EDITOR: Who controls Washington’s policy?
Well, you may well ask. Not Obama, that’s for sure. He can say what he likes (actually, he can’t!) but not do anything the boss does not like… and the boss is AIPAC, with its financial contribution to all but 5 senators and congressmen, and with its hosting of all presidential candidates, it is clear who controls Washington, and AIPAC is not even shy or coy about it. Of course, you cannot quite quite this in the media in so many words, but read below and see if you disagree. While in earlier times you needed Anti-Semites to invent racist lore about Jewish control, today AIPAC supplies the narrative, and it is not an invention. As usual, the west has bought the Israeli policy, hook, line and sinker. They are hooked.
Obama’s Iran strategy backed by US defence secretary amid GOP criticism: Guardian
Defence secretary Leon Panetta tells Aipac that critics of Obama’s Iran policy should not mistake diplomacy for weakness
Chris McGreal in Washington
The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, has warned critics of Barack Obama’s Iran policy not to mistake a willingness to pursue diplomacy for weakness.
Panetta, speaking to a largely sceptical audience at the annual conference of the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, derided the aggressive posturing of some of the president’s opponents and more hawkish supporters of Israel, who have pressed for an explicit commitment to the use of force against Iran by setting “red lines” that Tehran’s nuclear programme must not cross.
Panetta said the military option is on the table as a last resort if sanctions fail, and the president’s record demonstrates he will use it if he believes there is no alternative.
“As the president made clear, the United States does not bluff. In this town it’s easy to talk tough. Acting tough is a hell of a lot more important,” he told the the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference.
“The president ordered 30,000 additional troops to battle in Afghanistan to confront a resurgent Taliban. He launched a comprehensive precision bombing campaign to protect the Libyans and ultimately toppled a brutal dictator. He has ordered US warships to pass through the straits of Hormuz – despite the threats that we have received from Iran.
“And he has been the driving force behind the most successful and lethal counter-terrorism campaign in US history, culminating in the bold decision to send US special operations forces hundreds of miles into Pakistan to take the risk to take down Bin Laden. And he did.”
Panetta’s speech was a clear rebuke to other speakers at Aipac, including three of the four Republican presidential candidates who also addressed the conference on Tuesday. Ron Paul was not invited following his calls to cut off aid to Israel, along with every other country, and because of his criticism that sanctions on Iran are driving it toward developing a nuclear weapon.
The other candidates also came out swinging against Obama’s Iran strategy.
Mitt Romney called Obama’s policy of “engagement” with Tehran naive, and said it gave the Iranian leadership time to develop its nuclear programme.
“Hope is not a foreign policy. The only thing respected by thugs and tyrants is our resolve backed by our power and our readiness to use it,” he said.
“In recent days and weeks we’ve heard a lot of words from the administration. Its clear message has been to warn Israel to consider the costs of military action against Iran. I don’t believe we should be issuing public warnings that create distance between the United States and Israel.”
But in the end, Romney’s position was not so far from Obama’s.
“I will bring the current policy of procrastination toward Iran to an end. I will not delay in imposing further crippling sanctions,” he said. “As president I’ll be ready to engage in diplomacy but I will be just as ready to engage our military might.”
Newt Gingrich, also speaking via video link, went furthest in saying that as president he would give Israel the means to attack Tehran’s nuclear facilities and let it do so without question.
“I will initiate a strategy in the tradition of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to undermine and replace the Iranian dictatorship by every possible method short of war in order to achieve a government we could trust and could deal with,” he said.
“At the same time I would provide all available intelligence to the Israeli government, ensure that they had the equipment necessary and reassure them that if an Israeli prime minister decides he has to avoid the threat of a second Holocaust through preemptive measures that I would require no advance notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world.”
Rick Santorum was the only candidate to appear in person at Aipac.
“As I’ve sat and watched this play out on the world stage I’ve seen a president who has been reticent. He says he has Israel’s back. From everything I’ve seen from the conduct of this administration, he’s turned his back on the people of Israel,” Santorum said to applause.
He accused Obama of appeasement over today’s news that the US will join Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany in a fresh round of negotiations with Iran.
“Another appeasement, another delay. Another opportunity for them [Iran] to go forward while we talk,” he said.
Santorum – breaking with the tradition that the president’s opponents do not generally side with other powers on the question of foreign policy – said there was a “tragic disconnect” between how Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, viewed the urgency of the situation.
“We need to set forth a clear ultimatum to the Iranian government. We need to say to the Iranian government: the time is now – you will stop your nuclear production now, you will open up your facilities for inspectors from the United States ad other countries so we can certify that those efforts are stopping and being dismantled, now,” he said to strong applause from the Aipac audience.
“We need to put that ultimatum in place and we need to be prepared if that ultimatum is not met … that if they don’t tear down those facilities, we will tear down them ourselves.”
