Israel Matzav

How different is Obama from his predecessors?

In the midst of all these crises, Obama has maintained faith with his two central foreign policy goals: forcing Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and scaling back the US nuclear arsenal with an eye towards unilateral disarmament. That is, as the forces of mayhem and war escalate their threats and aggression, Obama's central goals remain weakening the US's most powerful regional ally in the Middle East and rendering the US incompetent to deter or defeat rapidly proliferating rogue states that are at war with the US and its allies.

HAVING SAID THAT, the truth is that in advancing these goals, Obama is not out of step with his predecessors. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both enacted drastic cuts in the US conventional and nonconventional arsenals. Clinton and George W. Bush adopted appeasement policies towards North Korea. Indeed, Pyongyang owes its nuclear arsenal to both presidents' desire to be deceived and do nothing.

Moreover, North Korea's ability to proliferate nuclear weapons to the likes of Iran, Syria and Venezuela owes in large part to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's insistence that Israel say nothing about North Korea's nuclear ties to Iran and Syria in the wake of Israel's destruction of the North Korean-built and Iranian-financed nuclear reactor in Syria in September 2007.

As for Iran, Obama's attempt to appease the regime is little different from his predecessors' policies. The Bush administration refused to confront the fact that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are to a large degree Iranian proxy wars.

The Bush administration refused to acknowledge that Syria and Hizbullah are run by Teheran and that the 2006 war against Israel was nothing more than an expansion of the proxy wars Iran is running in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama's failed "reset" policy towards Russia is also little different from his predecessors' policies.

Bush did nothing but squawk after Russia invaded US ally Georgia. The Clinton administration set the stage for Vladimir Putin's KGB state by squandering the US's massive influence over post-Soviet Russia and allowing Boris Yeltsin and his cronies to transform the country into an impoverished kleptocracy.

Finally, Obama's obsession with Israeli land giveaways to the PLO was shared by Clinton and by the younger Bush, particularly after 2006. Rice - who compared Israel to the Jim Crow South - was arguably as hostile towards Israel as Obama.

SO IS OBAMA really worse than everyone else or is he just the latest in a line of US presidents who have no idea how to run an effective foreign policy? The short answer is that he is far worse than his predecessors.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Caroline Glick, Condoleeza Rice, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:31 AM