WarSclerotic

No moral backbone, Israel Hayom, Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi, December 19, 2017

The 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize before he even managed to make an impression on the international reality, and who tirelessly repeated his commitment to promoting universal values and morality, is now being portrayed as someone who crossed all normative red lines by allowing Hezbollah and its satellites to carry out crimes undisturbed, even on U.S. soil.

Indeed, according to an exposé by the news site Politico, it appears that the Obama administration knowingly thwarted the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “Project Cassandra,” which was designed to deal a fatal blow to Hezbollah’s global logistics, finances and operations. The work was supposed to have exposed the corrupt channels through which enormous revenues from drug deals were funneled. The money was directed, via drug lords and business people with contacts – straight to Hezbollah, and allowed the organization to improve its military capabilities.

The Politico report also said that the regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria, a strategic partner of the Lebanese terrorist group, enjoyed the rotten fruits of this conduit in the form of shipments of conventional and chemical weapons to Damascus during the Syrian civil war. Despite the frightening picture revealed by those involved in Project Cassandra, it quickly became apparent that the upper echelon of the Obama administration, particularly the U.S. Justice and Treasury departments, consistently blocked the effort to eliminate the drugs and weapons axis, thus giving Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Assad the quiet and the room to maneuver that they needed.

If even a fraction of the facts detailed in the report by the reliable site are accurate, they would provide sufficient ground to rip off the drapes of righteousness that still cover the true nature of the Obama era. Specifically, if indeed “all the president’s men” thwarted the operation to avoid spoiling the relations between Washington and Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, in the period when Obama was working feverishly to set up the nuclear deal with Tehran, it expresses the unbearable cynicism of the White House that prided itself on a flawless “ethical code” of conduct in the international arena, including its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This latest affair is like a tunnel that sends us back through time to the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, when the administration of then-President Harry Truman stopped at nothing to enlist some 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians, particularly in the field of missile development. That campaign, which was dubbed Operation Paperclip, is now considered the essence of immoral, inhumane conduct, which ignored the crimes against humanity the candidates had committed.

It is becoming clear that the liberal President Obama did not learn from history, and in complete contradiction of his saintly statements, effectively gave a green light to an entire web of ongoing crimes, based on his perception – ridiculous in itself – that it was in America’s national interest to do so.

To sum up, Obama not only refrained from taking action against the ruler of Syria when he crossed all the red lines that had been drawn on chemical warfare but also contributed – if indirectly – to Assad building up his chemical arsenal and deploying it against his own civilian population. Obama deserved a Nobel Prize for his Machiavellian, opportunistic and immoral conduct, which also hurt the security of the U.S.’s partner, Israel.