Thanks for the link to your previous article Glenn:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/enforced-orthodoxies-and-iran.html

I agree with everything you wrote there, but there is an important reason for American support of Israel that is not discussed there.

Israel is important to American political leaders because it is seen as a crucial strategic ally in the most important part of the world.

The US is utterly dependent upon foreign oil (2/3 to 3/4 of the oil we use is imported). Not necessarily Middle Eastern oil, since we tend to get our oil imports from Canada, Mexico, etc. But since the oil market is global, and the Middle East supplies a large share of the world's oil and the world's oil exports, if Middle Eastern oil was taken off the market, the result would be skyrocketing oil prices which would cripple the US economy.

The free flow of Middle Eastern oil to the global oil market has been a top foreign policy goal of the US for literally decades, and is stated explicitly in the Carter Doctrine.

This is important because Israel is a strong and unambiguous ally, right in the heart of the Middle East. They are a potential base of operations if we need to intervene militarily in the region, but usually simply act as a proxy, doing the work for us so we don't have to.

It's true that we have other allies in the region, such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar. But these countries often show more independence than we would like, or our coziness with their governments causes problems of it's own (bin Laden began his crusade against the US because we stationed our forces in Saudi Arabia - something he viewed as infidels occupying the Holy Land).

There are other ancillary reasons too - such as the Israelis are jews, not muslims, and therefore have closer religious ties with the West. Race plays a part too, since the Israelis

look like white europeans, not dark arabs, etc. But those kinds of reasons just reinforce the primary reason for such support, and do not really explain it.

Anyway, if the Middle East's only export was dates or figs, and it didn't have any oil to sell, I doubt you would see the kind of rabid support for Israel among our political elites - it would probably take the form of more garden variety interest group politics.

Do we use Israel as a base of operations in our mid-east wars? Do they do our work for us, or do we do theirs? Are their services so valuable that its OK to piss off those that sell us the oil we need?

The answer to the first question is usually no - but we could if push came to shove, and that's important.

Of course we sometimes do their work for them - the Iraq war is a good example, as was all the belligerence directed towards Iran in recent years. However, taking down Iraq was still viewed as in the interest of the US - it removed a anti-American dictator from one of the countries most endowed with oil wealth. The US has been itching to take out Saddam for quite a while - even the Clinton Administration's goal in Iraq was regime change.

As for the final question, the answer is Yes. The US has never tried to maintain good relations with the Middle Eastern oil producers. The deal is, and always has been, that we will support any government, even brutal, authoritarian regimes, in return for a promise to keep the oil flowing. When a governement arises in one of these places that might not want to continue this arrangement, we step in and "fix" the situation. Either we engineer a coup (put the Shah in power in Iran) or we simply take them out ourselves, as we did with Saddam in Iraq. Our government doesn't care if the Saudi population hates us, as long as the Saudi monarchy keeps the oil taps open.

I'll admit that the relationship has become so cozy and reflexive that the US does at times put Iraeli interests above US interests. An attack on Iran, which looked very possible a couple of years ago, and which was talked about repeatedly by Bush and other political leaders, would have been a case in point. But even there, it would have been an attack on an anti-American regime in a large oil producing country, which still fits the pattern of American foreign policy in the region since WWII.