Again with the $450 million in military aid the US supposedly gave the PA. Got a source for that, other than your fevered imagination?

The FAS links are to CRS reports. Call me crazy, but I think the Congressional Research Service can run down the numbers of how much money Congress gave in aid.

Yup, I was using "quibble" in its ordinary sense, which is how you took it. We could have a much longer discussion about this, which maybe we can pick up in a future thread.

My reservations about "threat", in brief: Caroline Faraj's story sort of demonstrates it. As I said previously, the opportunity for Hamas to agitate in areas where people might be receptive is pretty small. Likewise the opportunity for 'direct action', which has gotten smaller since the hotel attacks of a couple years ago. The security services for one, which are very good, are on it. The window is not non-existent ... but I don't see this as a 'threat' to Abdullah. Ditto in the Gulf states, where one size of monarchy does not fit all, nor the level of dissatisfaction.

Coupling this with ideas about 'the Arab street' makes it a bit more misleading; not so much your coupling as the way the concept is put to use to argue a variety of (western) positions which seem to follow a script ... and don't have any basis for representing 'popular opinion'.

My arguments about the 'Arab street' would probably be different than Electros. It isn't that such a thing doesn't exist, it's that it exists in superabundance relative to how its channeled in the media.

After working in the middle east during much of the 80s, and living and working in the region for the past several years (and having been professionally involved with Arab journalists and personally interested in public opinion), I've seen alot of 'Arab street' that does not go into that description when it gets channeled as Vox Pop by western media (or sometimes Arab or pan-Arab media, due to ownership structures, red lines, etc). Some of that is normal, but alot of it is either ignorant or intentional. The 'street' is so diverse you can get 'it' (which is, as you said, different in different parts of the Arab world, sometimes night and day) to say almost anything you want ... and this is precisely what so many outlets do. Hence my reservation.

(Maybe if we continue this discussion, I would also add some of the cultural, contextual, historical and linguistic barriers that seem to show up in our coverage of MENA ... I wouldn't want to go all Edward Said, some of my observations came via the inter-ocular trauma method ... )

BTW, a good stateside source for views on the Arab media is Marc Lynch's blog, abuaardvark.typepad.com ... also, Jon Alterman at CSIS, who doesn't focus on the media per se, is a smart guy who is sensitive to these kinds of issues. Others if you're interested.

I posted an extract from Stratfor in a previous thread opining that the US (and not Israel) 'revealed' the Syrian site details against Israel's expressed wishes because they were unhappy with recent diplomatic moves by Israel re the Golan. I think it noted the 'momentum' behind the diplomacy with Turkey showing up.

So why would the US oppose such a move? If there was a parade toward peace, the administration would better accomplish its objectives by getting in front of the parade, which it could do in some fashion with two key allies involved.

Speculation: Either some detail on the table was so unacceptable, and so impossibly to dislodge or stall by simply sending a diplomat along to accomplish that, or it interferes with other plans in the neighborhood; hard to have the allies you would want to say are watching your back, or on whose behalf you are taking some provocative action, if those allies are at that moment sitting down and making peace with other people on your Axis of Evil list. We'll see, I guess.

OT, but a friend just sent me this and I thought I would share (the theme of ethnotribalism and the first doctor being Israelis is my thin justification for posting it in this thread):

An Israeli doctor says, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we

can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him looking

for work in six weeks."

A German doctor says, "That is nothing, we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks.

A Russian doctor says "In my country, medicine is so advanced that we

can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them

both looking for work in two weeks."

The Texas doctor, not to be outdone, says, "You guys are way behind, we recently took a man with no brains out of Texas, put him in the White House for eight years, and now half the country is looking for work."

Thanks for that very interesting link ... good info.

I assume you would agree, though, that even if this invalidates my example (I'm not sure it does ... adding updated avionics to a 'shell' ... engines? other components ... gives the Israeli def industry a heft and buyers some flexibility, but they still can't source anywhere else for F-16s), that the point about asset specificity still applies to any number of other items in the defense 'basket'?