Three Cheers for Congress, One for France, and Two and a Half Boos for Obama Policy

 

by Barry Rubin

The U.S. Congress is back as a factor in U.S. foreign policy. Partly because the Obama Administration has pushed it too far to do unpopular things; partly because members are no longer in awe of the president's alleged invincibility and much-declined popularity. Many Democratic members see their whole careers flashing before their eyes. And, of course, there's the administration's decision to pick a quarrel with Israel.

For the first time since Barack Obama took power, we're seeing a bit of a congressional revolt even from his own side of the aisle. The two issues are Israel and Iran.

On Israel, 76 senators—including 38 of 59 Democrats—signed a flattering but critical letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging reconciliation with Israel. Another 333 House members signed up, including leading Democrats. The letters blamed the Palestinian leadership—and rightly so—for the lack of serious negotiations.

They noted that "it is the very strength of our relationship [with Israel] that has made Arab-Israeli peace agreements possible, both because it convinced those who desired Israel's destruction to abandon any such hope and because it gave successive Israeli governments the confidence to take calculated risks for peace.

On Iran, a whopping 363 members of the House of Representatives urged Obama to put "crippling" sanctions on Iran, taking "tough and decisive measures," and urging him to make sure Tehran doesn't get nuclear weapons.

Thus, Congress is challenging Obama's policy on four levels:

1. It's not tough enough

2. The proposed sanctions are too toothless (and on this one, see below)

3. Sanctions have taken too long.

4. Instead of waiting for the UN, the U.S. government should show leadership and act on its own along with willing allies.

Moreover, even while the House passed a sanctions measure by a huge majority in December and a similar bill went through the Senate in January, to my knowledge the administration has never taken any position on the proposal.

And now things are about to get worse.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted that the U.S. government is ready to water down the sanctions even further in order to get a UN Security Council resolution supporting additional action against Iran. The rationale for this is to say that this consensus can then be used as a basis for additional sanctions by countries acting on their own, what Gates called, "a new legal platform." He explained, "What is important about the U.N. resolution is less the specific content of the resolution than the isolation of Iran by the rest of the world."

The Los Angeles Times thought this, at least partly an excuse for failure to be able to get more:

"Gates' comments were the clearest sign yet that the administration, facing continuing resistance from other countries to the harshest of the proposed measures, is lowering its sights. U.S. and allied officials have given up on prospects for a ban on petroleum shipments to or from Iran, and some allies have questioned other potential measures."

It could be pointed out that the second Bush administration also settled for lightweight UN resolutions, but it was far more determined to follow up with a tough strategy. Equally, Russia and China can be wreckers in violating stronger sanctions, but they are not so likely to respect weaker ones either. The bottom line is that not only can Iran get off easily but the signal conveyed undermines the hopes for future containment possibilities.

Incidentally, there have been definite successes for behind-the-scenes U.S. diplomacy in discouraging specific companies or banks from dealing with Iran, even companies from dealing with Iranian oil. For such efforts and achievements the administration deserves credit. But what this proves is how effective a really strong push could be to cut off Iran's gasoline imports and business dealings generally.

Moreover, I think this situation largely reveals a fundamental flaw in the Obama worldview: what should be important is a tough and effective strategy based on strong U.S. leadership which is going to intimidate Iran at least to some extent. Instead, we get the priority on consensus, to avoid any sign of the dreaded "unilateralism" or masterful American leadership which horrifies Obama regarding past U.S. policy. This approach is likely to continue after a UN resolution. Far from unleashing an aggressive U.S. strategy against Iran, the follow-up is more likely to be an anti-climax.

Consequently, Obama may succeed in passing muster as legalistic while being hailed by the poodle brigade in the media. But it will fail at the ostensible goal of the entire exercise: stopping Iran now or making Tehran act more cautiously in future.

A parallel situation is now going on regarding Syria's providing of advanced Scuds to Lebanon. The U.S. State Department reaction was a joke: we are going to study this! Compare that to the French response. We must update our thinking. For years we spoke of the timid and unreliable Europeans. Now, in many respects, France (along with Germany and the United Kingdom) is bolder and braver than Obama's American policy.

Here is the uncertain and passive response from the U.S. State Department briefing, remember we are in the midst of the administration's rush to engage Syria, pushing the return of the U.S. ambassador to Damascus despite congressional--there's Congress getting it right again--opposition:

"We are concerned about it. And if such an action has been taken– and we continue to analyze this issue–it would represent a failure by the parties in the region to honor UN Security Council Resolution 1701. And clearly, it potentially puts Lebanon at significant risk. We have been concerned enough that in recent weeks, during one of our regular meetings with the Syrian ambassador here in Washington, that we've raised the issue with the Syrian Government and continue to study the issue. But obviously, it's something of great concern to us."

