Time for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to confront Barack Obama
Caroline Glick
The time has come for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to confront U.S. President Barack Obama.
A short summary of events from the past three days: On Tuesday
morning, the head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence Analysis Division
Brig. Gen.
Itay Brun revealed that the Syrian government has already used
“lethal chemical weapons,” against Syrian civilians and opposition
forces. Brun described footage of people visibly suffering the impact of
chemical agents, apparently sarin gas.
Hours later, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Netanyahu had
told him on the telephone that “he was not in a position to confirm”
Brun’s statement.
It is hard to imagine the U.S. was taken by surprise by Brun’s
statement. Just the day before, Brun briefed visiting U.S. Defense
secretary Chuck Hagel on Syria. It is not possible he failed to mention
the same information.
And of course it isn’t just the IDF saying that Syrian President
Bashar Assad is using chemical weapons. The British and the French are
also saying this.
But as a European source told Ma’ariv, the Americans don’t want to
know the facts. The facts will make them do something about Syria’s
chemical weapons. And they don’t want to do anything about Syria’s
chemical weapons.
So they force Netanyahu to disown his own intelligence.
Thursday afternoon, in a speech in Abu Dhabi, Hagel confirmed, “with
some degree of varying confidence,” that Syria used chemical weapons, at
least on a “small scale.”
What the administration means by “some degree of varying confidence,”
is of course, unknowable with any degree of varying confidence.
Then there is Iran.
Also on Tuesday, the former head of IDF Military Intelligence,
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, said that Iran has already crossed the red
line Israel set last year. It has already stockpiled 170 kg. of
medium-enriched uranium and can quickly produce the other 80 kg.
necessary to reach the 250 kg. threshold Netanyahu said will mark Iran’s
achievement of breakout capability where it can build a nuclear arsenal
whenever it wants.
Yadlin made a half-hearted effort Wednesday to walk back his
pronouncements. But his basic message remained the same: The die has
been cast.
Due to American pressure on Israel not to act, and due to the White
House’s rejection of clear-cut reports about Iran’s stockpile of
enriched uranium, Iran has crossed the threshold. Iran will be a nuclear
power unless its uranium enrichment installations and other nuclear
sites are destroyed or crippled. Now.
True, the Americans set a different red line for Iran than Israel.
They say they will not allow Iran to assemble a nuclear bomb. But to
believe that the U.S. has the capacity and the will to prevent Iran from
climbing the top rung on the nuclear ladder is to believe in the tooth
fairy – (see, for instance, North Korea).
Iran has threatened to use it nuclear arsenal to destroy Israel. Have
we now placed our survival in the hands of Tinkerbelle? And yet, rather
than acknowledge what Iran has done, Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres
and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon carry on with the tired act of
talking about the need for a credible military option but saying that
there is still time for sanctions and other non-military means to block
Iran’s quest for the bomb.
Perhaps our leaders are repeating these lies because they want to
present a unified US-Israel front to the world. But the effect is just
the opposite.
What their statements really demonstrate is that Israel has been
brought to its knees by its superpower patron that has implemented a
policy that has enabled Iran to become a nuclear power.
Indeed, the U.S. has allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold
while requiring Israel to pretend the course the U.S. has followed is a
responsible one.
The announcement that the U.S. has agreed to sell Israel advanced
weapons specifically geared towards attacking Iran should also be seen
in this light. Israel reportedly spent a year negotiating this deal. But
immediately after its details were published, the U.S. started backing
away from its supposed commitment to supply them. The U.S. will not
provide Israel with bunker-buster bombs.
It will not provide Israel with the bombers necessary to use the
bombs Israel isn’t getting. And anyway, by the time Israel gets the
items the U.S. is selling – like mid-air refuelers – it will be too
late.
When, after overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the U.S.
failed to find chemical weapons in the country, then-president George W.
Bush’s Democratic opponents accused Bush of having politicized
intelligence to justify his decision to topple Saddam. In truth, there
is no evidence that Bush purposely distorted intelligence reports.
Israel’s intelligence agencies, and perhaps French ones, were the only
allied intelligence arms that had concluded Saddam’s chemical weapons –
to the extent he had them – did not represent a threat.
The fact that Bush preferred U.S. and British intelligence estimates
over Israeli ones doesn’t mean that he politicized intelligence.
In contrast, what Obama and his advisers are doing represents the
worst case of politicizing intelligence since Stalin arrested his senior
security brass rather than heed their warnings of the coming German
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Never in U.S. history has there been a greater misuse and abuse of
U.S. intelligence agencies than there is today, under the Obama
administration.
Take the Boston Marathon bombings. Each day more and more reports
come out about the information U.S. agencies had – for years – regarding
the threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.
But how could the FBI have possibly acted on those threats? Obama has
outlawed all discussion or study of jihad, Islamism, radical Islam and
the Koran by U.S. federal government agencies. The only law enforcement
agency that monitors Islamic websites is the New York Police Department.
