Hold on to your hastas and batten down the la vistas, it's coming (at least, if she wins): the era of the RetaliaClinTerminator.

"I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel," she responded to a question from one of the ABC shills throwing last night's debate. "Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States,"

It came deep in the Pennsylvania shindig, after a long, frivolous political panty raid (gee, thanks, ABC!), but now we see Hillary for the Yankee Athena she yearns to be.

"Massive retaliation". On the Olbermann show, Pat Buchanan picked up the phrase and shook it like a chimp with a baby rattle. He was the first of the evening to see the implications of her throwaway sabre-rattling: Four more years of imperial presidency if she moves back in to the big marble  digs on Pennsylvania Avenue.

And, following the Israeli Lobby/Bush Doctrine to the last line of fine print, she slung Iran against the wall. As we can just about repeat by rote now, she sees them as the hulking, sinister Dark Force in the Middle East, forever plotting evil and a sanction away from cooking up black-market nukes.

Except, they're not. At least, not down here in the real world, where we buy iPods, burn oxygen and make poo-poo. Iran hasn't invaded another country, or even started a war, in more than three centuries. Yeah... they were pissed at us 30 years ago; that little matter of us overthrowing their elected government in 1953 kept eating at them.

But WE'RE the big devastator in the Middle East. The U.S. is the country that invaded two states and threaten more, unless everyone plays marbles to our favor. For these misadventures, we've thrown away the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, along with a king's ransom - in the trillions of dollars, by some estimates.

And as its 2006 Lebanon incursion reminded us, Israel can stir up some chaos of its own. In fact, the one boon from Hillary's immodest proposal is that the door is now open to discuss our special relationship with our close - very close - Mideast ally.

The big question: Why does this alliance exist in the first place?

Even sources most critical of the Mideast status quo tend to cast the U.S./Israeli "strategic relationship" in a "hired-gun" rendering that has Israel assuming a collateral position, doing regional dirty work at the behest of a demanding, belligerent U.S. San Francisco State professor Stephen Zunes, for one, has profferred this interpretation, calling Israel "a surrogate for American interests in this vital strategic region."

But the facts just don't add up to that interpretation.

Israel gets $3 billion annually in foreign aid - i.e., American taxpayers' money; the split usually comes down to $1.2 billion in economical aid, and $1.8 billion in military aid. Contingency spending, such as the relocation of the Suez settlers a few years ago, can boost the sum by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and direct military aid - both on and off the books - adds much, much more.

Additionally, federal loan guarantees to Israel amount to another $2 billion annually. Again, this can vary: For instance in the early 1990s, the U.S. agreed to loan guarantees of $10 billion for the resettlement of Russian immigrants in Israel.

All of this amounts to the largest portion of foreign aid given to a country, and constitutes over 30% of the total amount of the entire - ENTIRE - U.S. foreign aid budget. Imagine how chagrined Sumatra must be.

As Yossi Beilen, deputy foreign minister of Israel and a Knesset member, asked one gathering, "If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?"

Well... how indeed?

We may assume, that for all this money and favor, Israel is obliged to do American bidding as it polices its "bad neighborhood." But when, exactly, has that ever happened? When has Israel deferred its own national and security concerns to act as "a surrogate for American interests"?

Well... never. The dog wags the walker in this arrangement, and Israel's powerful lobbies in the U.S. make sure it gets what it wants - without backtalk.

The short list here would tote up what the U.S. gets out of its joined-at-the-hip partnership. And it's a short tally: nothing. We earn the enmity of the Arab world, and that's it. You can argue our big deathware dealers make a bundle from Israel's weapons business (and, now, co-development). But that only means riches for the most seamy sectors of our economic elite.

It's time for a reappraisal of our relationship with Israel. And it's time to bring our Mideast policies into a more realistic framework.