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Source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_we_need_israel_tza4kAkH7m7f10fCiMve4M
Israel: A Solid Strategic Asset for the U.S.
(New York Post) Arthur Herman - The U.S. has always looked to Israel as a monument of democracy and stability in a region where's there's been little of either; uncertainties in the wake of the Arab Spring only add to that value. Even the fiercest critics of our pro-Israel policy concede that we get invaluable intelligence from its matchless espionage service, the Mossad. Israelis know more about fighting terrorism than anyone else and have top human-intelligence sources in every country in the Middle East. Since 9/11, the Israelis have not only helped us detect and run down networks like al-Qaeda, but also kept us intimately informed of the spreading nuclear-arms race in the Muslim world. Israel pioneered the hostage-rescue mission with its daring raid at Entebbe Airport in 1976. It pioneered the use of unmanned drones to knock out Soviet-built anti-aircraft systems in the '80s and showed how to use our TOW guided munitions to smash massed Soviet tank attacks. When Israeli jets took out Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program in 1981 and did the same to Syria's budding nuclear facilities in 2007, they not only bought time against gathering threats for Israel but also for the rest of the world. The writer is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.