Israel Matzav

Eerie parallels: The Dersh slams Obama

Give Alan Dershowitz credit: His loyalty to Israel is greater than his loyalty to Obama. (For those who - like me - do not have Wall Street Journal subscriptions, the link above is to a Harvard Law School website that reproduces the entire article). While the fact that a liberal icon like Dershowitz is slamming Obama over Iran would be significant in and of itself, the parallels between Chamberlain and Obama - especially when raised in the moment of Obama's victory on healthcare reform - are eerie and devastating.

[A]llowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.

In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"

But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"

Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.

So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

Jonathan Tobin adds:

Dershowitz is right, both about the nature of the threat from Iran and about Obama’s place in history if he allows Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons. But does Obama take the threat as seriously as Dershowitz? Everything the president has done since he took office leads us to believe the answer is no. A year of feckless engagement and weak diplomacy has led the Iranians to believe Obama is a weakling who will do nothing but appease and talk. The threat of force has been taken off the table, and only recently has the administration begun to speak seriously about sanctions on Iran — but even then, the measures considered aren’t tough enough and lack the support of China and Russia. Beyond wrongly blaming Israel for his failure to rally the world to America’s position, Obama has done little to indicate he cares deeply about the threat.

Thus, while we applaud Dershowitz for throwing down the gauntlet to Obama, we have to wonder how long will he wait before he concedes that the man in the White House is more of a Chamberlain than the Winston Churchill that the West needs so badly today.

Obama doesn't care about the threat because he believes that it's not a threat to the United States. Obama sees this only as a threat to Israel, a country for which he has little sympathy. Dershowitz all but acknowledges that in the part of his article that I did not quote - he lists a number of threats to Israel (and specifically to Israel) that arise from a nuclear-armed Iran. Obama wouldn't see a nuclear Iran as a threat to the United States unless Iran had ICBM's with nuclear warheads on the launch pad that were capable of reaching the US. Of course, by then, it would be too late to do anything, but Obama still believes he can talk anybody into anything and his success at getting healthcare legislation passed this week will certainly feed that belief. Hence Obama plans to rely on containment to control a nuclear Iran.

Obama has little real interest in foreign policy (other than coddling the 'Palestinians') and ignoring the Iranian threat fits right in with that modus operandi.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:19 AM