Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes that Israel will attack Iran in April, May, or June. This is according to a 2 February Washington Post column by David Ignatius, apparently relying on a conversation with Panetta. Ignatius’s column came out at the same time as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s speech in which Barak declared that Iran would soon enter a stage where its nuclear program would be immune from attack. In his speech, according to a report in the Financial Times , Barak said, ” The world today has no doubt that the Iranian military nuclear program is slowly but surely reaching the final stages, and will enter the immunity stage from which point the Iranian regime will be able to complete the program without any effective intervention and at its convenience.” He added, “Dealing with a nuclearized Iran will be far more complex, far more dangerous and far more costly in blood and money than stopping it today. In other words, those who say ‘later’ may find that later is too late.” Had statements like these come during the Cold War from, for example, America and Britain, it would be suspected as a ruse. Such ploys were a commonplace then, each side trying to maneuver against the other to draw wavering nations to their side in the dispute du jour . This is different. Since Obama took office, Israel has learned to suspect America, not trust it. Obama’s Islam-centric foreign policy has broken the link between Israel and the United States. There is no common policy on Iran that could have resulted in coordinated statements by Barak and Panetta. The personal hostility between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the public face of deep disagreements. Their enmity became open after Obama had demanded Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on the pre-1967 war borders. Last May, Netanyahu schooled Obama before the television cameras after a rocky private White House meeting. A visibly angry Obama shifted uncomfortably in his chair during Netanyahu’s compelling lecture. Netanyahu’s subsequent speech before a joint session of Congress amplified the clear break between the two men. Since then, Obama, Panetta, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey have attempted to dissuade Israel from any military action against Iran. But the only result has been that Israel’s distrust of the Obama administration has grown to the point that Israel will not tell Obama what it plans. Panetta himself has worked to heighten that distrust. Last December, he blamed Israel for the lack of talks with the Palestinians, admonishing Israel to “Just get to the damn table.” In effect, by its feckless actions and pressure on Israel but not Israel’s enemies, Obama has deprived Israel of options other than war. Continued sanctions against Iran have been met with defiance from Iran and dissembling from its allies. Iraq is apparently planning to help Iran avoid a pending embargo on Iranian oil by shipping Iranian oil from its ports, hiding its origin. (That plan may be only symbolic, because the construction of planned pipelines delivering oil and gas from Iran to Iraq’s export center are not scheduled to be finished until 2014.) The European embargo of Iranian oil is months away, and may never happen. Obama’s actions have made the Middle East and Southwest Asia vastly more unstable. Our actions to encourage rebellion in Egypt and military action in support of the Libyan rebellion have only propelled the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood movement to power in both nations. Panetta’s announcement that we may withdraw from Afghanistan a year early relieves pressure on Iran and encourages both Iran and Pakistan to continue their strong support for the Taliban. Obama’s plan to release five top Taliban commanders from Gitmo is a major boost to the Taliban. According to a leaked NATO classified report, the Taliban are confident that they will return to power quickly after our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that Iran is prepared to launch terrorist action inside the United States. Iran was greatly emboldened when, in 2009, Obama’s “hands off Iran” policy failed to support the nascent rebellion against the mullahs. Last December, a New York court held that Iran had helped al Qaeda mount the 9/11 attacks. The sad fact is that, since 1979, Iran has paid no price for its central role in terrorism against the United States. Obama’s preference for passive sanctions — rather than overt or covert measures that can deprive Iran from its ability to produce nuclear weapons — has granted Iran more time to reach what Ehud Barak called the “immunity stage.” What is that? Immunity for Iran means that its nuclear weapons program would be so deeply buried and dispersed that only a nuclear attack on it could delay or destroy it. Israel can’t afford to wait for Iran’s nuclear weapons program to become immune. Israel would certainly use nuclear weapons in response to such an attack against it, but it isn’t about to wait until a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran