by Caroline Glick
Next to the American people themselves, Israel is no doubt the
biggest immediate loser in the U.S. presidential election. President
Obama's foreign policy is predicated on the false notion that the U.S.
and Israel themselves are the principal causes of the Islamic world's
antipathy toward them. Consequently, Obama has cultivated the
anti-American, genocidally anti-Jewish Muslim Brotherhood and
facilitated the Brotherhood's takeover of Egypt and Tunisia and its
gains in strength throughout the Middle East. In addition, Obama has
appeased Iran's Islamist regime and has enabled it to reach the cusp of
nuclear capability.
Obama's policy of relying
on the United Nations has placed Israel's diplomatic viability at risk
as the Palestinians and the international Left that supports and feeds
on their cause use the U.N. to delegitimize Israel's right to exist.
Finally, Obama's animosity toward Israel has strengthened the hand of
anti-Israel forces within the Democratic party. In the coming years,
Israel will become an increasingly partisan issue in American politics.
While
Obama's reelection clearly places Israel in jeopardy, the plain truth
is that the inevitable continuation of his foreign policies places the
United States at risk as well. The jihadist assault on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi must be viewed as a sign of things to come, just
as al-Qaeda's 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole were precursors of the 9/11
attack on the U.S. mainland. Obama is empowering the United States'
worst enemies in the Sunni and Shiite Muslim worlds alike. Thereby
emboldened, they place America at increased risk.
Israel
can and must take the actions necessary to mitigate the dangers that
Obama's reelection poses to its national security and indeed its very
survival. It must embrace its advantages in economic growth, the
domestic support it can count on from its deeply patriotic populace, and
its demographic advantages -- it is the only Western country with a
high and growing fertility rate. It must boldly assert its national
rights. In its relationship with the U.S., it must move from being a
dependent to being an ally. It must take the military steps necessary to
prevent Iran from making good its promise to annihilate the Jewish
state. It must deter the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian military from
making war against it.
As for the U.S.,
Israel's allies in the Republican party and the conservative movement
must now take a serious look at their own foreign policy positions and
reassess them in the light of the Republican defeat in Tuesday's
elections and in the face of the growing dangers to the country that are
the inevitable consequence of Obama's reelection. This is not merely a
partisan interest. It is a matter of the United States' own national
security.
For a host of reasons, Republicans
have failed to make the case for an alternative to Obama's policy of
appeasement. During the election campaign, Mitt Romney embraced Obama's
support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. He refused to say
that the U.S. must take military action to thwart Iran's nuclear
aspirations, despite the clear failure of the current bipartisan policy
of sanctions against Tehran. Justifying Obama's abandonment of the
United States' longtime ally Hosni Mubarak, Romney said that he would
have abandoned Mubarak as well, even though Mubarak was the anchor of
the United States' alliance system in the Arab world. Romney failed to
criticize Obama's open-door policy for friends of the Muslim Brotherhood
within the U.S. government.
Romney's "me too"
foreign policy was not simply a consequence of his hope to make suburban
mothers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio feel comfortable voting for
him. Rather, it was a function of his political camp's greater failure
to recognize and contend with the unpleasant and hard realities of the
world as it is. The conservative camp in general has been too timid to
face the strategic implications of the Islamic world's embrace of the
cause of jihad and its goal, Islamic world domination.
During
the Bush years, the so-called neoconservative camp believed it had
formulated the means of convincing an American electorate dominated by
the leftist media to support the projection of American power in the
Islamic world. Claiming, and believing, that the purpose of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan was to liberate otherwise tolerant and
liberal-minded Muslims from the yoke of authoritarian governments,
neoconservatives promoted an argument that permitted Republicans to
avoid making the hard case for victory.
