Even during the Fifties when Eisenhower followed a policy of "even handedness," there was a strong American guarantee that Israel would not be overrun by its perpetually hostile neighbors. The Eisenhower Archives are filled with memos and telexes to this effect--even during the days of the Great Presidential Temper Tantrum also known as the Suez War of 1956.
Thanks to the policies of President Obama (who bodes well to take permanent possession of the Bugs Bunny "What A Maroon!" trophy) it is Israel and not Iran which now stands alone, surrounded by hostiles and facing existential threat. The cringing approach of appeasement has brought, as any realpolitiker would have projected, failure as its reward.
The latest round of UN Security Council sanctions will not convert the mullahs of Tehran to peace, love, and flower power. The sanctions, once promised by SecState Clinton to be "crippling" are hardly an annoyance to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps given that entity's vast experience and skill in avoiding previous sanctions.
As everyone who is oriented in time and place would have known months ago, Iran's protectors, Russia and China, would place their interests ahead of any sort of international consensus. One can be thankful that Iranian Orator-in-Chief, Ahmedinejad, so insulted Moscow that Putin, Medvedev, and company actually put the sale of S-300 air defense missiles on hold. Had it not been for Ahmedinejad's capacious mouth, the sanction regime imposed by the latest Security Council vote would have permitted the sale and delivery to go through.
Iran has allies. This reality was shown in harsh relief as Iran, Turkey, and Russia sat down for a confab regarding regional security just this week.
Such a meeting does little to support President Obama's insistence that Iran is more "isolated" following the sanction vote. Nor does the White House's opposition to efforts in Congress to impose unilateral American sanctions on companies trading in refined petroleum products to Iran support the oft repeated administration notion that the UN sanctions would provide a basis for stronger measures by the US and EU countries.
The reason pumped by the Oval crowd is that Doing Something Real on the part of Congress would carry with it the probability of annoying "allies." Well, fer sure, dude, that is to be expected, France and Germany as well as Russia and China are feathering their own businesses with beaucoup trade with Iran. Both Sarkozy and Merkel are quite willing to talk the talk but refrain from making companies walk the walk. And, golly, these fine folk shouldn't be put in a bind simply because Congress is more worried about an Iranian nuclear capability than is either France or Germany--or Mr Obama.
It is hard to decide whether Mr Obama knows he is lying or is so filled with the miasma of ideology that he really, really believes what he has been saying regarding either Iran or Israel. Suffice it to write that not even the previous Monument to Naivete, peanut farmer turned governor of a small state morphed to the presidency, Jimmy Carter, was as out-to-lunch in Mideast policy than the Nice Young Man From Chicago.
The focus on the artifact of the Great Humanitarian Aid Flotilla To The Starving Millions Of Gaza has become a very dangerous preoccupation not only for the US and other seemingly civilized states but, most of all, for Israel. Thanks to the melding of the utter brainlessness of so many of the "elites" of Europe and the US with the administration's policies of "outreach" to the Muslims of the world, the government of Israel has been forced to divert its efforts from dealing with the existential threat represented by emergent Iran to the sideshow of why IDF commandos were so bold as to kill people who were trying to kill them.
While the government of Israel made a blunder in the precise tactics of interdicting the Great Humanitarian Aid Flotilla, the ground truths remain unchanged. The flotilla was a deliberate provocation orchestrated and conducted with the assistance of the Erdogan regime; the Miza Marmara had on board a number of martyrdom seeking jihadists who offered cold arm resistance to the fast roping commandos. End of story.
Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu and his inner cabinet, the Septet (also either the Seven Samurai or the Seven Dwarfs depending on your point of view and the choices they make) are wrestling with damage control and new means of placating Obama over the Gaza Strip blockade rather than the very important subject of how to deal with Iran before it is an hour too late. Iran along with its allies, Syria and Turkey, and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, seeks the total obliteration of Israel as currently constituted. That is a ground truth impossible to ignore or rebut.
While Mr Obama is apparently quite comfortable with the idea of a Mahdi Bomb, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary, the state and government of Israel cannot afford such a detached, laid back attitude. While it will be quite some time before Iranian technicians can miniaturize a nuclear charge so as to make it deliverable by one of its medium or intermediate range ballistic missiles, it will take very little time to build a bomb which would fit comfortably in a truck.
(Feeling depressed, Ahmad, anxious, tired of this life? Think martyrdom. Particularly if you can drive a truck.)
Think of it this way, Ahmad, you don't even have to cross the Israeli border. Just get to a checkpoint on the Lebanese border--or the Gaza border after our Western tools have opened the Strip to our ships--and let the sucker go. A twenty kiloton ground pounder will kill a whole bunch of Jews--particularly if Allah wills the winds to blow in the correct direction. Come on, Ahmad, that little push of the clicker will make you a hero orders of magnitude greater than the guys who flew into the Twin Towers. Way to go, fellihin!
By the most conservative estimate the Iranians are only a pair of years from having a workable truck transportable nuclear weapon or two. Letting one or both rip on Israel would be a mighty blow against the "Zionist entity" particularly if followed by ground attacks from all those nice neighbors known as "frontline states." The ground attacks won't even have to be conducted by heavy and well coordinated forces if the government and people of Israel are not prepared for the initial shock.
In a world filled with "get-or-get-got" situations, the one faced by Israel is the most compelling. To "get" implies the willingness to be held responsible for starting the equivalent of a full scale war at a time when the global economy would be an inevitable collateral casualty. To wait until being "get-got" and then retaliate means the political will to absorb a large number of Israeli casualties must exist.
The time to make decisions between "getting" and surviving "getting got" is short. The time to make the necessary preparations in both political will and material capacities for either option is not much longer. Every minute wasted on damage control over the flotilla mess is time wasted.
For this the Obama administration must and will take great responsibility when historians of the future consider this period. Cringing, hand-wringing, bowing to Muslims has been bootless. Turning Uncle Sam's back to Israel is much, much worse.
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