<<And if you want to be completely cynical, keeping Israel over there to occupy the ragheads helps keep them from getting any funny ideas about forming an actual working Pan-Arab alliance which just might become another major power - even a superpower - and would introduce a whole new problem in that oil-rich region. OPEC is quite enough to deal with. >>
If I wanted to be completely cynical? Come on, Pooch, put that old imagination to work. If I wanted to be completely cynical, I'd have to say that Zio-Nazi bribe money, of which AIPAC, I can tell you from personal knowledge, is but the tip of the iceberg, will keep the unbelievably corrupt U.S. Congress on the side of Israel for a very, very, very long time. As the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty should have told any thinking observer.
<<Israel keeps them all jockeying for power while trying to avoid getting on Big Brother's hit list. Eliminate Israel and they could have enough free time on their hands to start thinking about mergers. It could be like a wall-street orgy with five breaks a day for prayer. >>
Israel, to the contrary, is what should bring them together despite all their differences, since it is Israel that humiliates the Muslim world every second of the occupation of the West Bank occupation, with gratuitous extra-large doses of humiliation thrown in at choice intervals, i.e., invasions of Lebanon, invasion of the West Bank, invasion of Gaza, murder of the Turkish relief workers, etc. etc. etc. Support of Israel is behind much of the anti-American sentiment of the Middle East today. At the end of WWII, the country they loved to hate was the UK. Even at the time of the Suez War, it was the English and French bad guys conspiring with the Israelis to take back the Canal by force, and the American good guys who forced them to give up their ill-gotten gains. Somehow, after Eisenhower, American $$$$$upport swung round to Israel, and hatred of America all over the Middle East has risen to epic proportions.
