Many of Ambassador Michael Oren's observations are grounded in reality, and many of the facts he deploys are incontrovertibly true. Allow me to dilate on several of his points:
1. It is true that Israel is still the only stable democracy in the Middle East (though we'll see soon enough whether Egypt and Tunisia, among others, will be joining the club).
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2. The members of the Arab League, collectively, create virtually nothing the world, and in particular the West, needs or wants, apart from oil and natural gas. Israel, on the other hand, is a hothouse of technological and medical innovation.
3. Israelis, while not particularly enamored of U.S. President Barack Obama (though his record is, in fact, solidly pro-Israel), adore the country he leads more than any other group of people in the Middle East, save Iraq's Kurds and, perhaps, the oppressed citizens of Iran.
4. The eastern Mediterranean has been, for the past several decades, a more secure and steady place than, say, the Persian Gulf, because of Israel's stabilizing power and because of the beneficent effects of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. This stability has brought America large savings in lives and money, especially when compared with the sacrifices the United States has made, with only intermittent success, to keep the Persian Gulf from collapsing into chaos.
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5. The Iranian regime's nefarious dream of regional domination -- its goal of supplanting America as the Middle East's strongest power -- is checked to some degree by Israel's strength.
6. The shrinking camp of foreign-policy realists ("shrinking" because the Obama administration now seems to have moved somewhat in the direction of morality-driven liberal interventionism) has been largely discredited by events of recent days. Several years ago, former U.S. national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, a leading light of realism, told me that support for authoritarian Arab leaders had bought America "50 years of peace." We are learning now the price of that support for anti-democratic forces in the Middle East. One obvious lesson: Stability cannot be achieved in perpetuity through the suppression of the natural democratic yearnings of Arab peoples, who, like Americans, value freedom and dignity.
7. Another lesson, one that deeply wounds so-called realists: It seems as if the Arab masses have been much less upset about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians than they have been about their own treatment at the hands of their unelected leaders. If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, Arabs would still be upset at the quality of their leadership (and they would still blame the United States for supporting the autocrats who make them miserable); Iran would still continue its drive to expunge American influence from the Middle East; and al Qaeda would still seek to murder Americans and other Westerners.
8. And one more thing, while we're on this general subject: One of the great mysteries of life to foreign-policy realists is Israel's continued popularity among average Americans. Some realists have resorted to conspiracy-mongering in order to explain what is otherwise, to them, inexplicable. But these realists fail to understand, as Oren outlines, the historical, ideological, and theological ties that bind Israel and America. They also fail to understand something very basic about the workings of power in Washington: A lobbying group is ultimately successful only if it is lobbying for a cause that is already widely popular.
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