is its only option. The Israeli calculus is complex. Attacking Iran will certainly provoke Iranian attacks, using missiles and terrorist proxies, which could result in massive Israeli casualties. Hizballah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, will launch its thousands of missiles into Israel. The Hamas terrorists in Gaza will do the same and other Iran-connected terrorists — including al Qaeda — will probably attack U.S. and other western targets. If Israel suffers massive casualties, it’s entirely possible that its Arab neighbors would try to mount another 1967-like attack. But in 1967 and again in 1973, Israel had clear American support. When Israel appeared to be losing the 1973 war, U.S. Air Force aircraft were being armed and fueled to fly into the fight. That possibility still exists, but the Israelis’ distrust of Obama is so great that they aren’t including that in their war planning. Israel believes it is alone, and in that it’s probably right. As I wrote about eighteen months ago in a quasi-fictional forecast , Israel’s military will be stretched to the limit in attacking Iranian targets that are a long flying distance from Israel, and are both dispersed and — in many cases — deep underground. If it chooses to attack, it should also judge that suppression missions against Hizballah in Lebanon and against Syrian missile forces are an essential part of the plan. Such an attack will ignite a theater-wide war that Israel may not survive. Obama isn’t serious about preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. In the three decades since the Iranian regime came to power, no diplomatic effort has ever changed its behavior. The only option for us, for Israel, and for the shopkeepers of Europe is to strike at Iran’s nuclear program to dismantle it. But that option, despite what Obama and Panetta say, isn’t one we are seriously considering. Left with no other choice, Israel will have to do what we lack the resolve to do. If Secretary Panetta’s belief is as the Washington Post reported, and if we are to take Ehud Barak’s statements at face value, Obama’s inaction would mean that Israel has concluded that it cannot rely on American action in its defense. By continuing inaction against Iran, going beyond ineffectual sanctions, Obama is pushing Israel toward war. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the U.S. for a major speech to the AIPAC group next month. It may be the last opportunity for him and Obama to come to an understanding on decisive action against Iran. Soon after Netanyahu returns home, the Israelis will have to risk their nation’s existence in a war that is as much ours as theirs.
The rest is here:
Pushing Israel to War
Unreal, even by Obama’s standards. (Washington Times) — Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman is working on a major Obama administration initiative that would renew scientist exchanges between U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and Chinese nuclear facilities. The idea is aimed at promoting openness and transparency by China’s military about its secret, large-scale buildup of nuclear
See the article here:
Obama Looking To Renew Nuke Scientist Exchange With China That Led To One of Worst Cases of Nuclear Weapons Espionage In U.S. History…
With most Republican presidential candidates beating the war drums against Iran, it is worth reflecting on what Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently had to say on Iran’s nuclear developments.
Not surprisingly, Obama doubled down on his message of moral equivalence between Israel and the so-called Palestinians in his UN General Assembly speech. Yes, he tossed out some politically motivated bromides about our deep friendship with Israel, but overall, he continued to view the two sides equally. Obama’s overarching theme was that peace in the Middle East is “so hard” to achieve. He asserted that there will be no peace unless “each side learns to stand in each other’s shoes,” and they “sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears.” As he uttered these puerile platitudes, I was attempting to conjure up an image of such a conversation. It would go something like this: Hamas/Fatah guy: “I fear those Jews and their settlements with every fiber of my being. There will be no Jews living in our state, nor will they live in the remaining parts of Israel, once we inevitably destroy them. Oh, how I hope all those homes will be within missile range. Oh, how I regret that I have but one body to blow up for my religion.” Israeli: “Oh, how I fear for my children, while missiles fly over their schools. Oh, how I hope there comes a day when Palestinians will love their children more than they hate us; when they will allow Jews to live peacefully and prosperously in “their” land, as they do in ours.” As you can see, it’s quite arduous to have a productive dialogue here. In that sense, Obama is right about how difficult it is to achieve peace. As Human Events’s John Hayward wrote on Twitter , “Peace is hard. But dancing and handing out candy after 9/11 is easy. Why would Palestinians