Why is it that I doubt we are ever going to see any action against Syria taken on the basis of that "concern." Remember that if the White House or State Department says anything critical of Syria, they'll be asked some tough questions about why the United States is courting that dictatorship and expecting it to become more moderate.

Compare this reaction to the French Foreign Ministry's reaction which, mincing no words, called the Scud transfer "alarming" and pointed out that such activity was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which "imposes an embargo on the export of arms to Lebanon, except those authorized by the Government of Lebanon or the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)."

And this is the key! What good is it to get a new UN Security Council resolution if the U.S. government won't even enforce the previous ones!

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh

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Another Jewish Organization Takes On Obama

 

by Jennifer Rubin

Albeit with less vehemence than the World Jewish Congress and the ADL, the Orthodox Union joins the growing list of Jewish organizations publicly taking on Obama’s assault on Israel. Nathan Diament writes that the notion of an imposed peace with a divided Jerusalem — a “bitter pill,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski describes it – is fundamentally faulty:

Jerusalem cannot be equated with any other Israeli-Palestinian border arrangement in pursuit of a peace accord. The city is at the core of Jewish theology, history and identity.

From the religious perspective, Jerusalem is the heart of the Jewish identity. Observant Jews pray each day for Jerusalem’s welfare, facing toward it. We read Biblical accounts of our forefathers that take place there. We conclude our holiest days — as we did at the Passover Seder last month — with a prayer that, next year, we will celebrate in Jerusalem.

And he reminds us of the pre-1967 Jerusalem:

Synagogues were destroyed. This is what happened to the Hurva Synagogue, which was finally rededicated this month — amid Palestinian denunciations and incitement to violence. Christian sites were degraded, too. But after the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel unified the city and opened the holy sites to people of all faiths.

From 1948 to 1967, when Jordan held the Old City and East Jerusalem, Jews were barred entry, denied worship at the Western Wall at the foot of the Temple Mount and denied access to the ancient cemeteries on the Mount of Olives and Mount Zion.

Whether or not one agrees with Diament’s take, his argument makes it clear that there is no obvious peace deal where the terms are “known to all,” as  Brzezinsk put it. Obama’s assault on Jerusalem and the threat of an imposed peace deal are, in fact, an “anathema to Jews everywhere.” (He certainly has some polling data on his side.)

It does seem we are entering a new phase in the Jewish community’s relationship with the administration. The series of public rebukes is noteworthy. And so is the timing of the AIPAC-sponsored letters, taking issue with Obama’s Iran and Israel policies. It is no coincidence it came directly on the heels of the nuclear summit. The message: you’re not fooling anyone. Now the question is whether that opposition manifests itself in a decline in support for Obama, and whether he really cares what Jews think. There’s substantial doubt about both.

 

Jennifer Rubin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Playing with Fire in the Levant

 

by Noah Pollak

 

The National, a paper in the UAE, fleshes out the Scud missile story:

 

Although US officials contacted by The National could not completely confirm that such technology had been transferred to Hizbollah by Syria, one official privy to intelligence briefings confirmed a story previously reported in the Israeli press that in the weeks before Senator John Kerry's visit to Damascus on April 1, Israel almost bombed what it claimed was a convoy of advanced weaponry headed from Syrian military bases to Hizbollah along the shared border with Lebanon.

 

"I can't promise you that planes were actually in the air, but it was close, very close," said the official. "The White House had to talk them down from the attack and promised that Kerry would use strong language" with the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.

When asked about the outcome of the meeting between Mr Kerry and Mr Assad on the issue, the source tartly responded: "In light of where we are now, what do you think?"

 

As Tony Badran points out, Bashar Assad "is known to have a penchant for brinksmanship." In this case, he appears to have been saved from the consequences of a particularly foolish gambit by the Obama administration.

 

But this doesn't mean the red line hasn't been crossed. Syria is in fact now in more danger than the Israelis. The IDF's Arrow missile-defense system can knock Scuds out of the sky with great reliability, so they don't pose a tremendous a threat. What they do provide to Israel is an opportunity — and they impose a requirement. The fact that they were transferred to Hezbollah in violation of tacit but well-understood red lines gives Israel clear and credible casus belli, should hostilities break out, to expand any conflict to Syria.

