Obama targets Netanyahu, Iran targets Israel, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, January 29, 2015
Obama will tell himself and anyone who wants to hear that he has brought Iran back into the community of nations. Obama, after all, is a rare man. How many others can make 118 self-referential mentions in a half hour talk, as Obama did in India this week?
Is it any wonder why someone who stands for something, say a country’s security, as Netanyahu does, gets under the skin of a man who is primarily concerned with little more than his own greatness, and whose presidency, in a word, has been a “selfie”?
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There is a bit of difference between Iran and U.S. President Barack Obama when it comes to Israel. Iran has never been reticent that its goal is to eliminate the State of Israel, and Israelis too while they are it. Iran’s proxy terror army of Hezbollah contributed their part on Wednesday, killing two Israeli soldiers and wounding seven with anti-tank fire from southern Lebanon directed at an Israeli convoy. Obama seems more interested, at least in the next two months, in eliminating one Israeli — namely, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It has been a remarkable two weeks in U.S.-Israel relations. The president delivered his State of the Union address, in which he argued for staying the course with negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, overselling what has already been achieved, as well as what might be achieved. He also threatened to veto new sanctions legislation that might be passed by Congress, where some have called for tougher sanctions to be applied to Iran if a satisfactory deal were not struck between the P5+1 and the Iranians by June 30. Obama argued that passing such a measure now would be a sign of bad faith and drive the Iranians from the negotiating table. It was, of course, an odd prediction, since one area in which the Iranians have shown remarkable consistency has been in negotiating with European powers, or the now expanded negotiating group for over 10 years, always without a satisfactory outcome. The Iranians seem to like being seen as negotiating while their nuclear program advances.
Fact checkers awarded Obama a bunch of “pinocchios” for his latest effort, suggesting he was all but lying on the matter. No, the Iranians have not dismantled any centrifuges (they have more running than before), they have not removed any fissile material from the country for safekeeping, they have not allowed inspections on demand, they have not disabled their Arak heavy-water reactor, they have not agreed to end any missile program they are working on for delivery of a nuclear bomb.
”Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran,” Obama said, ”where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.”
James Robbins, a senior fellow in national security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, begged to disagree:
”But has Iran’s stockpile shrunk? Under a deal concluded last November, Iran halted work on the most dangerous material, 20 percent refined uranium. However, Iran is still making lower-grade uranium. According to a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency last November, Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium gas and 5 percent enriched uranium were both growing. Also, the agency cautioned that their figures only covered ’declared sites,’ the nuclear facilities Iran has publicly acknowledged and allowed to be inspected.”
In the days after his address to Congress, the president repeated his threats about vetoing new sanctions legislation, when meeting with Democratic senators, several of whom, along with a few Republican colleagues, had been lobbied on the matter by Britain’s visiting Prime Minister David Cameron. The president upped the ante, accusing Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a leader in the attempt to pass new sanctions, of not thinking long-term, but just trying to make his donors (could Obama have meant Jewish donors?) happy.
The idea of a foreign leader directly lobbying members of Congress on an issue like the Iranian sanctions bill took on a new life when House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on the Iranian issue on February 11. The White House predictably blew its lid, accusing Boehner of breaking established protocol for such an invitation. (It should have been coordinated with the White House.) The usual Obama water carriers like Jeffrey Goldberg were quick to lambaste Netanyahu for stage managing the invitation so as to embarrass Obama, and in the process threaten U.S.-Israel relations. As Joel Pollak describes Goldberg’s argument:
”In his most recent Atlantic column, he claims, for example, that Obama worked ‘in tandem’ with Netanyahu to promote sanctions on Iran: ‘Netanyahu traveled the world arguing for stringent sanctions, and Obama did much the same.’
“That is simply factually untrue. Obama resisted Iran sanctions for months, defying even a unanimous vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Not only was Israel frustrated, and Congress, but Europe as well, which accused Obama of re-inventing the wheel, resetting diplomacy that had started under (gasp) George W. Bush.
“In fact, Obama pushed the world towards a more lenient position on Iran, allowing nuclear enrichment in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
And then there is this doozy:
”It is Netanyahu’s job, Goldberg says, as ‘the junior partner in the Israel-U.S. relationship,’ to make concessions.”
