President Obama had a somewhat contradictory message for the AIPAC conference on Sunday, an outgrowth of his typical play for a middle course in any and all things. On the one hand, he decried “loose talk of war”. On the other hand, he exhibited… loose talk of war, while pushing for sanctions that in the past have had serious consequences for the innocent.

In midsummer 2006, while my wife and kids were on our yearly trip down to Seattle, to be with our extended Norwegian-Jewish-Cambodian-Icelandic-Swedish-Texan family, the so-called Israel-Hezbollah War was in full rage. My brother-in-law and I were watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, as he interviewed one pro-Israel talking head expert after another, describing the war not just from the Israeli point of view, but from a right-wing Israeli standpoint.

After the program, he lamented that the voice for Israel in the American media, in public affairs and in politics is almost always from a perspective much further from the right than it should be to reflect the views of the average Israeli, or those of the American Jewish community. He longed for a new organization, based from the positions of moderates, to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“But,” Lee lamented, “that’ll never happen.”

Some say it has now happened.

I’ve always found the expression “Israel, right or wrong” to be disturbing. We know that countries, like people, can make mistakes — sometimes serious ones. And history shows that unconditional nationalism isn’t a virtue — it’s dangerous. But “Israel, right or wrong” is the sentiment that ran through Eric Cantor’s speech at AIPAC yesterday. For him, peace is all up to the Arabs, because Israel is completely blameless.

President Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) today that his misinterpreted comment about a peace deal in the Middle East using the 1967 borders as a starting point, with mutually agreed swaps, was an utterly uncontroversial statement reflecting longstanding US policy.

If you listen to non-Likudniks in the region, you would know that Obama’s speech was actually far more deferential to Israel, and inspired more disappointment than anything else in the Arab world. This has not been a feature of the debate in this country.

In the end, if Obama truly wants to install Suleiman, he probably can. He’ll engineer one of those “make me do it” moments, where he just has to accept that the thing his administration has been working tirelessly to achieve is the best thing for Egypt. But the minute that happens, and the stories start leaking out about young demonstrators being “disappeared” by Suleiman’s thugs, he’ll have to explain to the social media generation how it was all worth it for “stability in the region.”

And this time, he won’t be able to blame it on the need for “60 votes.”