 

The crossing of the Scud-missile red line carries its own inexorable logic: since Syria has chosen to become a provider of military-grade weapons to Hezbollah, Israel has little choice but to include Syria in any future war with Hezbollah. And if Israel goes to war with Syria, there will be little rationale, given the risks involved and the immense reward of ridding the region of Iran's only ally, from going for regime change.

 

Badran:

 

The Syrian president made a telling remark at the last Arab League summit to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. He observed that "the price of resistance is not higher than the price of peace." And therein lays the problem. Assad has not been made to feel that the costs of continued destabilization can be prohibitive. Instead, all he gets from Washington are weak statements in response to his actions.

What Barack Obama appears not to understand is that the harder he presses Israel and the more he protects Syria, the more self-reliant Israel has to become — and that is going to involve things that Obama might discover he dislikes more than close relations with the Jewish state.

 

 

Noah Pollak

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Promoting a Genocidal “Peace”

 

by Kenneth Levin

 

Indoctrination to genocidal anti-Semitism is epidemic among Palestinians and in Arab and other Muslim states. "Peace" plans that do not recognize this as the major obstacle to genuine peace, but rather push steps which ignore it, inexorably lead to more violence and are doomed to fail. Even worse, by their silence on this issue they pander to and help promote such deadly hate-mongering.

Demonization not only of Israel's Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of Palestinian institutions, those controlled by Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority as well as those of Hamas.

Hamas's charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas "aspires to the realization of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take."

Hamas systematically employs its media, mosques and schools to convey the same message. Its schools and children's television programming teach their young audience the virtues of killing Jews.

The Palestinian Authority hardly lags behind its Islamist rivals in peddling genocidal Jew-hatred. PA media depict Jews as a cancer that must be excised and, like Hamas, insist it is a religious duty to do so. PA indoctrination includes delineations of the nature of Jews that entail virtually every hoary anti-Semitic caricature. While PA leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas talk of "peace" to Western leaders and media, they use their vehicles of incitement to instill in Palestinians not only commitment to annihilating Israel but also dedication to extirpating the Jews.

For example, a recent official Palestinian Authority Friday sermon, broadcast on PA TV and translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), had the preacher declaring: "The Jews are the enemies of Allah and His messenger… the enemies of humanity in general… Our mutual enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith more than an issue pertaining to occupation and land… The prophet Muhammad said: 'You will fight the Jews, and you will kill them…'"

In the wider Arab world, even in countries allied to the United States, the same message is incessantly promoted. A recurrent feature of Saudi government television is of clerics or other authority figures demonizing Jews, often with the speaker having children present to whom they are imparting their Jew-hating wisdom.

Even in countries with which Israel is officially at peace, such as Egypt, variations on the same theme are prominent in government-controlled media. Egyptian television and government newspapers have, for example, featured clerical and academic authorities confirming the Jews do indeed use the blood of non-Jews in their recipes for Passover matzoh.

Robert Wistrich, a leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism and author of the recently published book on the subject,  A Lethal Obsession, has written:

"In the Middle East, [anti-Semitism] has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the 'mission' of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews…

"The scale and extremism of the [anti-Semitic] literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst."

Also noteworthy is that, aside from the exacerbations introduced by the rise of Islamist groups in recent decades, similar anti-Jewish depredations permeated much of the Arab world before the 1967 war and Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and even before Israel's founding.

What has been the Western response to this promotion of genocidal Jew-hatred? Largely silence. In the Palestinian arena, the indoctrination has actually been paid for in part by the European Union and individual European states, the United Nations and even American government funds.

But no less morally obscene is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of this hate indoctrination from all discussions of "peace." There are, here and there, some bland references to ending "incitement," but no evident outrage over the level and nature of the incitement or discussion of what must be done – or the time it will take – to reverse the impact of decades of hate-inculcation.

Nor is there any recognition of Israel's need to be able to defend itself from the onslaught that it has faced in the past and will inevitably face in the future as a result of this indoctrination. The need for Israel to have defensible borders – recognized in 1967 by the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 in the wake of the Six Day War, and by various U.S. presidents in the ensuing decades – gets scant recognition from today's self-styled promoters of peace, even as the intensity and impact of Palestinian and broader Arab genocidal Jew-hatred has only grown.

Territory beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire line that Israel has every right under 242 and under international law to claim for the purpose of national defense, territories that should, given their legal status, be depicted as "disputed," are declared "Palestinian" by Western politicians and media.

Israel's claims are dismissed as illegitimate land-grabs and the threats against her are ignored.

