Applying NIMBY To The Middle East

In An Inconvenient Truth, Marty Peretz writes that apparently the reason that Obama is only pressing Israel is that, well, there actually no other country for Obama to apply pressure to:

What dismays me most about Barack Obama's Middle East initiative is that the only country in the area he seems to be pressing is Israel. He is not pressing Egypt and perhaps that's because there is nothing that Cairo can give. Maybe I'll be surprised by the presidential visit to Riyadh, but he is, thus far, also not pressing Saudi Arabia and its king to whom he offered at the G-20 meeting rather curious and extravagant homage. If you read A Safe Haven by Allis and Ronald Radosh (reviewed by me in the Wall Street Journal) you'll see how King Ibn Saud was flattered by F.D.R. and took that flattery as an index of his actual power. Roosevelt reinforced the illusion.

There's no point in Obama pressing the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan either: poor Abdullah, as opposed to the very rich one mentioned above, has no compromises to make. He sits on a Palestinian powder keg suppressed permanently by his political police. And, however much George Mitchell sips tea with President Assad, the special envoy won't be able to match Iran's armament emoluments to always ambitious Syria. I trust that the president won't drop into Damascus. Lebanon is a mess. It may have a government of some kind after the coming elections. The real question is whether it will be a country.

Now, of course, Palestine is really not a country either... or, at least, not yet.

Read the whole thing.

Not suprisingly, when there is no one else to demand concessions from--everyone knows that you can always demand something more from Israel. It reminds we of the scene where someone asks a line of people to volunteer--and everyone except for one person steps back.

Israel is that person.

Every time.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Obama.