Obama's epic fail
Lee Smith writes that Barack Hussein Obama has managed to turn decades of US Middle East policy on its head, expecting the Gulf Emirates to defend themselves against Iran, while using US troops as human shields for an Iranian attack and trying to keep Israel at bay. A more useful question, then, is whether Washington has the will to deter a nuclear Iran. As it happens, U.S. officials have already admitted, inadvertently, that the model used to deter and contain the Soviet Union is unworkable with Iran. During the Cold War, the several hundred thousand American troops stationed in Germany were conceived of as a trip-wire. But this is not how U.S. policy-makers understand the standoff with Iran. Even as the Obama administration is exiting from Iraq, it contends that the withdrawal will be offset by a beefed up troop presence in Gulf states like Kuwait. But when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warns, like many before him, that a strike on Iran “could have a serious impact on U.S. forces in the region,” he reveals that Washington sees U.S. troops in the region not as a forward position against Tehran, but effectively as Iranian hostages. The U.S. forces there deter attacks on Tehran, not the other way round.Read the whole thing.
The notion that the Gulf Cooperation Council forces can be strengthened to balance the Iranians is at odds with the historical rationale for arms sales to Gulf Arab states. The Israelis get American weapons for use against American adversaries; the Arabs are sold U.S. munitions because it pleases them to have expensive new toys and it keeps U.S. production lines rolling. The Saudis may have convinced themselves that they rolled back the Iranians when they dispatched Gulf Cooperation Council forces to Bahrain in March, but all they managed to prove was that Arab armies and their weapons are typically turned against their own populations—which is why there was so much resistance recently to a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain. Indeed, with the recent parade of Bahraini dignitaries through Washington, American policymakers cannot help but be dismayed by the fact that a vital U.S. strategic interest—the home port of the Fifth Fleet—has been entrusted to a gang of incompetents.
Administration officials may well believe they can deter a nuclear Iran—without figuring nonstate actors (and possible delivery mechanisms) like Hezbollah into the equation. But the fact that the Obama White House decided not to pursue further sanctions against the Iranians for the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington—an operation that might have killed hundreds of Americans—signals that the administration has no credible threat of force, not even against a nonnuclear Iran.
Accordingly, Israel may well escalate its public diplomacy campaign—and may move beyond diplomacy if it thinks a mortal threat is being ignored. There are options short of a full-scale bombing campaign that Jerusalem might take: an aerial strike on one facility, or even a ground operation designed by a defense minister obsessed with commando raids—anything that might make the international community, and especially the United States, take the Iranian threat seriously. Israel may not be able to destroy the Iranian nuclear program in its entirety by itself, but it might settle for less than that in the hopes of inspiring others to finish the job.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:52 PM
1 Comments:
This was also the Blue Helmet UN paradigm in Bosnia. Rather than protect the Muslim population from the Serbs, the UN was immobilized by the fear that its own forces might be attacked--rather than act as soliders they were hostages preventing true military intervention.
Of course Obama has his head up his ass generally, so what else is new?
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