want to take Obama’s advice and walk in Israeli shoes? They might get blown up by a suicide bomb or rocket attack.” Yet, in Obama’s perverted sense of morality, he believes, ” that [the] truth [is] – that each side has legitimate aspirations.” Yup, one side wants to build homes; one side wants to build bombs. The reason why Obama is so blinded by the truth in the Middle East is because he fundamentally rejects the notion that there is an Islamic terror threat. Throughout the entire speech, he failed to mention the word terrorism, or even milder liberal innuendo, such as “extremism.” Instead, he pinned all of the world’s problems on “nuclear weapons (including our own; hence, START treaty) and poverty; ignorance and disease,” along with global warming, unbridled capitalism, and a lack of LGTB rights. Obama’s only problem with Syria and Iran, the world’s foremost exporters of terror, is their autocratic form of government (even though he had no problem with Ahmadinejad’s bloody suppression in 2009). As such, he praised all of the “democratic” uprisings in the Middle East, without mentioning the extremists in Libya, the anti-Israel violence in Egypt, and the Al-Qaeda takeover of Yemen. It’s as if our consummate mission in the Middle East is to end autocracy, while blithely ignoring the Islamic threat to us and our allies. This perverse worldview also sheds light on Obama’s tepid prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. We are fighting aimlessly and taking record causalities against an enemy that he is simultaneously negotiating with . Well, now we understand why things aren’t going well. We are “fighting” for faux-democracy for undemocratic people, while ignoring the larger Islamic threat. Concurrently, we are making more progress in Iraq, but our soldiers are still being attacked by Iranian-made bombs. Obama has nothing to say about Iran on that front either. Nevertheless, he triumphantly declared, “we are poised to end these wars from a position of strength.” Nope – not as long as he is president. This is why Republicans need to focus more on foreign policy in some of the debates, even though the economy is the major issue of the campaign. They need to draw a bold-colored distinction between Obama’s foreign policy driven by dastardly moral equivalence and one that is purveyed by peace through strength, moral clarity, American exceptionalism, and most importantly, defining the enemy. During his UN speech, Obama proclaimed, “And it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can achieve one.” Our Republican nominee must enunciate clearly that it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of Americans and our allies to live free of Islamic terror that America will stop investing so much time and effort in a Palestinian terror state – and start investing in defeat of Islamic terror.
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Obama at UN: Arabs Build Bombs; Israelis Build Homes -It’s all the Same
“It’s the laboratory — or goodbye.” Mikhail Gorbachev barked out the words, his eyes cold, temper flaring. Ronald Reagan sat directly across the table from the Soviet leader, staring calmly. In the wake of President Obama’s speech to the nation last night, shamelessly quoting Reagan out-of-context to give the impression Reagan would have approved of Obama’s spend-thrift ways, another particular Reagan moment is worth summoning. It was October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two were engaged in the final day of a hastily called summit conference. This night they sat directly across from each other in Hofdi House, a stark, white-washed wooden building on the perimeter of the Icelandic capital overlooking the frigid North Atlantic. Outside in the cold Icelandic darkness, the international media was gathered, hundreds of cameras and microphones poised and ready. Breaking the agreed-upon press embargo, the Soviets had already leaked to the reporters outside that the two leaders were nearing a historic agreement on Reagan’s demands for deep cuts in strategic weapons and a “zero-zero” agreement (the latter eventually zeroing-out certain nuclear weapons systems based in Western Europe and the Soviet Union). Now the media was set up, the pressure ratcheting upward with the President himself aware that if this negotiation failed — it would be cleverly portrayed as his fault. The price for this agreement? He would have to restrict SDI to laboratory testing — which both he and Gorbachev knew would effectively kill the idea of an American nuclear shield completely. For a moment, time seemed to stop. Outside — just as in today’s debt-ceiling battle — was the press. Waiting. Waiting. Inside, with a historic agreement to slash record numbers of nuclear weapons hanging in the balance, and a potential of banning them completely, the President of the United States considered the words he had just heard from the man who sat in Lenin and Stalin’s chair. “It’s the laboratory — or good-bye.” Either Reagan did what he, Gorbachev, wanted — or the Reykjavik summit would come to an abrupt, immediate end. Right now. Right