WarSclerotic

Indiana Gazette > B Opinions.

On all fronts, President Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East are failing. So what is the president doing? Taking it out on America’s closest ally, Israel.

The administration’s top priority in the region should be to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. That’s clearly not happening.

Obama’s second-biggest priority – if not his first, given the president’s campaign pledges – is to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.

That plan was going along nicely until Iraq’s elections – a tribute to Bush administration policy, but claimed as a success by Obama officials – produced a political deadlock that may lead to violence and extend the U.S. troop presence.

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And, third, Obama wants to be the president who finally produces a two-state peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But that’s not happening, either, largely because of mistakes made by the administration itself.

(Afghanistan is in South Asia, not in the Mideast, but the administration’s courageous policy isn’t going very well there, either, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai entertaining Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, abetting rampant corruption and accusing the United States of trying to dominate his country.)

Obama gives every indication of believing the “Arab narrative” of what blocks Middle East peace – namely, Israeli (not Palestinian) intransigence.

His animus isn’t into Jimmy Carter territory yet – Carter likens Israel to apartheid South Africa – but Obama is given to outbursts of rage at Israeli “provocations,” but none to those committed on the Palestinian side.

Contrast the reaction of the administration to the March 11 dedication of a square in Ramallah, interim capital of the Palestinian Authority, honoring a terrorist with the Israeli announcement March 9 of construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem.

The square in Ramallah now honors Dalal Mughrabi, leader of a Palestinian terror squad that killed 38 Israelis aboard a bus in 1978, 13 of them children.

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on March 22, she said that the dedication “insults families on both sides of the conflict who have lost loved ones.”

But she incorrectly blamed the action on “a Hamas-controlled municipality,” when it was not authorized by that terrorist group, but by Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. She did not condemn him. By contrast, on Obama’s personal orders, the administration fired every verbal gun in its arsenal at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Jerusalem announcement – even though it knew he was blindsided and embarrassed by right-wingers in his own government.

It was, as the administration said, “an insult” to visiting Vice President Joseph Biden, who “condemned” it. That was a reasonable reaction.

But then, on Obama’s orders, Clinton upbraided Netanyahu in a 45-minute phone call publicized by the administration, and her spokesman said that Netanyahu had drawn the entire U.S.-Israeli “bilateral relationship” into question.

When Netanyahu spoke to AIPAC, he made it clear that Israel would not stop building in its capital, Jerusalem, even though it has frozen settlement activity in the West Bank.

He then went to the White House – and was treated like a pariah, denied customary photographs with the president, let alone a press availability. Also, according to reports from the Israeli side, Netanyahu’s aides stayed past midnight in the White House and had to ask for food and water.

It’s conceivable that Obama’s approach is directed more at Netanyahu than Israel and that he hopes, as Bill Clinton did, to drive the Likud leader from office and have him replaced by a less hard-line prime minister.

But Obama’s whole approach neglects some facts. During Clinton’s final months in office in 2000, Israel agreed to a peace plan substantially turning the West Bank over to Palestinian rule. It was rejected by then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli forces from Gaza in 2004 – whereupon Hamas took over the territory and began firing rockets at Israeli towns.

Before he left office in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinians the most generous peace plan yet, and they refused to take it.

Now, they are refusing even face-to-face negotiations with Israel. Why? Because last March, Obama and Clinton demanded total cessation of Israeli settlement activity on former Palestinian territory – whereupon that became the Palestinians’ precondition for participation in peace talks, which have yet to resume.

Obama has been publicly pounding on Israel for concessions but never publicly leans on the Palestinians.

Meantime, the administration is leaning on Iran, but ineffectually. Clinton said at AIPAC that “the United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” and if Iran persists, “our aim is not incremental sanctions, but sanctions that will bite.”

Obama said he anticipated that the U.N. Security Council would agree to sanctions within “weeks,” but the truth is that China and Russia are blocking them and, if finally persuaded to impose some, will see that they are weak.

