Lautenberg: US expects Israel to hit Iran if all else fails
US Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) implied to the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that the US expects Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities if all else fails. Interviewed during a short visit, Lautenberg - a consistent backer of Israel who is also a Democratic Party supporter of Obama - said, "Israel didn't ask us permission to drop bombs twice on Syrian nuclear facilities. I didn't hear America scolding Israel for what it did then. Hypothetically, if Israel were able to get rid of Iran's nuclear bomb-making capability, I'm sure that America would not send Israel a chastising e-mail message. We have to give Israel the courtesy of [allowing it to] make its own decisions."I'm not sure America didn't scold Israel for bombing Syria's nuclear reactor in 2007, and I certainly don't share Lautenberg's optimism that "America would not send Israel a chastising e-mail message" were Israel to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Still, it is refreshing to see that if the Obama administration condemns Israel for attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, there are at least some Democratic Senators (and hopefully Representatives as well - although given the Ackerman betrayal I have to wonder how many) who will not fall into line.
Lautenberg also had some good comments about Obama's idea of linking opposition to Iran to 'progress' on the 'Palestinian' front.
The senator ... said he disagreed with Obama's policy of linking US action against Iran with an Israeli limitation of settlement activity.Not all of Lautenberg's comments will make you feel warm and fuzzy though. Read the whole thing.
"I agree that each is a major problem deserving of attention, but one is not dependent on the other," he said.
Israel is a "humane democratic society, a bastion of decency and freedom. It is a vital asset for America. It deserves not only respect but support," said Lautenberg, who has visited Israel 80 times since 1968. "It is a necessity for the US, a drop of sanity in the middle of so much madness."
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:45 PM
2 Comments:
Like I said Carl - Iran expects the US to do nothing. The US isn't stopping the North Koreans. How in the world does it expect to stop Iran? The writing is on the wall.
although I agree that Israel must do what she must do regarding Iran, this attack, different from Osirak and Syria - will yeld a backlash hard to fathom, let alone to withstand. Iran's proxies hizbullah and hamas, and most certainly fatah, will join Iran in the retaliation, so the mess is most certainly bound to spread like wildfire. Even if the sunni arab states "abstain", I guess there will be a wave of taliban and world jihadist attacks not only here, but in a worldwide scale. What the US reaction will be is a big open question. Finally, after Hillary's foam-in-mouth declaration last week about the "settlements", I got myself thinking, 'what if this woman had been elected instead of obama?'. If life indeed mimicks a horse's tail, that grows - but downwards, well, we can always expect things to get "worser"...
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