Obama on telephone, Feb 13, White House photo by Pete Souza
An extraordinary op-ed in the New York Times today is entitled “Israel’s Last Chance to Strike Iran.” Written by Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, the article deepens the impression that members of Israel’s security establishment have a faucet at the Times which they can turn on at pleasure. Thus on the eve of Netanyahu’s AIPAC visit, Yadlin observes with alarm that Israel cannot bomb Iran as effectively as the U.S. can; yet if President Obama waits much longer, Israel will be forced to act alone. Israel, however, is willing follow Obama’s schedule provided it gets “ironclad American assurance” that he will bomb when a moment arrives on which the two countries have agreed in advance.
This is discussed in public, in a famous American newspaper. For what purpose if not to soften American opinion? The New York Times is helping one more war after Iraq and Afghanistan–a war against Iran–to become for us an everyday fact, an
understood arrangement.
A similar proposal of war was floated in the Times a little over three weeks ago, in an op-ed entitled “To Weaken Iran, Start with Syria.” The author, Efraim Halevy, was director of the Mossad from 1998-2002. He asked his American readers to recognize the good sense of his idea that the U.S. combine with Russia to overthrow Assad and install a mutually agreeable puppet regime in Syria. Like the follow-up suggestion by Yadlin, that earlier argument for an American attack on Israel’s behalf was presented in the language of emergency. It was an opportunity that the U.S. must seize or else–an “option” (as Halevy called it) which “we do not have the luxury of ignoring.”
The high strategy op-eds by luminaries of a foreign power, appearing so close together in the Times, deal with superficially different subjects but they are by no means incompatible. The first asks us to see an attack on Syria as a logical way station to the bombing of Iran. The second concedes that, given “ironclad American assurance,” Israel may be willing to wait a little longer before joining the U.S. against Iran. (Long enough maybe for the fall of Assad.)
Meanwhile President Obama continues a policy of minimal explanation concerning Israel and Iran. He gave a hostage to fortune and contradicted warnings by his
secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs when he
said that the U.S. was marching “lockstep” with Israel on Iran. Characteristically, as three years of his presidency have shown, Obama works by tacking and co-opting. He goes some distance to meet the most dangerous of demands, and seems not to have understood the impression of weakness which this pattern has infallibly conveyed. His counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, by contrast, moves rapidly, emphatically, and unembarrassed in the medium of American politics. He has the assistance of the jingo media of the far right but also the mainstream media. Is it wrong to suspect that Obama is entering his next encounter in a usual state of mind for him–passive, wishful, and ill-advised?
DB expands on the theme of Bibi and Obama in this slam dunk from the New York Review which is worth reading in full.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/obama-his-words-his-deeds/
Barack Obama from the start of his presidency has exhibited an almost exclusive taste for the dignified part of government. During the BP oil spill, his remoteness from the plod and toil of problem-solving showed day after day. That was a “teachable moment,” if ever there was one: a public catastrophe that implicated the environment and energy resources close to home for all Americans. The moment escaped this president, as the nuclear disaster in Japan has also escaped him. He never broke a sweat as he could have—literally and figuratively—by descending into the muck on the spoiled Louisiana beaches. Few presidents have ever seemed farther than Obama from being “in the thick of things.” The impression came back as he left Washington with Netanyahu triumphant, and took a plane for Ireland to speak of hope and peace.
On May 26, at the urging of the President, the Senate and House voted to renew the Patriot Act. Obama signed it with a teleportable pen, from France. He has said that he would look to the future, not the past—a slogan that nullifies the large part of justice that consists of accountability—but here was an element of the Bush-Cheney past that he chose to project into the future with as little discussion as possible. Obama’s real trouble has come, however, in his attempts to inhabit the present. He is slower to react than most people, far slower than most politicians. He gave away six months of the health care debate without pressing his initial advantage while the resistance sprang up all around, the Tea Party was created, and congressional enemies gained on him. He let the controversy over his birth certificate blow up to absurd proportions over two and a half years before dispelling all doubts at a stroke in a press briefing that was hastily called and testily managed. At present, he is waiting for Afghanistan to calm down and let him withdraw troops on a deliberate schedule. But things can flare up while you are waiting, or flare up elsewhere and set back every cautious preparation.
The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still. This is one lesson of his passage from inaction in Egypt to action in Libya, and from his summons of reform in Cairo in June 2009 to the guarded speech from the sidelines in May 2011.
I really like how Israel and the U.S. are discussing and planning offensive warfare as though it were nothing more than a lunch date. Will the warmongers in these rogue, nuclear-equipped nations be held accountable for their actions? Probably not. And that’s a damned shame.
Relative to our media, AIPAC has always been a bit player. And the starring role has always been assumed by the New York Times.
Thank you David, so very well put:
unless the occupy movement comes out in opposition to another war it’s going to lose whatever support it still commands, assuming it still has a hold on the 99%. and since this winter has turned out to be very mild, bad weather can no longer be cited as an excuse for the movement’s continued inactivity. come on, occupiers, either go after the warmongers (especially these israel firsters) or stop making like you’re serious about change, because an iran war breaks out and the occupy movement will be blown away by a groundswell of rally-round-the-flag/my country right or wrong sentiment that invariably occurs whenever our government decides to take us into one of its preemptive wars.