The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had this pithy answer to a question regarding a supposed double standard he was lobbed at a regional security conference in Bahrain: why does the US support Israel and go after Iran? Perhaps he was channeling his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, but he had this well phrased broadside that explains what Israel is up against and why it deserves support from other free countries: “Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors, it has not shipped weapons to a place like Iraq to kill thousands of civilians, it has not threatened to destroy any of its neighbors, it is not trying to destabilize the government of Lebanon”.
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