The Republican candidate also had stinging criticism for the US military chief, General Martin Dempsey, who called Iran a “rational actor”.
“Rational actors don’t call for the destruction of other states, call them cancers, preach radical theologies,” he said. “Rational actors do not develop nuclear capability, calling for nuclear power, when they have hundreds of years of oil and gas to provide for their power and their medical research.”
Romney broke with the focus on Iran to mention the Palestinians – who have been virtually invisible as an issue at this Aipac conference to the gratification of the Israeli government – although his comments will have brought them little comfort.
“The current administration has distanced itself from Israel and visibly warmed to the Palestinian cause. It’s emboldened the Palestinians. They’re convinced that they can do better with America directly than they can at the bargaining table with Israel,” he said.
Romney took a stab at Obama’s assertion last year that a two-state solution will be based on the 1967 armistice lines with land swaps – a statement long accepted as the basis of a deal but which brought a torrent of accusations from the Republican right and some of Israel’s more militant supporters that he was selling out the Jewish state.
“I’ve seen Israel by land and by air. I’ve seen its narrow waist and its vulnerability,” said Romney. “I would never call for a return to the indefensible ’67 lines because I understand that, in Israel, geography is security.”
By conjuring the Holocaust, Netanyahu brought Israel closer to war with Iran: Haaretz
Haaretz’s editor-in-chief says that the Prime Minister publicly booby-trapped himself to war with Iran by comparing the need to strike its nuclear program with the Jewish request to bomb Auschwitz.
By Aluf Benn
In his speech to the AIPAC conference Monday night Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved closer than ever to the point of no return en route to war with Iran.
Netanyahu compared Iran to Nazi Germany, its nuclear facilities to death camps, and his current trip to the White House to a desperate plea to former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt by the U.S. Jewish community to bomb Auschwitz.
The request, as Netanyahu told a sympathetic AIPAC crowd, was denied, using justifications similar to those used today by those who object to a military strike against Iran.
“Israel has patiently waited for the international community to resolve this issue. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work, we’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer,” Netanyahu warned, adding that, as Israeli premier, he would “never let Israel live under the shadow of annihilation.”
It was the same reason former Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981: preventing the possibility that Jewish children would face the peril of another Holocaust. Now it’s the turn of his successor, Netanyahu, to remove the danger hovering over the heads of Jewish children.
Netanyahu was in the habit of comparing the Iranian nuclear threat to the Holocaust back when he was opposition leader, claiming that the western powers were not doing enough to thwart it. But, since coming back to power, three years ago, he has refrained from making these kinds of statements, opting for a vaguer rhetoric and asking his ministers to keep the fervor down. That vagueness dissipated on Monday. In his speech to AIPAC, coming mere hours after his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House, Netanyahu escalated the tone, both in his reference to a clock that was running out, and in his expressed disappointment from U.S.-led diplomatic sanctions.
The Holocaust talk has but one meaning: they force Israel to go to war and strike the Iranians. The justifications against an attack, weighty as those may be, turn to fumes when put up against the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. No calculus of missiles falling on Tel Aviv, rising oil prices and economic crisis can hold water when compared to genocide. If that’s the situation, the option of sitting quietly, expecting the “world” to neutralize Iran, or of a stable balance of terror, becomes nonexistent. If Netanyahu doesn’t act and Iran achieves nuclear weapons capabilities, he’ll go down in history as a pathetic loud mouth. As a poor man’s Churchill.
But Netanyahu booby-trapped himself back when he was still making his way to Washington, when he presented Iran with a public ultimatum: dismantle the underground enrichment facility near Qom, cease all enrichment activity, and remove the medium-grade uranium from Iranian territory. He realizes that the Iranian government will never agree to those terms, which seems more like setting up a casus belli that a reasonable diplomatic demand. But Netanyahu’s Holocaust speech at the AIPAC conference went much further than that.
Obama asked Netanyahu to avoid inflammatory statements in regards to Iran, to keep gas prices down in America’s gas station. It’s an important issue when trying to rebuild the American economy as well as, of course, his reelection bid. And while Obama’s thinking may seem reasonable, he’s living in an entirely different world than that of Israel’s prime minister. From the White House, Iran looks like a strategic problem, not as a Holocaust. Thus, time isn’t of the essence, and diplomacy and sanctions should still be given a chance. Netanyahu is motivated by other things.
It’s possible to detect enough loopholes that would allow Netanyahu to escape an imminent decision to go to war. Netanyahu has a political interest to aid his Republican friends against Obama, so his statement that “there wasn’t a decision to attack” seems more like an attempt to stir things up ahead of the U.S. presidential elections than a command to Israel Air Force units. There are those who believe he’s just a second-guessing coward who would never take it upon himself to initiate a war. It could be that all those interpretations are true. Nevertheless, Netanyahu took on a public obligation on Monday that would make it very hard for him to back away from the path of war with Iran.