Great op-ed by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times today says that it’s time for the US to get out of the Middle East, the same way it got out of Vietnam. You’ve shot your wad here. Maybe you can come back later as a friend. The piece includes repeated references to Israel as our client state over there:

Franklin D. Roosevelt was only slightly more conciliatory when, in 1940, he proposed mollifying dispossessed Palestinian Arabs with a “little baksheesh.” … It is not just extremist Salafis who think Americans always have malevolent intentions: the Egyptian anti-Islamist demonstrators who pelted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s motorcade in Alexandria with rotten eggs in July were convinced that America was making shady deals with the Muslim Brotherhood. And few people in the Muslim world have missed the Israeli prime minister’s blatant manipulation of American politics for the sake of a pre-emptive assault on Iran…. Although it’s politically unpalatable to mention it during an election campaign, the case for a strategic American retreat from the Middle East and Afghanistan has rarely been more compelling. It’s especially strong as growing energy independence reduces America’s burden for policing the region, and its supposed ally, Israel, shows alarming signs of turning into a loose cannon… America’s retrenchment is inevitable. The only question is whether it will be as protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly assertive Asia and Africa.

A lot to chew on there. Bruce Wolman anticipated this, writing here that the I/P conflict will be resolved when the Arab countries kick us out of the Middle East… Fawaz Gerges wrote in The Nation that Israel was just a crusader kingdom, doomed to a short life… Jeff Halper has said recently that Israel could be turning out not like South Africa but Algeria… Finally, I wonder whether NYT op-ed editor Sasha Polakow-Suransky, whose book The Unspoken Alliance repeatedly describes Israel as a “pariah nation,” words that are unspoken at the Times, is smuggling that intelligence into the Times with such fine op-eds as this one. A vital journalistic contribution.