Yes. I don’t want to see another Caspar Weinberger in place.
Thee Department of Defense is significant in our international relationships. The first President Bush used the end of the Gulf War in 1991 as an excuse to deny Israel the missiles that its military establishment believed were necessary, in order to extort participation by Israel in the Madrid Conference that was supposed to bring peace to the Middle East.
Israel’s leftists tried to avoid acting under the thumb of the Bush administration, by engaging in secret and illegal (under Israeli law) negotiations with Arafat and his gang. They entered into what was called the Oslo Accord. The result was renewed terrorism in Israel and a government led by Yitzhak Rabin that seemed indifferent to suffering by Israel’s patriotic right wing (”Let them spin like propellers” was one way that he described the unwillingness of Israelis to become “sacrifices to peace” by being murdered by terrorists).
Israel responds to severe, unreasonable, and unnecessary pressure from the US in irrational ways, and we can’t blame the US Department of Defense for the spiral of common sense and the leftist re-ascendancy in Israel that followed the infamous Madrid Conference. Nevertheless, I do not believe that it would have occurred without the brutal pressures that President Bush’s Department of Defense applied to Israel after the Gulf War.
The Department of Defense is NOT insignificant in our international relationships. That one typographical error undercut my entire argument. Please ignore.