Analysis: US funding unending arms escalation in Middle East

The Huffington Post - Josh Ruebner - ...Cantor would do well to read some of the 19 cables released so far by WikiLeaks from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, which shed important light on behind-the-scene tensions between Israel's quest for complete military dominance and U.S. attempts to militarize the Middle East, as evidenced by Gilad's admission. These documents display an incomplete, yet consistent, pattern of the United States saturating its allies with weapons while deflecting Israeli pressure not to do so.

...However, Burns also "noted that the Middle East is now at the heart of American interests. Because Egypt also plays a vital role in the region, the U.S. would also renew its security assistance commitment to that country. U.S. relations with the Gulf states were longstanding, and America would stay true to those friendships, as well." In other words, massive amounts of U.S. military aid to Israel in no way conflict with massive U.S. arms sales to the region in general, as witnessed by the Obama administration's record-breaking $60 billion sale of fighter planes and attack helicopters to Saudi Arabia, announced just last month.

The sad reality is that this process deliberately fuels an unnecessary and never-ending arms escalation in the Middle East, making President Obama's goal of achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace during his first term in office that much more remote. WikiLeaks has done a great service by exposing the inner workings of how U.S. diplomacy is drowning the region in weapons. As President Jimmy Carter once said, "We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war." Read more