I am of the opinion and conviction that the USA and Israel badly need to sue for peace (surrender) in the middle east.
This might, at first glance, seem absurd ... but think about it. The USA and Israel currently enjoy positions of military strength ... but will this always be true? The USA and its 'coalition of the ridiculous' in Iraq are rapidly losing whatever favor, cooperation, and support they ever had from the rest of the world. We are not invincible.
Both countries -- the USA and Israel -- are far more vulnerable politically and militarily than we let on ... that is why the US media are now routinely censored. Armaments in the USA have escalated in price, due to favoritism and patronage in the awarding of military contracts, to the point where the US budget could easily go south if, say, the oil-producing countries started accepting currencies other than dollars for crude oil (which, by the way, Saddam Hussein began doing in 1999 AND North Korea and Iran too have begun doing, hence Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech).
Suing for peace would give us just that -- peace -- and it would permit us to conclude a real peace, under favorable terms, with the cooperation of the rest of the world, including our supposed 'enemies' (which are really countries whose resources we have been trying to steal by military means).
Furthermore, at this point we could still 'sue for peace' and do so from a position of relative strength. There is every reason to believe that the USA, for instance, can never, ever, win the current war of aggression that it is fighting in Iraq. There is every reason to believe that one day, the world's history books will chart the USA's decades of making up reasons to go to war in order to steal other countries' resources and enslave their populations ... the USA may well one day suffer under the historical reputation of being ruled by a kind of latter-day Nazi-like regime. Hard to believe, but many historians, political scientists, and other experts believe we are already living under a perverse form of fascism.
I love my country -- I have ritually raised and lowered the US flag thousands of times. Though I am a pacifist, I organized memorial services for high school friends whose remains were repatriated from Vietnam. My father is a veteran of both the Marines and the Navy. I am an American, and in better (or perhaps more naive) times, I have been proud of it.
But we are wiser now ... we have a critical mass of knowledge and wisdom in this country that should tell us that in the long run, the good will of the world is far more important to us than our ability to take by force whatever we want, from anyone, anywhere.
I have corresponded personally with Jeb Bush for some time, and have occasionally written letters to his brother. A childhood friend of mine is the State Department's senior diplomat working on anti-terrorism issues. About fourteen months ago, I counseled George Walker Bush and the US government, to the effect that now that 'we' had (at that time) a superior military position in the middle east theater of operations, NOT to invade Iraq. If he had taken that advice, history would have recorded him as a strategically-wise commander-in-chief ... NOT invading would have been a stroke of military genius.
Now, however, tens of thousands of people are dead because of these folks' poor strategic decisions ... and we will eventually have nothing whatsoever to show for it ... no moral victory, no freedom for the Iraqui people, and no spoils of war.
According to Amnesty International, the USA is waging a political "campaign of impunity" as well, making deals with its puppet governments and dictatorships in various parts of the world not to take one another to the International Criminal Court for war crimes. In other words, we have squandered whatever good will we enjoyed around the world out of our prominence in the last half of the 20th Century and our victim status in 9/11, and now our very leadership fears trial in international courts of law for war crimes!
Our position is shaky at best. Our best strategic course of action at this time is to beat a stragegic retreat. We are almost at the point of being forced to do so. The USA should sue for peace and for favorable settlement terms ... Israel would be best advised to do so as well.
The great danger is that the current policies will soon envelop us in a worldwide conflagration ... and at least from the moment, the people most vulnerable under those circumstances would be the Israelis and others in the middle east. I support Zionism and a national home for the Jewish people within secure, defensible borders. However, if we -- the United States and Israel -- progress further along these current quasi-fascist policy paths, we may lose everything ... most of all our souls, as individuals, and as nations.