So, something like 1300 people died in the Gaza fighting. Several US offensive in Iraq produced worse numbers. An average weekend in an African civil war gets much worse than that. Yet, we don't hear the same level of rhetoric about either. Why is that? The lack of news crews in the fighting?

If Israel were using drugged-up kidnapped child soldiers to hack peoples limbs off with machetes and used rape as a weapon and nobody took a picture of it, would people still make as much sound?

"But that misses the point. The real question is whether Israel's actions make Israel safer in the long run"

Probably, yes. They silenced the Hamas rockets and showed the price for lobbing bombs at Israeli cities.

"and did they improve the chances for peace in the Holy Land?"

The chances for peace in the "Holy land" are the same as before.

Bill Clinton needed Al Gore to break the tie in the senate with no republicans voting for his budget. The economic powerhouse of the 1990's started with that republican-free vote. It is apparently time for Obama to repeat history and pass a republican-free budget that gets America over a bad Bush economy.

The republicans want Obama to fail, and for the economy to stay bad for four more years. The dems will never make the republicans happy, so they should stop trying.

If the dems had pushed a bill they liked through congress without any republican votes and gloated about it, they would look arrogant and vindictive. As it is, the democrats are pushing a bill they like through congress without any republican votes and the REPUBLICANS look arrogant and vindictive.

With Obama you really don't know what he is doing, because he is very good at politics, much better than me. I didn't understand that get-together with conservative opinion makers. It seemed like a silly thing to do. When you see Rush Limbaugh fly off the handle and start ranting as he was not invited, you realize what was going on. You can't exclude someone from a gathering of their friends if you don't invite their friends to a party.

And they have the airwaves. The republicans are going to do as much damage between now and the next elections while the talking heads on the news blame the democrats for things not getting better. It is sad to see how quickly things have turned sour.

How did Reagan's handlers deal with his obvious mental incompetence in front of foreign leaders? The most striking example was Reagan proposing to Gorbachev that the US eliminate it's nuclear arsenal in exchange for a missile defense system. Gorbachev must have left that meeting knowing that the US nuclear trigger was in the hands of an irrational senile kook with an overactive fantasy world that he was unable to distinguish from reality.

What gets me about the military is that it is almost entirely a waste, as the US can't defeat nations such as Iraq or Somalia. Nations like Iran and North Korea are completely out of our league. We have a WWII-style military, as that is what we had then the contractors took over. We keep losing wars with the WWII military, and we keep funding it. You would think that we would have gotten the message in the Vietnam war that the heyday of tanks and aircraft carriers has been over for a while.

For a reality check, the people in aircraft carriers knew that they were in WWII-era public works projects in the 1970's. The nickname for an aircraft carrier was "Target" as they were totally defenceless against the multi-warhead ICBMs that were aimed at them 24/7. Now they are sort of useful against non-nuclear nations that don't buy conventional anti-carrier missiles from Russia, but they don't justify their extreme costs.

For all of the trillions we waste on the military, a gang of irate rich people can bomb our financial and military centres without the military stopping the attacks.

Hamas' attacks have radicalized a generation of Israelis. For every Israeli that they kill with their missiles they create 100 soldiers for the IDF. Peace will only be possible when Hamas and others in the area realize that there is no military solution to Israel, and only diplomacy can work.

Is that the same way that 40 years of Israeli occupations, settlement expansions, walls, blockades and attacks "have radicalized a generation of Palestinians" -- or is it totally different?

Pretty much, yes. Both sides have been killing each other, and both sides have entrenched "Us vs. Them" mentalities and "Us vs. them" governments.

I think the second intifada sealed things for the Palestinians for a generation at least. The US sat everyone down and made them negotiate, and the Palestinians walked away at the last minute. I don't know if there can ever be peace, but Israel can manage the violence against it's citizens. You don't like their methods, but a lot fewer Israelis are killed by terrorists these days.

A couple of questions:

How would Israel benefit from a renewed peace process? At all?

What would make the people currently cursing Israel start liking Israel?

If there is no real benefit to the peace process and the people cursing Israel will never stop cursing it until Israel stops existing, then why should the Israelis listen to these criticisms or try for peace?

I personally gave up on peace in the middle east anytime in my life when Yasser Arafat called the second intifada. After all of that work, grief, and bombings all the US and Israel got for their troubles was a rebellion. Sharon may have been provocative, but Israel didn't walk out on the negotiations despite the bombings in Israel.

Israel needs a real reason to consider peace and a real belief that peace is possible. Their current methods of dealing with the missile attacks from Lebanon and the Gaza strip are heavy handed, but they have also been effective at stopping the attacks.