RICHARD BAEHR: OBAMA’S FEAR OF A REALITY CHECK
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=11761
The administration has decided to send two officials to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference this week.
One is Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who once called for a U.N. military operation to drive Israel out of the West Bank. The other is Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser. Rice is best known for lying on five Sunday network news shows in the same morning about who was responsible for the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, blaming it on a video no one in the region had seen. This lie was needed to preserve the mythology of the Barack Obama re-election campaign, that al-Qaida was defeated and on the run. Rice, ever the loyal trooper (a good explanation, really the only one, for her continual advancement up the ranks), made her contribution to the current impasse between Israel and the United States this week by blasting the government of Israel, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be a ”destructive force” in U.S. Israel relations. As Jennifer Rubin has accurately described it, sending Rice to AIPAC is sticking a finger in AIPAC’s eye.
Rice’s intemperate remarks were just part of a continual stream of hostile fire aimed at Netanyahu ahead of his upcoming talk on Iran and its nuclear program to a joint session of Congress this week, which a few dozen Democrats have proudly broadcast that they will not attend.
Secretary of State John Kerry, in remarks before a House committee last week, attacked Netanyahu for having supported the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. In essence, Kerry was accusing Netanyahu of having had poor judgment then, and poor judgment now for opposing the administration’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, which seems very close to a final agreement between the P5+1 and the mullahs.
Of course, we know some others who joined Netanyahu (who was not Israel’s prime minister at the time) in supporting the Bush administration policy on Iraq in 2003. The long list of supporters includes none other than Kerry himself. Ditto for former secretary of state and all-but-certain 2016 Democratic nominee for president Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joe Biden and even Susan Rice. One might add to the list former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the leaders of more than three dozen other countries who signed up to support the mission. But it is Netanyahu who must be excoriated for exercising bad judgment, according to Kerry, not any of the others.
”I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him,” Kerry said during a 2003 Democratic primary debate.
Rice was also all in for the attack: ”I think the United States government has been clear since the first Bush administration about the threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein poses,” she said in an interview with National Public Radio in November 2002. “The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it’s a question of timing and tactics. … We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions.”
There is a point at which it is obvious that the current administration has no shame and will say or do anything to accomplish its objectives.
What are the administration’s objectives? It seems there are at least three in play related to Iran and Israel:
The administration has been working to move the Democratic Party leftward on both domestic and foreign policy issues since Obama took office. The further left one goes, the more likely one is to be hostile toward Israel. Obama and the Left’s agenda on foreign policy can best be described as an updated version of the Pete Seeger approach — lay down your swords and shields, and give peace a chance. So withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, make peace with our enemies, and make enemies of our friends (since they worked together with Republican presidents to get us into wars). Iran and Cuba are our new friends, Israel is now much less of one. The president also seems to have had an obsession with making things right with the Muslim world since he believes the West has behaved badly toward Muslim nations. Terrorism and violence are not Islamic, and the bad actors are a very few individuals who are really embarrassments to and not actually adherents of Islam. The real threat we face is not radical Islam, which does not exist, but Islamophobia and a lack of good jobs at good wages (with no gender imbalance) for jihadists.
With regard to Israel, the president has worked to weaken the ties between the Democrats and Israel, and make support for Israel less of a bipartisan position in Congress, and appear to be more of a Republican Party cause. Incredibly, the president and his flacks have accused House Speaker John Boehner and Netanyahu of damaging the bipartisan support for Israel, when they have been working to move Democrats away from Israel for six years. The brouhaha about protocol concerning Netanyahu’s speech played into the administration’s strategy and they jumped on it, once again calling the kettle black.
The Obama administration wants Netanyahu to lose the upcoming election in Israel. Obama wants a more compliant Israeli leader, one who will not threaten what he believes is the signature achievement of his second term — a nuclear deal with Iran — and will also be more willing to make concessions to the Palestinians. The best strategy to accomplish that is to make lots of Israelis nervous that a Netanyahu victory will mean two years of American pressure on Israel and further bad blood between the two countries. The message delivered by the Obama team is that a government headed by the Isaac Herzog-Tzipi Livni Zionist Union can get along with Obama. Obama surrogates therefore meet with the opposition team, while ignoring Netanyahu when he visits, an incredible display of rudeness and disrespect that has almost nothing to do with considerations of neutrality in the upcoming election. Instead, the Obama media team (the major networks, newspapers and bloggers) blame Netanyahu’s “collusion” with Boehner for the current impasse and argue that Netanyahu has violated “protocol” and been disrespectful.
The major issue, of course, is the Iran deal itself. As more details emerge on the proposed deal, the record of continuing concessions to Iran is becoming ever more apparent. They include an apparent agreement to remove limits on the number of centrifuges after a few years; an effective sunset provision on limits on the Iranian nuclear program, extending the breakout period for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon by at most a few months in the early years of the agreement; and acceptance of a weak inspection mechanism, all the while ignoring Iran’s missile development. The administration was hoping that its pressure on Israel would lead Netanyahu to fold his tent and postpone any speech to Congress until hopefully the nuclear deal was signed and he had lost the election. Netanyahu refused, and at this point, he may be talking as much to the American people as he is to Congress, warning them of the dangers of the giveaway to Iran that is underway, and why Iran remains a bitter foe of both Israel and Western interests. As Rick Richman described it, the Obama team is selling the foreign policy equivalent of Obamacare.
Since no administration figure will play the Jonathan Gruber Obamacare role on the nuclear talks (exposing the lies that underlie the policy, while congratulating himself for his cleverness and deceit), Netanyahu will have to expose the deal for what it is. In short, it is a surrender that will result in Iran getting sanctions relief, and over time, a nuclear bomb, with all the increased leverage in the region that this will bring for a nation that is already a very bad actor. Throw in some proliferation of nuclear programs by other nations, and you have a much more dangerous brand of instability in a region where the U.S. has strategically withdrawn. If I were Obama, I would also be trying to hide what is going on.
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