Those interested in a genuine peace would recognize that true peace is a long way off and will never be achieved as long as Israel's enemies continue to indoctrinate their people in genocidal anti-Semitism. They would draw public attention to this obscenity and to its obstruction of possible movement toward a real peace. And they would seek in the interim lesser, and less murder-enabling, goals entailing a separation of Palestinians from Israel to the degree commensurate with Israel's retaining strategic territories necessary for its defense; goals that, for example, would not put Israel's major population centers within range of the type of assaults that have followed upon Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

Genuine peace-seekers would aspire to arrangements that enable Palestinians to pursue their own, separate political course without rendering Israel more vulnerable to those whose agenda is the annihilation of its people.

Promoters of anything less, of any plan that is silent about the hate-indoctrination and the existential threat it represents to Israel, or gives it no more than a passing nod of acknowledgment as a problem, are not pursuing peace. Promoters of any formula that talks of "peace" as reachable in short order and dismisses Israel's need for defensible borders are not agents of serious attempts to attain peace. Whether such formulas emanate from gentile or Jew, from the EU, or individual European states, or the UN, or the Quartet, or the State Department or the White House, or are advanced by Israel's Meretz party, or the devotees of Peace Now, or the beneficiaries of the New Israel Fund, or the groupies of J Street – their promoters are in reality silent appeasers and accommodators, and not infrequently abettors, of those who are both propagandizing for and actively aspiring to another genocide of the Jews.

 

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

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Why No Jews in a Palestinian State?

 

 by Jonathan Tobin

 

One of the orthodoxies of Middle East peace advocacy is that Jewish settlements in the West Bank (which by now has come to include Jewish neighborhoods in the city of Jerusalem) are a terrible obstacle to peace. You see, so long as Jews are building homes in these places, the Palestinians and their supporters can't believe in peace. So those who claim to be peace advocates insist that the number of houses and Jews in these towns and villages must be absolutely frozen as prerequisite for peace. And we are assured that, once a peace agreement is signed, this will mean without doubt that all of these settlements, including every single house and every single Jew living in the houses, must be removed. That is, we are assured, the definition of peace for Palestinians.

 

But a member of Israel's Cabinet has now asked a very pertinent question. Moshe Ya'alon, a former Israel Defense Forces general who now serves as Benjamin Netanyahu's strategic affairs minister, posed the following query in an interview published in the Jerusalem Post: "If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews? Why do those areas have to be Judenrein? Don't Arabs live here, in the Negev and the Galilee? Why isn't that part of our public discussion? Why doesn't that scream to the heavens?" Ya'alon believes that previous withdrawals, such as the evacuation from Gaza, only encouraged Hamas and Hezbollah to raise the ante in terms of violence.

 

These are excellent questions. If what Israel is being asked to negotiate with the Palestinians is mutual recognition and legitimacy in the context of a cessation of violence, why can't Jews stay in the areas designated as part of a Palestinian state, just as Arabs live in Israel with full rights as citizens? Indeed, what kind of a crazy peace would create a state alongside Israel in which Jews are forbidden to live and where Arabs face the death sentence for selling property to Jews, as is currently the case in both Jordan and the Palestinian Authority?

 

Critics of the settlements might answer that the settlers are too extreme and too violent to be allowed to stay behind because some might attempt to sabotage the peace. Others might also point out that without the protection of the IDF, no Jew surrounded by hostile Arabs would be safe. As to the charge that violent settlers would seek to destroy the peace, that might be true of a small minority, but the overwhelming majority of settlers are law-abiding. But the fact that some Israeli Arabs were hostile to Jews didn't mean that all Arabs couldn't live in Israel. If there was a commitment to peaceful coexistence from a Palestinian government, there's no reason why most of the Jews living in outlying settlements on land closely associated with Jewish history and faith couldn't stay on. As for the threat to the safety of Jews remaining in a putative state of Palestine, that's a different question that goes to the heart of the problem.

 

The reason why Palestinians insist that all Jews must leave their future state is because they do not recognize the legitimacy of Israel or the Jewish presence anywhere in the land. And Palestinian political culture is so steeped in violence and hatred of Jews and Israel that it is literally impossible to believe that Jews, even if they behaved like Quakers, could live in a Palestinian state.

 

Moreover, Ya'alon's point about the example of Gaza is telling. Removing every Jew from Gaza didn't satisfy the Palestinians there. Not only did the Palestinians burn the synagogue buildings and the tomato greenhouses left behind by the Israelis for them to use, they immediately began to use that land for launching terrorist missile attacks inside of Israel. So long as the Arabs still view the conflict as zero-sum game in which the goal is to remove or kill every Jew, territorial withdrawals won't bring peace. If the Palestinian vision of peace — even the vision articulated by so-called moderates like Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — is predicated on ridding the land of Jews rather than embracing coexistence, then there will be no peace.