this minute. With Reagan portrayed as the bad guy. The man who failed the cause of world peace. “The laboratory — or goodbye.” The words echoed. Reagan scribbled a note to his Secretary of State, George Shultz. “Am I wrong?” Shultz leaned in to the President’s ear. “No,” whispered Shultz, “you are right.” And with that, with Gorbachev’s cold eyes fixed on him, with the television lights just outside the door and the world watching, Ronald Reagan delivered his answer. Without saying a word he stood up. And he gathered his papers. Gorbachev, startled, stood. He hastily grabbed for his own notes. He looked at Reagan and blurted “please pass on my regards to Nancy.” Each man put on his overcoat and walked silently, side by side, out the front door into the blinding klieg lights of the cold Icelandic night. The look on Reagan’s face was instantly clear to everyone. He was mad. Furious. He made no pretense whatsoever about the fact. A thousand cameras snapped in the darkness, transmitting the image of the unsmiling president and his Soviet counterpart around the globe. Gorbachev was so startled by all of this that he had blurted a semi-apology to Reagan: “I don’t know what more I could have done.” Replied Reagan: “You could have said yes.” And with that, the President slipped into his waiting limousine and went home. As the showdown in Washington between President Obama and Republicans reaches its peak, the story of Reagan in Reykjavik is worth recalling for one very, very important reason. What Ronald Reagan was really about in Reykjavik, as history now records, was a crusade. He didn’t see the summit as one more chapter in an endless procession of summits between American presidents and Soviet leaders. That was the view of Washington elites and their international counterparts, the crowd who long ago began treating the Soviet Union as just one more respectable international player. Reagan was about something different altogether. “We win, they lose” he had told his national security advisor when discussing his strategy. Within days of taking office Reagan acted on his belief that the Soviet Communist empire was not just another routine international player but rather an empire run by leaders who “openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat…” Later he applied another specific — the Soviet Union, he said, was an “evil empire.” And when he finally sat down with a Soviet leader for the first time — in Geneva with the newly installed Gorbachev — he promptly did something American presidents never did: give a stern, personal lecture on the evils of Marxism-Leninism to the head of the Communist Party. Indeed, while at Reykjavik Reagan did this yet again, with Gorbachev sitting stone-faced as Reagan began quoting Lenin. Gorbachev finally replied drily: “Well, at least we’ve gotten past Marx and on to Lenin.” In other words, Ronald Reagan was not a man of process. He did not view the Cold War as something that was no more than a perpetual negotiating process with those who represented a system the world simply had to accept. His idea was not co-existence, it was victory. And in the end, against all the conventional wisdom of Washington elites, Reagan won. The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down — and the Soviet Union, unable to sustain its ideology, collapsed in on itself. AS THE DRAMA in Washington — nominally over an increase in the debt-ceiling — reaches a climax, this is the moment to ask the question: What are Republican leaders really all about here? Are they doing the domestic version of what Reagan refused to do with the Soviets? Treating the idea of perpetually massive, financially crippling government spending as just one more legitimate argument in a world of legitimate arguments? Or are they willing to do exactly what Reagan did with the Soviets? Take on the philosophy behind all of this debt, spending and regulation directly, to delegitimize it by doing the functional equivalent of walking out of Reykjavik? While today’s Republicans delight in talking fondly of Reagan, many of them are terrified of behaving in a Reaganesque manner. Normally sensible Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn and Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, Republicans both, discussed their views on Sean Hannity’s radio show last week. It seemed the only real Reaganite in the discussion was not Coburn or Chambliss but Hannity. Neither senator was talking about defeating the Obama agenda. Each went on at length about the prospect of accommodating it. A startled Hannity pointed out the obvious: Why were Republican senators involved with creating a bipartisan “Gang of Six” when the conservative “Cut, Cap, and Balance” proposal was on the House floor? Coburn and Chambliss both quickly replied that they were for Cut, Cap, and Balance, just like Jim DeMint, but, you know, ” realistically …” Said Coburn in another venue, Newsweek , in distinctively un-Reaganesque style: “I don’t see a time anywhere in the future where there’s 60 people that’ll be in the Senate that think the way Jim DeMint and I do.”