Even
more destructively, the neoconservative campaign to make the Islamic
world ripe for democracy necessarily ignored the larger pathologies
there that rendered the totalitarian dogma of the Muslim Brotherhood the
most salient and popular ideology among Sunni Muslims. The
neoconservatives' focus on democratization blinded them to the fact that
authoritarian and problematic allies like Mubarak were often the only
possible allies available to the United States. Finally, the
neoconservatives' insistence that the urge toward democracy and freedom
is universal led to their failure in places such as Iraq and Egypt to
use U.S. resources wisely. If everyone is just like us, then there is no
reason to cultivate the habits of liberty. There is no reason to
empower women. There is no reason to financially and politically support
nascent and weak democratic forces or to postpone elections until the
scales are properly tipped in the direction of moderate forces congruent
with U.S. interests. There is no reason to support Christian
minorities. There is no reason to insist on the normalization of
relations between countries such as post-Saddam Iraq and Israel.
Instead,
elections were perceived as a panacea. Give the Arab world the vote and
all will be well. In the event, the result was just the opposite. The
Palestinians elected Hamas -- their branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptians and Tunisians elected the Muslim Brotherhood.
The
Bush administration's false claim that the masses of the Islamic world
share the values of the American people led to other problems as well.
First and foremost, it confused Bush and his advisers about the
distinction between Israel and its neighbors and so brought about Bush's
full-throated support for Palestinian statehood. His endorsement came
even as it was becoming undeniable that the Palestinians, with their
addiction to terrorism, their support for jihad, and their
anti-Americanism and genocidal anti-Semitism, are the embodiment of all
the pathologies of the larger Arab world. If you believe that Israel is
no better than the Palestinians, then it is a short step to concluding
that weakening Israel on the Palestinians' behalf is only fair.
Losing
sight of what makes Israel America's closest strategic ally, the Bush
administration relegated it to the uncertain category of "special
friend," sending to the Arab world the message that the U.S. was a
treacherous ally and fundamentally confused about its interests in the
global arena. If the so-called "peace process" was America's chief
concern in the region, then it followed that the U.S. should empower its
worst enemies at the expense of its closest ally.
And
indeed, by supporting Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and
insisting on an Israeli ceasefire with Hezbollah in the 2006 war in
Lebanon and northern Israel, the U.S. did in fact help its worst
enemies. In Gaza, it supported the establishment of a jihadist state
that has since contributed to the transformation of Sinai into a
jihadist base of operations, and it emboldened the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt and Jordan. And it facilitated Hezbollah's -- that is, Iran's --
takeover of Lebanon.
The Republican party's
failure to reconsider the ill-founded assumptions of Bush's foreign
policy toward the Islamic world led inevitably to Romney's adoption of
it in the election campaign. And as a consequence, his endorsement of
Palestinian statehood and of Obama's abandonment of Mubarak made it
impossible for Romney to draw a meaningful distinction between Obama's
foreign policy and the foreign policy Romney himself would follow if
elected.
There are two reasons that it is
essential today for the Republican party and the conservative movement
to reassess their foreign-policy positions and sharpen the distinctions
between their positions and those of the Obama administration. First,
while we cannot say exactly how Obama's policy of appeasing jihadists
will play out, its trajectory is clear, inevitable, and dangerous for
America. When the dangers become obvious to the American public, the
Republicans will have to have a clear, distinct vision and plan for
American foreign policy. If they fail to present one, they will not only
hurt themselves. They will hurt their nation.
Second,
today and in the coming months and years, there will be a lot of
soul-searching in the Republican party and the conservative movement
over what went wrong in the 2012 elections. And with that soul-searching
will come the inevitable temptation to adopt the Democrats' policy of
appeasement in a bid to woo various constituencies -- suburban mothers,
for example, and perhaps Muslim communities in Michigan, Tennessee,
Minnesota, and other states. But Republicans must understand that, while
this is tempting, it is a recipe for repeated electoral defeats.
Democrats will always and forever be able to out-appease Republicans.
And so constituencies that want the American government to appease our
enemies will always and forever vote for them. If the Republicans wish
to return to power in the foreseeable future, they must boldly draw a
distinction between themselves as the party of victory and the Democrats
as the party of defeat.
Caroline B.
Glick is senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Postand director of
the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los
Angeles. She is currently writing a book (Crown, 2013) setting out a
new U.S. and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.
Originally published on National Review Online
Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/11/national-review-article---the.php
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