And its chief Ray Kelly has bravely maintained his policy despite
massive pressure from the media and the political class to end his
surveillance operations.
Everywhere else, from the Boston Police Department to the FBI and
CIA, U.S. officials are barred from discussing the threat posed by
jihadists or even acknowledging they exist. People were impressed that
Obama referred to the terrorist attack in Boston as a terrorist attack,
because according to the administration-dictated federal lexicon, use of
the word terrorism is forbidden, particularly when the act in question
was perpetrated by Muslims.
Then there are the Palestinians. On Thursday, it was reported that in
the midst of everything happening in the Middle East, Obama is planning
to host a peace conference in Washington in June to reinstate
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The terms of reference for the conference are reportedly the 2002 Arab League “peace plan.”
Among other things, that plan requires Israel to accept millions of
hostile foreign-born Arabs to whatever rump state it retains following a
“peace” agreement with the PLO. In exchange for Israel agreeing to
destroy itself, the Arab peace plan says the Arabs will agree to have
“regular” relations with Israel. (“Regular” by the way, is a term devoid
of meaning.) During his visit here last week, Kerry announced that the
new U.S. policy towards the Palestinians is to pour billions of dollars
into the Palestinian economy. Among other things, the administration is
going to convince U.S. companies like Coca-Cola to open huge plants in
Judea and Samaria.
Sounds fine. But as usual, there is a catch. The administration wants
U.S. firms to build their factories in Area C, the area of Judea and
Samaria over which, in accordance with the agreements they signed with
Israel, the Palestinians agreed Israel should hold sole control.
In essence, the policy Kerry announced is simply an American version
of the EU’s policy of seeking to force Israel to give up control over
Area C.
Area C, of course, is where all the Israeli communities are, and almost no Palestinians live.
Those Israeli communities and the 350,000 Jews who live in them are
the strongest assertion of Israeli sovereign rights to Judea and
Samaria. So the EU – and now the Americans – are doing everything they
can to force Israel to destroy them. The campaign to coerce Israel into
surrendering its sole control over Area C is a central component of that
plan.
It cannot be said often enough: The administration’s focus on the
Palestinian conflict with Israel in the midst of the violent
disintegration of the Arab state system and the rise of jihadist forces
throughout the region, coupled with Iran’s steady emergence as a
regional power, is only understandable in the framework of a psychiatric
– rather than policy – analysis.
For the past five years, perhaps Netanyahu’s greatest achievement in
office has been his adroit avoidance of confrontations with Obama. With
no one other than the U.S. willing to stand with Israel in public, it is
an important national interest for Jerusalem not to have any
confrontations with Washington if they can possibly be avoided.
This attempt to avoid confrontations is what made Netanyahu agree to
Obama’s anti-Jewish demand to deny Jews their property rights in Judea
and Samaria in 2010. This is undoubtedly what stood behind Netanyahu’s
decision to apologize to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan during
Obama’s visit to Israel last month. That apology constituted a moral
abandonment of the IDF naval commandos who Netanyahu’s government sent –
virtually unarmed – to face Turkish terrorists affiliated with al-Qaida
and Hamas aboard the Mavi Marmara terror ship.
To a degree, all of Netanyahu’s seemingly unjustifiable actions can
be justified when weighed against the need to avoid a confrontation with
America.
But by now, after five years, with Iran having passed Israel’s red
line, and with chemical weapons already in play in Syria, the jig is up.
Obama does not have Israel’s back.
Contrary to the constant, grinding rhetorical prattle of American and
Israeli politicos, Obama will not lift a finger to stop Iran from
becoming a nuclear power. He will not lift a finger to prevent chemical
weapons from being transferred to the likes of al-Qaida and Hezbollah,
and their colleagues in Syria, or used by the Syrian regime.
From Benghazi to Boston, from Tehran to Damascus, Obama’s policy is
to not fight forces of jihad, whether they are individuals,
organizations or states. And his obsession with Palestinian statehood
shows that he would rather coerce Israel to make concessions to
Palestinian Jew-haters and terrorists than devote his time and energy
into preventing Iran from becoming the jihadist North Korea or from
keeping sarin, VX and mustard gas out of the hands of Iran’s terrorist
underlings and their Sunni competitors.
No, Israel doesn’t want a confrontation with Washington. But we don’t have any choice anymore.
The time has come to take matters into our own hands on Syria and
Iran. In Syria, either Israel takes care of the chemical weapons, or if
we can’t, Netanyahu must go before the cameras and tell the world
everything we know about Syria’s chemical weapons and pointedly demand
world – that is U.S. – action to secure them.
As for Iran, either Israel must launch an attack without delay, or if
we can’t, then Netanyahu has to publicly state that the time for
diplomacy is over. Either Iran is attacked or it gets the bomb.
