Mideast peace

This represents everything wrong with U.S. policy on the Israel-Palestine issue:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has urged U.S. President Barack Obama to impose a solution on the festering Arab-Israeli conflict if necessary, a Saudi newspaper said on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab states want Obama to get tough with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has balked at Palestinian statehood and defied U.S. calls to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements.

While it is axiomatic in most foreign policy circles that it is up to the U.S. to solve the seemingly intractable problem of Israel and the Palestinians/Arabs I have little idea why this is in our job description. It is simply nonsensical that the solution to this matter is to be found in the capital of a foreign country thousands of miles away.

Some might respond that the responsibility lies with the United States because it is in our foreign interest. That might be true -- I believe that it is in our interest to have peace throughout the world -- but it doesn't follow that it is our job to provide or enforce this. Others might talk of oil and the U.S. dependence on this precious good, but it does not logically follow that we should intervene because the Middle East is an oil-rich region.

Israel and all of its neighboring countries have relatively little oil. The major players in the region are in the Persian Gulf, an area that Israel has never attacked. To the extent that oil flows have been interrupted from the region -- as in 1973 -- it was because of politics and the U.S. decision to support Israel, not because conflict itself endangered the oil supply.

The proper U.S. policy in the region should be to cut off aid to all countries, both the Arab states and Israel. The Arab states are nothing more than autocratic kleptocracies undeserving of our support while Israel has evolved into a modern state with the region's most fearsome military, plainly capable of taking care of itself.

Our interests -- peace, democracy and personal liberty -- would be far better better served through other means such as measures to promote economic liberalization in the region (some work has already been done here) and encouraging students in these countries to study in the U.S. or American universities in the region. Free, democratic people never go to war with one another.

U.S. policy has for the most part only yielded us a bitter harvest of resentment and enmity. While we should make no apologies for open and friendly relations with Israel it does not serve us well to place them on our foreign aid rolls. Nor do we do ourselves any favors by fostering the perception we hold the key to a decades (arguably much longer) long conflict, which betrays a level of hubris not at all appropriate for our foreign policy.