordan as a launching site for troops and missiles in the 1967 war, instigated by the Arabs, not Israel, incidentally. When Israel defeated the Arabs in that war, they held those strips of land and they have been in dispute ever since, but this fiction of them being 'occupied' as say, the U.S. occupied Germany and Japan after World WarTwo is false. Unfortunately, it's been repeated so many times by the Arabs and their supporters over the years that many people accept it as a fact. It isn't. The fact is that these lands are in dispute and until there is a viable peace agreement with the Arabs and the Israelis, they remain in dispute.

Mr.-Chairman-General-whatever Arafat could have had a peaceful resolution in 2000 at the Camp David summit but Arafat not only rejected a generous peace offer from Israel, one that gave him 98% of what he had been demanding, including the West Bank and Gaza but part of the 'holy' city of Jerusalem , too. Arafat's response? He walked out of the summit and began a terrorist war against Israel that is still raging.

The Palestinian 'refugee' problem is mostly due to the Arab countries refusing to accept a Palestinian-Israeli state in 1948, which was what the U.N. offered. They refused, the 'Palestinians' fled to neighboring Arab states (mostly Jordan and Syria) and five Arab countries declared war on Israel, instead. They lost. The ''Palestinians" (Jordanians, mostly) were then refused as immigrants by Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries and herded into 'camps' by their Arab 'benefactors' on the disputed areas of land and told that someday Israel would be defeated and the Jews pushed into the sea. The 'Palestinians' are still waiting. I put 'Palestinians' in quotes because there never was an actual country of 'Palestine', but a country that was called Palestine and ruled by other nations over the centuries. There was never a Palestine President or government of any kind.

It's a sham of course and these people are simply being used as pawns by the Arab states to attack Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorists acts. Did you know that Arafat is an Eqyptian, not a ''Palestinian"? Make no mistake, Arafat is responsible for thousands of deaths of mostly civilian Israelis from his terrorists over the 35 years he's been the head of the PLO. He wants 'peace' with Israel as much as you want cancer.

The United States has always supported democratic Israel while attempting to reason with the intransigent Arab states. Oil is important but frankly, we could bomb most of the mid-east into smithereens and take over the oil fields if we were not a reasonable people. We are a reasonable, compassionate people.

We don't want a war but I believe that a war has been thrust on us by the Muslim fanatics and those who support them, which is most of the mid-east countries with the exception of Turkey and now, by force, Afghanistan and to a degree, Pakistan.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a side-show, in fact. It may never be totally ended. In the meantime, America supports Israel, a democracy that asks nothing from it's neighbors but to live in peace. The liberal media has taken the slant that since Israel has the army and the weapons, they must be the villians here. Wrong.

Israel is simply attempting to survive, not conquer, a distinction missed by many. It's an important one. If the Israelis wanted to conquer the Palestinians, they could do so in hours, not days. They don't want those little strips of land the Arabs like to call 'occupied'. The Israelis don't want to kill - they want to survive - and America helps them do that, against what would be otherwise impossible odds. 350 to 6 odds in fact.

Your question about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and if we may have to fight him some day is absurd. Calling him a terrorist is also a stretch, but now, everyone is a terrorist, I suppose. It's becoming an overused word, like 'Nazi' once was. Anyone you don't like is a 'terrorist'. Right.

Mr. Sharon was Israeli defense minister in 1982 when a Lebanese Christian militia allied to Israel killed hundreds of civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. He didn't 'attempt to wipe out a race of people'. Where did you get that bit of slander? Al Jazeera TV?

Arab apologists and political enemies of Sharon and Israel are attempting to charge Sharon with 'war crimes'. It's bogus. Get some facts straight before you make wild accusations based on Arab propaganda. By that ridiculous 'legal' reasoning, America, President George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell could be accused of 'war crimes' for heading Desert Storm, the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. I'm certain some civilians died in that brief conflict. It gets looney very quickly, doesn't it?

Any national leader or Defense Minister (Sharons' title in 1982) can be accused of 'war crimes' if any civilians are killed or, let's be honest, if we don't like the side that won the battle or the war. Bull. Most of this 'Sharon is a terrorist' crapola is being used to deflect criticism from Yasser Arafat, the true terrorist, who spoke at the United Nations with a pistol on his hip and preaches 'Peace' in English and 'Kill the Jews' in Arabic. No one with any intelligence is fooled by the smokescreen attempting to shield Arafat by smearing Sharon, who may not be a saint but if you want to compare body counts, Arafat wins handily and for the wrong reason. The Israelis want to live, in peace if possible, Arafat wants them to die - because they are Jews. No land will appease him, no agreement will be honored. He wants Israel to be destroyed. We choose to help Israel defend itself while attempting to remain at least partially open to Palenstinian grievences, which Israel tried to address at Camp David in 2000, but Arafat chose to ignore and wage a terrorism war on Israel, instead. Some 'leader'.

In any case, if you subscribe to the World Court-style legal mumbo-jumbo, you'll buy anything any leftist Arab apologist tells you, which I'm beginning to believe you already have. That would be a shame. You can find fault with Israel but to attempt to portray them and their leaders as some kind of bloodthirsty murderers is flat-out Arab propaganda and you really should know better.

Prime Minister Sharon is 74 years old and will retire in two years when his term of office expires. You see, Israel has elections, not 'kings' like Jordan and Saudi Arabia or dictators like Iraq or mullas running a theocracy like Iran. Learn the difference.

Your basic contention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all a crock is naive and badly uninformed - or misinformed.
Israel is our ally and our friend. The Arabs have oil and little more and they are not, by and large, our friends. September 11th, 2001 proved that once and for all. Maybe you missed it on the news. Afterward, the Palestinians and other Arabs danced in the streets in celebration. No Israelis danced in the streets to celebrate 3,000 dead Americans to my knowledge, but yet some people would attempt to paint both groups as equally useless to U.S. interests in that region. That's quite naive, at best.

America is in a war on terrorism and that will include many of the Arab states before it's all over. Islam is a major threat to the West as it's used to feed hatred and terrorism and terrorism is funded by states like Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born.

Make no mistake, we're in a real war and naive statements about Sharon and Israel being 'terrorists' don't help and simply show a complete lack of knowledge about the dangerous situation in the middle east.

I suggest you do some homework and try to understand the moral and practical imperative driving President Bush and the United States as it stands behind him in the war on terrorism. Don't be distracted by Arab apologists who spout 'occupation', 'Sharon is a terrorist' and other nonsense unsupported by the facts, which are readily available if you take the time to look.

The answer to your original question: "is it just me..."?

Yes, it's just you, but then, I'm sure that once you've educated yourself a bit more you'll see that and drop the bumper-sticker slogan mentality about a very serious subject that deserves a bit more thought than you've probably given it. I hope so.