 

 

Jonathan Tobin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

When Armageddon lives next door.

 

by Benny Morris

 

Obama is denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.

 

I take it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about.

 

The Jews of Europe (and Poles, Russians, Czechs, the French, etc.) should likewise have taken personally Adolf Hitler's threats and his serial defiance of the international community from 1933 to 1939. But he was allowed, by the major powers and the League of Nations, to flex his muscles, rearm, remilitarize the Rhineland and then gobble up neighboring countries. Had he been stopped before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, the lives of many millions, Jews and Gentiles, would have been saved. But he wasn't.

 

And it doesn't look like Ahmadinejad will be either. Not by the United States and the international community, at any rate. President Obama, when not obsessing over the fate of the ever- aggrieved Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, proposes to halt Ahmadinejad's nuclear program by means of international sanctions. But here's the paradox: The wider Obama casts his net to mobilize as many of the world's key players as he can, the weaker the sanctions and the more remote their implementation. China, it appears, will only agree to a U.N. Security Council resolution if the sanctions are diluted to the point of meaninglessness (and maybe not even then). The same appears to apply to the Russians. Meanwhile, Iran advances toward the bomb. Most of the world's intelligence agencies believe that it is only one to three years away.

 

Perhaps Obama hopes to unilaterally implement far more biting American (and, perhaps, European) sanctions. But if China and Russia (and some European Union members) don't play ball, the sanctions will remain ineffective. And Iran will continue on its deadly course.

 

At the end of 2007, the U.S. intelligence community, driven by wishful thinking, expediency and incompetence, announced that the Iranians had in 2003 halted the weaponization part of their nuclear program. Last week, Obama explicitly contradicted that assessment. At least the American administration now publicly acknowledges where it is the Iranians are headed, while not yet acknowledging what it is they are after -- primarily Israel's destruction.

 

Granted, Obama has indeed tried to mobilize the international community for sanctions. But it has been a hopeless task, given the selfishness and shortsightedness of governments and peoples. Sanctions were supposed to kick in in autumn 2009; then it was December; now it is sometime late this year. Obama is still pushing the rock up the hill -- and Ahmadinejad, understandably, has taken to publicly scoffing at the West and its "sanctions."

 

He does this because he knows that sanctions, if they are ever passed, are likely to be toothless, and because the American military option has been removed from the table. Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates -- driven by a military that feels overstretched in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and a public that has no stomach for more war -- have made this last point crystal clear.

 

But at the same time, Obama insists that Israel may not launch a preemptive military strike of its own. Give sanctions a chance, he says. (Last year he argued that diplomacy and "engagement" with Tehran should be given a chance. Tehran wasn't impressed then and isn't impressed now.) The problem is that even if severe sanctions are imposed, they likely won't have time to have serious effect before Iran succeeds at making a bomb.

 

Obama is, no doubt, well aware of this asymmetric timetable. Which makes his prohibition against an Israeli preemptive strike all the more immoral. He knows that any sanctions he manages to orchestrate will not stop the Iranians. (Indeed, Ahmadinejad last week said sanctions would only fortify Iran's resolve and consolidate its technological prowess.) Obama is effectively denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.

 

Perhaps Obama has privately resigned himself to Iran's nuclear ambitions and believes, or hopes, that deterrence will prevent Tehran from unleashing its nuclear arsenal. But what if deterrence won't do the trick? What if the mullahs, believing they are carrying out Allah's will and enjoy divine protection, are undeterred?

 

The American veto may ultimately consign millions of Israelis, including me and my family, to a premature death and Israel to politicide. It would then be comparable to Britain and France's veto in the fall of 1938 of the Czechs defending their territorial integrity against their rapacious Nazi neighbors. Within six months, Czechoslovakia was gobbled up by Germany.

 

But will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow in Czech President Edvard Benes' footsteps? Will he allow an American veto to override Israel's existential interests? And can Israel go it alone, without an American green (or even yellow) light, without American political cover and overflight permissions and additional American equipment? Much depends on what the Israeli military and intelligence chiefs believe their forces -- air force, navy, commandos -- can achieve. Full destruction of the Iranian nuclear project? A long-term delay? And on how they view Israel's ability (with or without U.S. support) to weather the reaction from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.