Obama should be doing what Bill Clinton did to prevent Serbia from committing genocide in Muslim Kosovo: go outside the U.N., form a European “coalition of the willing” and cut off Iran’s gasoline.

Iran may have enough highly enriched uranium to test a simple Hiroshima-style bomb in 2011. It would be a huge embarrassment to Obama a year before he seeks re-election.

It would also be a dire threat to Israel, whose existence Iran has vowed to end. Israel will be sorely tempted to attack Iran to prevent its developing a bomb.

Obama surely doesn’t want that. It could create chaos in oil markets and the world economy, not to mention the Mideast.

But Obama’s persuasive power with Israel? It’s fading fast – and it’s his own fault.

Obama: A nuclear Iran inevitable.

US President said “current course would provide them with nuclear capabilities.

It is inevitable that Iran will produce nuclear weapons, as things stand, US President Barack Obama said on Monday, in an interview with The New York Times. Seeming to indicate his administration was now resigned to a future including a nuclear-armed Iran.

President Obama stated he was now convinced that “the current course they’re on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities,” though he gave no timeline.

He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel’s view that a “nuclear capable” Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

“I’m not going to parse that right now,” he said. But he cited the example of North Korea, whose nuclear capabilities were unclear until it conducted a test in 2006, which it followed with a second shortly after Mr. Obama took office.

President Obama was speaking about revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons, with exceptions directed at “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On March 28th former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton warned of the White House moving towards acceptance of a nuclearly capable Iran. “I very much worry the Obama administration is willing to accept a nuclear Iran, that’s why there’s this extraordinary pressure on Israel not to attack in Iran,” Bolton told Army Radio.

On Saturday night a Israel urged international action on Iran. In response to an announcement by Iran’s nuclear chief of plans to build new atomic facilities in the country, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s newest warning regarding Israel’s demise, a senior government official called for “determined and effective international action.”

“Ahmadinejad’s continuous outbursts of extremist rhetoric only prove to the entire international community the seriousness of the threat posed by the Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and heightens the need for determined and effective international action,” the official said.

Ahmadinejad, referring on Saturday to escalating tensions in the Gaza Strip, said IDF action would “cost” Israel “too much.”

“I say to the Zionists and their supporters that they have already committed enough crimes,” he told an Iranian crowd. “A new adventure in Gaza will not save you, but hasten your demise.”

Faced with the prospect of new sanctions because
of Iran’s nuclear defiance, Ahmadinejad said that such penalties would only strengthen his country’s technological advancement and help it to become more self-sufficient.

“Don’t imagine that you can stop Iran’s progress,” Ahmadinejad said in remarks broadcast live on state television. “The more you reveal your animosity, the more it will increase our people’s motivation to double efforts for construction and progress of Iran.”

The Iranian president claimed US pressure on Iran had backfired and made Washington more isolated in the eyes of the world.

China, which has veto power in the UN Security Council and whose support would be key, has not confirmed US reports that it has dropped its opposition to new sanctions. Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is in China in the hopes of winning assurances from Beijing that it will oppose such measures.

Iran’s economy has suffered over the past year, and parliament approved a cut in subsidies that keep fuel prices low, a further blow to Iranians already experiencing high unemployment and inflation.

The UN Security Council could consider new punishments on Iran, including increasing financial squeezes on the extensive holdings of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The US has also said it could seek to penalize companies that sell fuel to the oil-rich Islamic Republic, which imports about 40 percent of the fuel it needs because its refineries cannot keep pace.

Ahmadinejad added that the US has failed to isolate Iran. He said the fact that Obama’s recent visit to Afghanistan was not announced beforehand for security reasons was evidence of America’s own isolation.

“First, let’s see who is isolated. We think those who can’t show up publicly among the people and directly address them are isolated – those who fear nations. Gentlemen go to a country where they have 60,000 troops without any prior announcement. Who is isolated?” Ahmadinejad said.

The Iranian president noted that his own recent trip to Afghanistan was announced in advance and said he was warmly received.

“You are isolated yourself, but you are a hotheaded and don’t understand it,” he said.