Israel Matzav

Will the IDF get its Iran wish list?

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz is heading to the US at the end of March, and JPost's Yaakov Katz has put together quite a wish list for him to request for use on Iran, which you can find here. The real question of course is why President Obama would grant any of the requests. Katz has some speculation:

But why would Obama agree to any of this?

This would depend on the timing of Israel's request. While the president currently appears to be opposed to military force, he did stress at AIPAC that Israel has the right to act in self defense and to do what it feels it needs to do as a sovereign state.

In addition, if Israel informed the president that it had decided to attack and that there was no alternative, it would ultimately be in the US's interest that Israel succeeds and that the damage it causes be surgical but also extensive. All of these different capabilities would increase the chances.

I think there's something else that's important to stress here. At the end of the day, as much as Obama doesn't like Israel, and has made the 'Palestinians' his sole foreign policy priority, Obama's real priority is not foreign policy. It's his domestic agenda.

Obama is willing to be a one-term President if it means he gets things like Obamacare enacted (it was passed but many of its most noxious features aren't scheduled to take effect until 2014, which means that a successor could repeal it without plunging the US healthcare market into chaos). He's not willing to be a one-term President to avoid an attack on Iran, which at the end of the day is a nuclear proliferator, which is something that's bad in Obama's book. He's just afraid that an attack on Iran would cause a spike in oil prices that could ruin his reelection prospects.

So as incredible as it may seem, with Israel's existence hanging in the balance - indeed with the whole western way of life hanging in the balance - Obama is more concerned with being reelected than anything else. And Katz has that one right: If Israel attacks and fails because Obama sat on his hands, that's not going to help Obama's reelection bid. If, however, he cooperates and tries to co-opt Israel's attack as his own (as he has done with sanctions, for example), that could help his reelection bid.

What could go wrong?

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

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:41 AM