 

An Israeli attack might harm U.S. interests and disrupt international oil supplies (though I doubt it would cause direct attacks on U.S. installations, troops or vessels). But, from the Israeli perspective, these are necessarily marginal considerations when compared with the mortal hurt Israel and Israelis would suffer from an Iranian nuclear attack. Netanyahu's calculations will, in the end, be governed by his perception of Israel's existential imperatives. And the clock is ticking.

 

Benny Morris is the author of many books about the Middle East conflict.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

Syria Sends Long-Range Missiles to Hizballah But, Says State Department, Only "in part." So No Worries!

by Barry Rubin

Once again, the Obama Administration has developed a new concept as an excuse for not taking action against a radical and aggressive action. Israel has charged on the basis of intelligence information--and the data in this kind of situation is excellent--that Syria has been shipping long-range missiles to Hizballah in Lebanon which can target Israeli cities. This has led to a raising of tensions and possibly might bring an Israeli air strike against the missiles.

Such an action is a clear violation of the U.S.-sponsored agreement ending the 2006 Israel-Hizballah war which dragged in Lebanon, of course, and resulted in much destruction there. This new development is thus a problem on the following grounds: it strengthens Hizballah, makes a future Hizballah attack on Israel more likely, makes an Israeli preemptive attack more likely, and emboldens Syria to violated agreements knowing the United States won't do anything.

This once again shows the trap involved in engaging dictators. No matter what Syria does--sending terrorists to kill Americans in Iraq being one item high on the list, moving closer to Iran, and so on--the U.S. government will turn a blind eye.

So the State Department has invented a new concept. Yes, missiles have been delivered, it explains, but only "in part." What does this mean? Perhaps the Syrians merely shipped Hizballah equipment or parts to repair and enhance missiles it delivered earlier in violation of the U.S.-sponsored ceasefire agreement. It is possible that it means the Syrians only delivered part of the number of missiles it promised.

What it comes down to is that the Syrians broke the agreement, says the State Department, but they didn't break it as much as they might have done. (Historical note: I can't help thinking of the Cuban missile crisis if, in 1962, the Kennedy Administration said that the Soviets had only shipped missiles to Cuba which could target the United States "in part," so it was ok.)

Bottom line: This is still a violation of the 2006 agreement but it allows the U.S. government to pretend nothing has happened and it need take no action. As I reported earlier, the French were clear on this issue and denounced the Syrian action. [Optional joke--Are the French now saying: The Americans have a cowardly foreign policy AND no good cheese?]

The problem here is not so much the specific issue but the basic principle: This administration won't enforce agreements, it won't hold radical states accountable for what they do, allies cannot rely on it to stand up for them, enemies know they can get away with a great deal.

Recently, U.S. officials have spoken about how certain situations in the Middle East lead to the death of U.S. soldiers or endanger them. The next time an American is killed or wounded in Iraq, note that they were probably short or blown up by terrorists who were financed, armed, and trained in Syria, giving safe haven in that country and passing through it to launch their murderous attacks.

Syria knows it can continue that activity at no cost, just as it can continue to seize power in Lebanon, back and arm Hamas to make Israel-Palestinian peace impossible, and keep tightening its alliance with Iran.

With each deed of appeasement or closing its eyes to aggression and terrorism, the current U.S. government is complicit in those developments.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Presidential Mistakes

 

by David Pryce-Jones

 

President Obama is reported as saying that American policy towards Israel is "costing us significantly in blood and treasure." First mistake. It's the other way round, Israel is holding the front line against Iran whose power is spreading through the region via Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas. If Israel was not holding the line, then the United States would face a most uncomfortable choice: either to tackle Iran head-on or concede that Pax Americana didn't work and it is time to withdraw from the Middle East with as little ignominy as possible.

 

From his way of thinking, Obama goes on to conclude that Israeli-Palestinian peace holds the key to Middle East stability. Second mistake. If there was genuine peace tomorrow and a state of Palestine, it would make no difference to the Sunni-Shia divide, to the ambitions of Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the civil war in Yemen, to the sectarian conflict in Lebanon, to the hard-wired despots in Egypt and Syria, and so on and on.

 

Obama also thinks that this projected state of Palestine is a practical proposition. Third mistake. The Palestinians are irremediably divided between Fatah and Hamas, and a state would trigger civil war to determine which faction would own it.

 

And from all this bog of misconception and ignorance, Obama finally is weighing using his presidency to impose some solution on Israel. Fourth mistake. No such solution exists. Any attempt at imposition would oblige Israel to see its existence now an urgent issue of self-defence and survival. The consequences boggle the imagination.

 

In the White House, it seems, someone likes playing with fire.

 

David Pryce-Jones

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Obama and Israel: Showdown at the UN?

