Israel Matzav

David Horovitz gets to say 'I told you so'

Although he is not the only one who said it, JPost Executive Editor David Horovitz has been one of the earliest, most public and most consistent voices arguing against the 'linkage' the Obama administration attempted to create between resolving the dispute between Israel and the 'Palestinians' and dealing with the Iranian nuclear drive. And now, with what we know from Wikileaks, Horovitz and many others get to say 'I told you so.' The difference is that David has a JPost column from which to do it.

To my mind, the president’s thinking defied common sense. Now we know, however, that it also defied the concrete information he was receiving from his own diplomats.

THE OBAMA administration, it is now clear for all to see, was not pressing a reluctant Netanyahu to make settlement-freeze and other concessions to the Palestinians in part because it truly believed this would be helpful in generating wider support for tackling Iran.

Not at all. The United States, we now know courtesy of WikiLeaks, was being repeatedly urged by a succession of Arab leaders to smash an Iranian nuclear program they feared would destabilize the entire region and put their regimes at risk. Their priority was, and is, battering Ahmadinejad, not bolstering Abbas.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in 2008, had not urged the US to chivvy those recalcitrant Israelis toward concessions to the Palestinians as a pre-condition for grudging Saudi support for a firmer US-led position against Iran. Anything but. Never mind the Palestinians, the king simply implored Washington to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”

Likewise, with minor variations in the course of the following year, the rulers of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

We are now starting to hear, courtesy of WikiLeaks, what Jordan and Egypt had to say on the matter too.

Obama, that is, was not the prisoner of a misconception, convinced in absolute good faith that if he could deliver Israeli concessions at the negotiating table he might stand a greater chance of getting the Arabs on board for the battle with the mullahs. No, he had the diplomatic cables to prove that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict was no obstacle to wide Arab backing, indeed wide Arab entreaties, for the toughest possible measures against Iran, emphatically including military action.

Either the president, it can be concluded, was so attached to his misconception that he refused to let the concrete information he had on Arab leaders’ thinking get in the way – sticking to his view of the region in defiance of the facts.

Or, more plausibly, he had internalized full well that he didn’t actually need the cover of a substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace process to generate Arab support for tackling Iran’s nuclear program, but chose to pressure Israel just the same, as a tactic, because he felt Israel was not being sufficiently forthcoming on the Palestinian front.

Neither explanation sits well, to put it mildly.

Read the whole thing. David is much more mildly mannered than I am (some of you may recall that we met three and a half years ago when I attended a talk of his), and he doesn't get into Obama's motivations. The picture at the top of this post illustrates what I believe to be Obama's motivations. It's saved on my computer under the caption "Obama's dream."

Jews believe that God is behind anything and everything that happens in this World. Nothing happens without a reason. Nothing can be dismissed as coincidence. Wikileaks' massive document dump may have had other reasons, but I believe that one of them was to give us the opportunity to see clearly the enemy in the White House (and yes, I believe the Wikileaks dump makes clear that he is an enemy) and to take action to make sure his dream does not come true.

Labels: David Horovitz, linkage, Obama's dream, Wikileaks

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:44 AM