You are operating from the assumption that the US does not have the power to control any piece of the middle east we require, without toading to whatever the radicals pretend they want this week. Well, in reality the radicals want us dead, and proved in on 9-11. So our interest with regard to them is pretty clear. It is not to appease them, it is to annihilate them, wherever they take power.
It is not the cold war anymore, you know. We can do things like that. There isn't any big bad wolf to deter us from it anymore, as even the gulf war showed. I quite agree with you that US interests are first, but US interests are no longer served by vacillation, delay, weakness, and appeasement. We don't have to do everything by proxy anymore, and we can't afford continued appeasement after 9-11.
For all those reasons, Israeli and US interests are now much more closely aligned than they were during the cold war. The traditional difference between them, which some stripes of US opinion made much of back then to distinguish themselves from other blocs, has largely evaporated. But those blocs still cling to the pretended violent clash between our interests and theirs, for reasons that no longer have anything to do with preferring US interests, and instead have everything to do with self-identification, or with dislike of Israel.