ANNE BAYEFSKY interview to FOX NEWS.com

QUESTION: Should we believe the administration that they are not pursuing a change in US policy towards Israel voting at the Security Council?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The issue of the Obama administration's use of the United Nations as a tool to blackmail the state of Israel is not confined to the Security Council. The Obama administration's affinity with an organization that is systematically focused on the demonization and delegitimization of Israel means that the issue is UN-wide. Whenever Israel is threatened by another UN resolution, or report, or meeting that adopts or discusses a condemnation of anything and everything Israel does, the U.S. is faced with the question as to how to respond. This has always been true, but the situation has been greatly magnified under the Obama administration.

For example, President Obama jumped on board the UN Human Rights Council within months of taking office, knowing full well that the Council is one of the worst - if not the worst - example of Israel-bashing across the UN system (as well as being completely disreputable in terms of its membership and lack of interest in the vast majority of human rights violations around the world). U.S. membership gives increased credibility to this UN body and its production-line of anti-Israel resolutions, sessions, and reports, notwithstanding their poisonous consequences. And every time another anti-Israel move is generated by the Council - which happens almost round the clock - the U.S. must decide how far it will go in standing up to the condemnations. Or from another perspective, as a Council member the administration is handed one more diplomatic sword to dangle over Israel.

At the same time, given that it is the Security Council alone that has the authority to make international law and take action - even military action - to implement that law, the five veto-wielding members have considerable influence. The track record of Obama's foreign policy for the past year indicates that the administration is prepared to use any leverage at its disposal to boss Israel around, whatever the stakes to Israelis. At bottom, the Obama administration has swallowed the lethal fiction that deems Israel responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict. This fiction originated with Arab-rejectionists of a Jewish state and has been cultivated at the United Nations over six decades. Such a position is a U.S. first, and it is why many now understand Obama to be the most anti-Israel president in the history of the US-Israel relationship.

Until now, American presidents have stuck by the fundamental principle that Israel is a sovereign state whose democratic government has responsibility for its own national security and the welfare of its citizens and, hence, that peace will only come through direct negotiations between the parties. Direct negotiations are key because the process of negotiation itself scuttles continued Arab and Islamic resistance to Israel's existence. The UN approach, however, has been to impose a solution on the parties – a solution drafted in Riyadh, Cairo, Damascus and Ramallah. Myriad numbers of UN resolutions demand that Israel agree to indefensible borders, accept the return of millions of Arab refugees and their non-refugee descendents to Israel – a development that would make Jews a minority in their own land, and prevent any Jew from living on land that Arabs claim for themselves; that is, they demand the immediate creation of what is in effect "apartheid Palestine". Every resolution, report, and session of the Security Council, now and in the future, is intended to implement in one form or another that scheme – an imposed outcome crafted to Israel's serious disadvantage. Now these efforts will be coupled with the Obama administration's own embrace of the same UN ideology: imposing on Israel whatever America wants (even on unrelated fronts) regardless of its disadvantage to Israel. From the Obama administration's perspective, therefore, UN fora will facilitate its new foreign policy agenda. The United States can play good cop to Israel at the UN, with the bad cop consisting of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and the Non-Aligned Movement, which the OIC controls.

So no, I believe this administration is hell bent on bending Israel to its will, regardless of the fact that Israel is a democracy on the front lines of a war where the enemy threatens liberty and freedom for all. And the administration is very likely – unless Congress stands up now – to use the United Nations to do its dirty work.

QUESTION: What signal would it send to Israel's enemies that the US is no longer vetoing anti-Israel resolutions?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The Obama administration may imagine that the threat of withholding the veto at the Security Council, or the failure to oppose vigorously any one of a constant stream of anti-Israel UN concoctions, will be good for the United States. It will be dead wrong. First, Israel's enemies are America's enemies. And second, an effort by the Obama administration to use the UN as a tool to blackmail Israel or undermine Israel's independence and security is a double-edged sword.

The use of the US veto did not only send a message that the United States was standing by the legitimacy, welfare and security of the Jewish state – whose citizens are surrounded by non-democracies who have no regard for their own peoples' human rights. The veto also sent a message that the best interests of the United States could not be dictated by the Security Council and the UN.

