Over the last months, as the Obama administration has attempted to force the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships into negotiations it seems as if the same tactic for achieving this method has been used over and over again like a broken record: pressure Israel. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly expressed his willingness to hold talks without pre-conditions it was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who was stalling. Yet the American government consistently decided the solution to this problem was to pressure Israel to make ever more difficult concessions before the real negotiations even began. Every time the Israeli government met a Palestinian demand the Palestinians would dismiss it and make a new more demanding one; the response of the Obama government? Sure enough each time Washington endorsed this unreasonableness and further pressured and humiliated Israel, not to mention the effect this had on undermining Israel’s legitimacy, national security and the stability of its government.
This of course is a very odd way of doing diplomacy, everyone knows that it is during the peace talks themselves that the two parties make their demands and give concessions in return. By making Netanyahu give away many of his best cards before the game even began America has left the Israelis in a position where they either will not be able to move negotiations forward because they will not have any concessions left to make or more likely they will be forced to make even more crippling cuts into their national security in return for even the most menial level of Palestinian cooperation.
Yet if you think the American strategy here has been questionable things get even more unusual when it comes to Obama’s approach for preventing the advent of a nuclear Iran. During his election campaign Barak Obama promised the American people and more specifically the Jewish benefactors of his party that he would do everything possible to prevent Iran getting the bomb. In reality we got an administration that has been sluggish in putting any kind of real economic sanctions against Iran in place and more recently came the first statements that the military option was off the table. So clearly when using the words ‘everything possible’ he didn’t mean quite everything, or indeed very much at all really.
The topsy-turvy world view of Obama-ist foreign policy was first revealed early on in his time in office when he first met with the Israeli Prime Minister and espoused his bizarre notion that the key to preventing a nuclear Iran was first to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, of course who knows when on earth that might be achieved. Yet the latest and even more terrifying version of this ‘Israel first’ policy comes with Obama’s fanciful new vision for a nuclear free Middle East. Wonderful you might think, now Obama really is going to get to grips with preventing a nuclear Iran. Not so points out John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN. Because when you think about it the only country in the Middle East that this will really affect is the only country in the Middle East currently believed to have nuclear capabilities – Israel.
Of course this call for nuclear disarmament comes from a country that itself was recently revealed as having well over Five Thousand nuclear missiles of its own, who knows what the American’s need that little lot for. But if there was a country in the world that was in need of nuclear protection might it not be the one that in the 20th century witnessed three separate attempts by its neighbours to wipe it off of the face of the earth and which to this day has another major power in the region calling for its annihilation while busily working away at building the genocidal weapons required to do this. How exactly does Obama imagine that by Israel dispensing with its only real means of deterring would be attackers Iran will be deterred from pursuing its own nuclear ambitions? What is clear to so many observers but apparently not to Obama is that the weaker you make Israel the more you embolden her enemies.
Who knows where this warped thinking will lead us all. Perhaps when Obama is setting his mind to the problem of climate change he’ll decide the best way to cut global carbon emissions is not to pressure China and India but to tell the Israeli government they’re not allowed cars in their country anymore. It sounds ludicrous but with the likes of Obama sitting behind that desk in the Oval Office it really is starting to look like nothing is quite too outlandish.
This of course is a very odd way of doing diplomacy, everyone knows that it is during the peace talks themselves that the two parties make their demands and give concessions in return. By making Netanyahu give away many of his best cards before the game even began America has left the Israelis in a position where they either will not be able to move negotiations forward because they will not have any concessions left to make or more likely they will be forced to make even more crippling cuts into their national security in return for even the most menial level of Palestinian cooperation.
Yet if you think the American strategy here has been questionable things get even more unusual when it comes to Obama’s approach for preventing the advent of a nuclear Iran. During his election campaign Barak Obama promised the American people and more specifically the Jewish benefactors of his party that he would do everything possible to prevent Iran getting the bomb. In reality we got an administration that has been sluggish in putting any kind of real economic sanctions against Iran in place and more recently came the first statements that the military option was off the table. So clearly when using the words ‘everything possible’ he didn’t mean quite everything, or indeed very much at all really.
The topsy-turvy world view of Obama-ist foreign policy was first revealed early on in his time in office when he first met with the Israeli Prime Minister and espoused his bizarre notion that the key to preventing a nuclear Iran was first to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, of course who knows when on earth that might be achieved. Yet the latest and even more terrifying version of this ‘Israel first’ policy comes with Obama’s fanciful new vision for a nuclear free Middle East. Wonderful you might think, now Obama really is going to get to grips with preventing a nuclear Iran. Not so points out John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN. Because when you think about it the only country in the Middle East that this will really affect is the only country in the Middle East currently believed to have nuclear capabilities – Israel.
Of course this call for nuclear disarmament comes from a country that itself was recently revealed as having well over Five Thousand nuclear missiles of its own, who knows what the American’s need that little lot for. But if there was a country in the world that was in need of nuclear protection might it not be the one that in the 20th century witnessed three separate attempts by its neighbours to wipe it off of the face of the earth and which to this day has another major power in the region calling for its annihilation while busily working away at building the genocidal weapons required to do this. How exactly does Obama imagine that by Israel dispensing with its only real means of deterring would be attackers Iran will be deterred from pursuing its own nuclear ambitions? What is clear to so many observers but apparently not to Obama is that the weaker you make Israel the more you embolden her enemies.
Who knows where this warped thinking will lead us all. Perhaps when Obama is setting his mind to the problem of climate change he’ll decide the best way to cut global carbon emissions is not to pressure China and India but to tell the Israeli government they’re not allowed cars in their country anymore. It sounds ludicrous but with the likes of Obama sitting behind that desk in the Oval Office it really is starting to look like nothing is quite too outlandish.
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