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How About America First?

A selfishly American foreign policy need not stand in opposition to Israeli aims. It would simply recognize that the United States might, on occasion, need to look to its interests and merely be indifferent to how securing those interests might impact Israel. For evidence that the Bush administration is reluctant to do this, look no […]

A selfishly American foreign policy need not stand in opposition to Israeli aims. It would simply recognize that the United States might, on occasion, need to look to its interests and merely be indifferent to how securing those interests might impact Israel.

For evidence that the Bush administration is reluctant to do this, look no further than Washington’s oddly delayed—if not criminal—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi effort to get American citizens out from underneath Israeli airstrikes. Sweden, using the new superpower assets of cell phone text messaging and chartered cruise ships, managed to get 5,000 Swedes out of Lebanon before the U.S. even had a plan to evacuate its citizens. Sweden did this without the benefit of an embassy in Beirut.

By contrast, it took nine days to get the Marines ashore to rescue Americans. ~Jeff Taylor, Reason

Via Antiwar

Of course, Sweden has such strange priorities, looking after its own citizens first.  How very parochial and limited of them.  It probably has something to do with their socialised health care, as legions of GOP drones will be ready to inform us.  Didn’t the Swedes get the memo about World War Eight?

On a more serious note, Mr. Taylor properly points to the dangerous precedent Mr. Bush’s laissez faire approach to Israel in Lebanon (the only kind of laissez faire the man has ever approved of) creates for Turkey to cite in going after the old PKK currently taking refuge in northern Iraq.  I’m just waiting for the crowd of pundits to start complaining about the Kurdish “state within a state” and the failure of Baghdad to assert sovereignty over its territory–I may be waiting for some time.

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