Sitting on its hands and refusing to exercise the veto, while the likes of Russia and China and Lebanon (which is currently a member of the Council) revel in a hate-filled denunciation of Israel, will diminish respect for the United States. The refusal to exercise the veto will be read as weakness, as will any attempt by the Obama administration to deflect criticism by claiming "the UN made me do it." True, the Obama administration is closer to the UN – and to the UN's fictional narrative of why there is no peace and democracy in the Arab world – than any previous US administration. But if the Obama administration lets the Security Council do its dirty work, Americans will feel cheated. The spectre of non-democratic thugs writing American foreign policy will appeal to very few on these shores. The good cop-bad cop routine will be transparent and the idea that the real friends of the United States are the non-democratic bullies at the UN won't hold water.

 

 

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Obama Tries to Eradicate Radical Islam Not from America, but from America's mindset

 

by Raymond Ibrahim

The Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all words that allude to Islam from important national security documents. Put differently, the Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all knowledge and context necessary to confront and defeat radical Islam (news much welcomed by Islamist organizations like CAIR). While this move may reflect a naively therapeutic administration — an Obama advisor once suggested that Winnie the Pooh should inform U.S foreign policy — that Obama, the one U.S. president who best knows that politically correct niceties will have no effect on the Muslim world is enforcing this ban, is further troubling.

An Associated Press report has the disturbing details:

President Barack Obama's advisers plan to remove terms such as "Islamic radicalism" from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counterterrorism officials say.

First off, how, exactly, does the use of terms such as "Islamic radicalism" indicate that the U.S. views "Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism"? It is the height of oversensitivity to think that the so-called "Muslim street" can be antagonized by accurate words in technical U.S. documents — documents they don't know or care about — especially since the Arabic media itself often employs such terms. Surely we can use "Islamic radicalism" to define, well, Islamic radicals, without simultaneously viewing all Muslims "through the lens of terrorism"? Just as surely as we can use words like "Nazism" to define white supremacists, without viewing all white nations through the lens of racism?

The AP report continues:

Obama's speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist China in 1984, Reagan spoke at Fudan University in Shanghai about education, space exploration and scientific research. He discussed freedom and liberty. He never mentioned communism or democracy.

The analogy is flawed. For starters, in Reagan's era, the Soviet Union, not China, was America's prime antagonist — just as today, Islamic radicals, not Muslims, are America's prime enemy. Moreover, unlike Obama, who would have the U.S. bend over backwards to appease Muslim nations— or, in his case, just bend over — Reagan regularly lambasted the Soviet Union, dubbing it the "evil empire." Finally, the Chinese never attacked America, unlike Islamic radicals, who not only have attacked it, but daily promise it death and destruction — all in the name of Islam.

The ultimate problem in the White House's new "words-policy," however, is reflected in this excerpt from the report:

The change [i.e., linguistic obfuscation] would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."

No doubt this important document will soon say something totally meaningless like "The struggle against extremism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century." Such changes bode ill for the future. For it is one thing to carefully choose your words when directly addressing Muslims; it is quite another to censor American analysts and policy-makers from using the necessary terms that conceptualize who the enemy is and what he wants.

The situation is dire. Words aside, there is already a lamentable lack of study concerning Muslim war doctrine in the curriculum of American military studies, including in the Pentagon and U.S. Army War College. Obama's more aggressive censorship program will only exacerbate matters: another recently released strategic document, the QDR, nary mentions anything remotely related to Islam — even as it stresses climate change, which it sees as an "accelerant of instability and conflict" around the world.

At any rate, as I have argued several times before, the U.S. government needs to worry less about which words appease Muslims — another governmental memo warns against "offending," "insulting," or being "confrontational" to Muslims — and worry more about providing its own citizenry with accurate knowledge concerning its greatest enemy.

In short, knowledge is inextricably linked to language. The more generic the language, the less precise the knowledge it imparts; conversely, the more precise the language, the more precise the knowledge. In the conflict against Islamic radicalism, to acquire accurate knowledge, which is essential to victory, we need to begin with accurate language.

This means U.S. intelligence analysts and policymakers need to be able to use, and fully appreciate the significance of, words related to Islam — starting with the word "Islam" itself, i.e., submission. It means the U.S. military needs to begin expounding and studying Islamic war doctrine — without fear of reprisal. In short, it means America's leadership needs to take that ancient dictum — "Know thy enemy"— seriously.

Deplorably enough, nearly a decade after the Islamist-inspired attacks of 9/11, far from knowing its enemy, the U.S. government is today not even prepared to acknowledge its enemy, which is doubly problematic, as knowledge begins with acknowledgment.

Nor is there much room for optimism: If the Obama administration can easily expose America to attack by reducing our physical defenses, surely a subversion of our intellectual safeguards — that is, a subversion of subtle but vital knowledge — will go unchecked.

Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum, author of The Al Qaeda Reader, and guest lecturer at the National Defense Intelligence College.

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