Israel Matzav

It's come to this: Obama to demand that Israel give up its nuclear arsenal

David Goldman makes a pretty convincing case that President Hussein Obama is likely to try to disarm Israel from its alleged nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.

Middle East nuclear disarmament is America’s stated policy. The only question is how to make it happen. A former senior Israeli intelligence official told me that the Obama administration expects Iran to acquire nuclear weapons in the near future. At that point, the official predicted, Obama will propose that both Israel and Iran give up their nuclear arsenal.

After his re-election Obama has more “flexibility,” as he told Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev over an accidentally open microphone last March.   Since the presidential election, the Obama administration has turned decisively against Israel:

1) Sat on its hands while the Palestine Authority obtained “observer status” at the United Nations, a setback that could not have occurred (as former UN ambassador John Bolton explained)  if the US had used its diplomatic muscle to avert it, as in the past, and advised at least one country to vote for the UN resolution;

2) Tacitly encouraged five European countries to deliver a strong diplomatic rebuke to Israel, according to Israeli diplomats;

3) Denounced Israel for a “pattern of provocation action” that “puts peace further at risk” on Dec. 18–for planning additional homes in an area that every proposed peace agreement in the past twenty years has assigned to Israel, and after the Palestine Authority broke the cardinal rule of the Oslo Process by going to the UN rather than engaging in bilateral negotiations;

4) Proposed Sen. Chuck Hagel (R.-Nebraska) for Secretary of Defense, after “the sentiments he’s expressed about the Jewish lobby border on anti-Semitism,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Obama is a radical utopian who identifies deeply with so-called colonial peoples, as I argued back in February 2008 (and Dinesh D’Souza documented vividly in his 2012 film). The more his utopian policies fail–in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and of course Iran–the harder he will push them. Political constraints made him scrap the idea of Israeli nuclear disarmament in May 2010.. Now those constraints are gone. Israel’s friends in Congress will have to draw the line somewhere. The best place and time to draw the line is here and now, on the Hagel nomination.

There's only one sentence with which I don't entirely agree here and that's the last one. As you all have figured out, I am all in favor of the Chuckster going down to ignominious defeat. But I believe that Obama will attempt to disarm Israel regardless of whether Hagel or someone else is running the Pentagon. The difference is that Hagel runs a think tank, the Atlantic Council that has gone so far as to suggest that the US should seek an alliance with Iran.

In December, the Atlantic Council issued the major position paper — part advice to Mr. Obama in his second term, part vision for the world in the next 17 years.

Mr. Hagel did not write “Envisioning 2030: U.S. Strategy for a Post-Western World,” but it corresponds with his and the Atlantic Council’s efforts to seek global cooperation, not confrontation.

The paper predicts that Iranian hard-liners will be unable to insulate the population from democratic movements in Egypt, Tunisia and other neighboring states.

“It is difficult to envision an already globalized Iranian public not being inspired by regional examples of popular democratic governance,” the Atlantic Council says. “For U.S. strategy, Iran should be viewed as a potential natural partner in the region. … A post-mullah dominated government shedding Shia [Muslim] ideology could easily return to being a net contributor to stability by 2030.”

...

The Atlantic Council paper puts pressure on Israel to make peace. A word search of the document did not produce a reference to Hamas.

“The U.S. will need to persuade its Israeli ally to recognize that the changing strategic calculus in the region will require Tel Aviv to make peace with its Arab neighbors to have a secure future as a democratic, Jewish state,” the document states. “However, the United States would be wise to also develop a contingency strategy that takes into account a possible scenario where the Israel-Palestinian issue remains unresolved to 2030 and the impact of such a reality on the U.S. role in the region.”

Part of the problem here is that even our friends don't understand that Fatah and the 'Palestinian Authority' share Hamas' goals. That's due in part to utopians like Shimon Peres who believe that peace must be made with one's eyes closed.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Chuck Hagel, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli nuclear capability, nuclear disarmament, nuclear-free Middle East

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:21 PM