Israel Matzav

'War is inevitable'?

When Barry Rubin and Caroline Glick agree, you have to take notice. And both Rubin and Glick agree that this week's events in Washington (is it really only Tuesday?) have made war much more likely and maybe even inevitable. They differ on timing. Here's Rubin.

What a lot of people are going to miss is not that Israel now thinks Obama is reliable but that it knows he has now locked publicly into a major commitment. If Israel ever were to attack an Iran on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, how is Obama going to bash Israel for doing so? In effect, then, Israel has traded patience for freedom of action.

Obama laid out a very clear chain of events. If and when Iran obtains a nuclear weapon then the U.S. government will support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities. It might even join in with such an attack.

This is a commitment that cannot be retracted. It will apply whether Obama wins or loses the election. It will apply if he changes his mind. Some will see his action as heroic; others will see it as reckless. But it makes no sense to see it as false or to nitpick about his precise definition of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

Here is Obama’s simple chain of argument:

–The U.S. government officially and publicly recognizes that Israel cannot and should not accept Iran’s having a nuclear weapon.

–Iran having a nuclear weapon is a tremendous and unacceptable danger to U.S. interests.

–If Iran obtains even one nuclear weapon that will prove sanctions have failed.

–Consequently, at that time Israel is entitled to use force to prevent Iran from having such weapons or to destroy any that exist.

–Indeed, according to Obama, Israel must attack Iran at that point. After all, if Obama says Israel cannot live with an Iranian nuclear capability how can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be less concerned about Israeli security than the president? And how can Obama then ignore what he said would be completely unacceptable for U.S. interests by not backing such an attack, even participating in it?

The phrase often quoted from Obama’s speech—that U.S. policy will not take any instrument off the table—is not important. It is the standard U.S. line we have heard for years. Obama has now gone far beyond this. The new U.S. position is that if Iran builds a single atomic bomb that means force sufficient to destroy its nuclar capacity entirely is the only instrument on the table.

What is important is that Obama’s speech provides a green light for an Israeli attack.

Read the whole thing.

And here's Caroline Glick.

In his commentary in Maariv's Friday news supplement, the paper's senior diplomatic commentator Ben Caspit laid out a hypothetical lecture that Obama might give Netanyahu when the two leaders meet alone in the Oval Office this afternoon. In Caspit's scenario, Obama used the one on one to set out the law to the Israeli premier. If you bomb Iran's nuclear installations before the November elections, in my second term Israel will no longer be able to buy spare parts for its weapons systems from the US. So too, Caspit's Obama said, the US will end its support for Israel at the UN Security Council if Israel dares to take it upon itself to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold before the US elections.

Perhaps Caspit wrote his article after hearing about a meeting between American Jews and Vice President Joe Biden's National Security Advisor Anthony Blinken. According to Commentary's Omri Ceren, Blinken told the assembled Jews that if Israel's supporters discuss Obama's hostile treatment of Israel in the context of the election, they can expect to suffer consequences if Obama is reelected.

It is important to keep Blinken's threats and Caspit's scenario in mind when considering Obama's speech to AIPAC on Sunday morning.

...

The fact is that Obama's actions and his words have made clear that Israel cannot trust him, not on Iran and not on anything. The only thing that has been consistent about his Israel policy has been its hostility. As a consequence, the only messages emanating from his administration we can trust are those telling us that if Obama is reelected, he will no longer feel constrained to hide his hatred for Israel.

What these messages make clear is that if our leaders are too weak to stand up to Obama today, we will pay a steep price for their cowardice if he wins the elections in November.

Read the whole thing.

Rubin seems to think that a war will come later and Obama - or his successor - will have no choice but to back it. Glick seems to think that war will come soon - before the 2012 elections - or Israel will suffer the consequences of its leadership's cowardice.

I'm more inclined to Glick's position than to Rubin's. I don't believe that Israel can wait until after the election because Obama's reaction after the election will be very different than his reaction before the election. That said, Israel's supporters ought to be doing everything they can to ensure that Obama is not reelected. As Glick and others have cataloged, Obama's supposed support of Israel has in every case been forced upon him by Congress and/or motivated by his reelection bid. After November, if God forbid he wins, Obama will essentially be a lame duck for four years and can treat Israel as miserably as his heart desires. The incident that Omri Ceren wrote about in Commentary on Monday strengthens the case that Israel will be treated very differently by Obama in a second term than it has been treated since the midterm elections debacle. I expect that if Obama wins, we will be in for far worse than 2009-10.

So the time to attack is between now and November. In any event, the Ahmadinejad - Khameni regime may oblige us by crossing the threshold outlined by Rubin before November. They certainly have not given any indication that they will stop.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Campaign 2012, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:07 PM