When it comes to negotiating with Iran, Netanyahu does not sit at the table with the Iranians, but Obama’s representatives do. And it is U.S. negotiators who have been making concessions month after month since the talks began, in what appears to be a desperate attempt to salvage some deal they can broadcast as having achieved a minimal set of objectives. That objective has now been reduced to providing some minimum breakout time for Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability if they ditch the deal. What will the West do in that time if Iran moves towards the bomb? It is pretty clear, any military response from Obama is out of the question.
The administration has further demonstrated its unhappiness about Netanyahu’s impudence in scheming with Boehner, by announcing that neither the president nor his secretary of state will meet with Netanyahu when he visits Washington, a date now moved back three weeks to overlap his visit to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. The excuse, couched in a diplomatic smokescreen, is that it would be improper for the president to meet with a candidate for office abroad so close to the time of that country’s election. That would be equivalent to electioneering and interference in the other country’s race. Presumably when President Bill Clinton met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres just weeks before his election contest with Netanyahu in 1996, at a time when Israeli prime ministers were elected in a head-to-head battle, electioneering was the furthest thing from Clinton’s mind.
The Obama team may not meet with Netanyahu when he visits, but an experienced Obama campaign team from 2012 is now in Israel working to defeat Netanyahu. That, in and of itself, is nothing new for Israeli elections. Experienced American campaign teams have aided Israeli candidates from the Left and Right in recent decades. What is new is that the current anti-Netanyahu campaign includes a State Department funded group:
”U.S.-based activist group OneVoice International has partnered with V15, an ‘independent grass-roots movement’ in Israel that is actively opposing Netanyahu’s party in the upcoming elections, Haaretz reported on Monday. Former national field director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign Jeremy Bird is also reportedly involved in the effort.
“OneVoice development and grants officer Christina Taler said the group would be working with V15 on voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts but would not engage in overtly partisan activities. She said OneVoice and V15 are still formalizing the partnership.”
Obama’s team has gone further to poison the waters for Netanyahu, planting a story in Haaretz that the Mossad was opposed to new sanctions legislation, a charge they publicly rebutted.
The Goldberg article was designed to deliver a message that Israel has two important objectives now — to keep Iran from going nuclear (for which their best hope of course is to count on Obama to do the job for them in negotiations), and second, to keep American close and happy with Israel’s behavior. Netanyahu, according to Goldberg, is killing the good vibes that presumably must have existed during the Obama years by his recent behavior.
There is an alternative interpretation for what is going on. Obama is really not terribly bothered by a nuclear Iran. A bad deal that looks like it delays Iran’s entry to the nuclear club is therefore not a bad option. It also allows Obama to check off one more box on his achievements list before his formal request to have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. Pakistan has a bomb. Israel has the bomb. Why not Iran, the leading Shiite nation? Iran, after all, is now our strategic partner, fighting with us to battle ISIS in Iraq.
The latest evidence that Obama is now on the Iranian team is the New York Times editorial calling for accepting that having Assad hang on in Syria is the least bad result, so backing a non-ISIS Syrian rebel team is a bad idea. The New York Times editorial page is little more than a conveyance tool for White House messaging at this point, and so this is now clearly Obama’s posture. How can we fight alongside Iran in Iraq, but support a side that is fighting Iran’s ally Assad in Syria?
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is stepping up its activities in the Golan. The Iranian goal appears to be to establish a base in Syria where Israel can be targeted by the Lebanese group, without getting an Israeli response in Lebanon itself. What is clear is that Hezbollah and Iran have Israel in their sights. If Iran gets the bomb, the retaliation options for Israel when Hezbollah pressure is applied, will be much more limited. There is no certainty that Iran subscribes to the mutually assured destruction deterrence club.
But not to worry. Obama will tell himself and anyone who wants to hear that he has brought Iran back into the community of nations. Obama, after all, is a rare man. How many others can make 118 self-referential mentions in a half hour talk, as Obama did in India this week?
Is it any wonder why someone who stands for something, say a country’s security, as Netanyahu does, gets under the skin of a man who is primarily concerned with little more than his own greatness, and whose presidency, in a word, has been a “selfie”?
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (right) shakes hands with US Secretary of State John Kerry (left) in Geneva, January 14, 2015. (photo credit: AFP/Rick Wilking/Pool)
Senator Bob Corker, R-TN (photo credit:: CC BY-SA, byUS Congress, Wikimedia Commons)
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