I'll check out that books, but the us and israel is not the sole cause of 9/11.
Yea I know it's not a chessboard like the old school of thought, but the fact is, like you said, we're in too deep. We can't just step back and restart, so we have to deal with what we have, which is a shit situation.
Israel is far from surpassing the United States technologically. If they had, then they wouldn't still rely on the US as a weapons supplier. Though what bothers me is how they barely pay for anyone of the hardware we give them. They are advancing at their own rate, but they aren't going to surpass the US. What they tend to do is take american equipment and improve on it. For example, we sell them f-16s outfitted with what our own f-16s had back in the 90s. Then they put their own upgrades and changes to customize it to their own reqs.
infantry training however, they most likely are ahead of us a bit because we don't all grow up in a state of warfare, and there is no general conscription. Thats hardly a technological breakthrough, and rather a matter of circumstance. Israel is not the sole aggressor though, otherwise I wouldn't be seeing stories on the news each evening about someone walking into an israeli market and blowing themselves up. The whole situation was handled poorly by everyone, and as a result, we now have this terrible ordeal which is seemingly never going to end.
And yes, the middle east has always been in chaos, even before the west/ east (or however you wish to refer to russia) intervened, simply because religions get hostile over their territory, and unfortunately many religions claim that area to be their own. It's not chaos as in, constant war and explosions, but it has been a consistently unstable region for an extremely long time. Plus that general area was one of the earliest parts of the planet to be populated, so people have been there a long, long time and have thus had longer to fight over it.
Should we stop supporting israel, all we do is make another enemy in an area where we don't have many friends. And i doubt there is anyone who can honestly believe that if we stopped supporting them and withdrew our troops, suddenly terrorist factions would just cease fighting and stop hating us.