WarSclerotic

YOUR VIEW: U.S. must support Israel unequivocally | SouthCoastToday.com.

It is time to get real. We need to work with and protect our friends and recognize our enemies for what they are and deal with them realistically. Israel is the lone democracy in the Middle East. Israel has been our only steadfast ally in the region since its birth 62 years ago. Compare Israel’s government with all the others in the region and you readily understand that it is the only one that shares and acts on our values.

David Ehrens’ recent essay in this newspaper (“Tough love for Israel,” June 3) recommends that the United States end financial aid to Israel to control it. Would the author have us give the money to Iran to pay for its nuclear weapons? Or perhaps to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, so they can build greater arsenals? Or perhaps to Syria, so that it can rebuild the nuclear reactor that North Korea was building for it?

We need to accept the fact that Islamist states will never be friends to Western countries. They are at war with our culture and religion. Osama bin Laden cared not one little bit about the Palestinians when he planned his attack on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the White House or the Capitol. The Islamists and especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, use anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment to cynically increase their power. Israel is trying to defend itself in an increasingly perilous environment.

Although the blockade is an effective way to prevent smuggling of arms to Hamas, which is sworn to destroy Israel, this is not about the blockade. It is about a much larger war. Our enemies regard Israel as our proxy, so a blow against Israel is a blow against us. For the United States to do anything but express unequivocal support for Israel’s security invites aggression which would be bad for the United States as well as Israel.

North Korea has two nuclear weapons now. Recently, it sank a South Korean navy vessel, the Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. No response. South Korea was paralyzed by the nukes. The International Atomic Energy Agency announced last week that Iran now has enough fuel for two nuclear bombs which can be built in several months. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, the world will change overnight.

We saw last week that Turkey, for years an ally of both the United States and Israel, has already been turned. It is in fear of Iran. Syria and Lebanon are already under Iranian control, and it is having a major influence in Iraq. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are rightly terrified.

This week the president signed a United Nations agreement ultimately requiring Israel to give up its nuclear defense under the guise of a “nuclear-free Middle East.” Last Friday’s White House statement against the Israeli blockade will increase, not reduce, the risk of violence. These steps and others signal American ambivalence and tend to create the impression that this president might not aid Israel if it is attacked.

What would North Korea do if we withdrew our 20,000 troops from South Korea? Iraq invaded Kuwait when our ambassador to Iraq on the instructions of the president equivocated when Saddam Hussein asked her whether we would respond if he invaded. An unequivocal statement guaranteeing Kuwait’s territorial integrity probably would have averted that war and spared thousands of lives. The president needs to do the equivalent, right now.

Yet this administration has been going in the opposite direction in this treacherous terrain. No good will come of it. It is a recipe for another very dangerous war in the Middle East. As soon as Israel concludes that the United States can or will not prevent Iran from building nuclear bombs, Israel will make an existential decision whether to attack Iran. It may opt for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program, as it has in Iraq and Syria for emotional as well as strategic reasons.

Israel has a deep and enduring collective memory of the Holocaust. It will not go quietly to the nuclear ovens repeatedly promised (even this week) by Ahmadinejad. We need to get realistic and learn from the past. The mistakes of Neville Chamberlain and their devastating consequences need to inform this debate.

The decision of the United States and South Korea to do nothing in response to the sinking of the Cheonan was an invitation to aggression by Iran. North Korea acted with impunity because of its new nuclear umbrella. Iran is close to opening its own umbrella.

We must act very soon or suffer dire consequences flowing from the reality of a nuclear checkmate in the Middle East as well as the Korean Peninsula. The mixed messages of the Obama administration are very dangerous indeed.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2010 at 8:12 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.