The author of the famous statement that the Israel lobby is a “night flower,” former AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen at Foreign Policy explains how painful it is for the lobby to have to come into the sunlight on the Syria question. But the risk of silence was too great, losing a precedent for American military action against Iran:
Pesident Barack Obama’s decision to make Congress decide on the course of the Syrian intervention has put the pro-Israel camp just where it did not want to be: openly advocating American military involvement in the volatile Middle East. It’s a calculation based on the lesser of two evils, the greater being risking Washington’s withdrawal from leadership on global security just as Iran crosses the nuclear threshold. No one has a greater stake in a strong United States — and the credibility of America’s deterrent capability — than Israel and the Jewish people. Indeed, many of the arguments that motivate the president’s opponents on Syria could also apply in the event that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities becomes necessary.
Rosen is rightly fearful that the American public will see this as a war for Israel:
Yet this is a debate about the American national interest, and most American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) supporters do not want it to degenerate into a debate about Israel. Most agree with former Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovitch that, “It’s bad for Israel [if] the average American gets it into his or her mind that boys are again sent to war for Israel.”
Paralyzed by these fears, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC supporters in Washington remained nearly silent for weeks,… [T]hey remained quiet even after Obama indicated that he was preparing a military strike. They did not want to be drawn into a political melee in a deeply divided Congress, risking strains in the bipartisan support for Israel that forms the bedrock of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
And though I often think our views at this site are marginalized, note how our drumbeat about the neoconservative and lobby support for the Iraq war has helped define the US discourse among Democrats, per Rosen:
…Israel’s detractors never cease asserting that the Iraq War was fought on Israel’s behalf, and that belief has eroded support for Israel on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Rosen seeks to explain the power of the lobby, without talking about the money that it gives.
As a White House official told the New York Times, AIPAC is “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” because it has close relations with and access to a vast array of members on both sides of the aisle and on all sides of the debate. Simply put, the president has staked a lot of political capital on the gambit to sway Congress on his Syria plan — and he needs AIPAC’s support….[T]he main thing is the mobilization of AIPAC’s vast network of trusted “key contacts” to speak privately with members they know well.
Rosen is afraid of “isolationism” and “a wider U.S. retreat in the Middle East…. [that] would certainly undermine the campaign to prevent Iran from completing its nuclear weapons program.”
Apparently retreat is what most Americans want now. They don’t see any profit in our continuing engagement in unrest, one root of which is the lack of acceptance of Israel, an occupier.
Rosen is reduced to pro-Israel doctrine, it lives in a terrible neighborhood and doesn’t have security (Hey, who chose Palestine?):
Americans and Brits are far away, but Israel’s permanent reality is that it lives in that very bad neighborhood, faced with an existential crisis and a Syrian civil war in danger of spiraling out of control. That is why, while Americans are divided on the issue, an overwhelming majority of Israelis are hoping President Obama will prevail.
The permanent reality. So that means war after war after war. No wonder Americans are balking at this vision for the future.
Notice the spin though: Obama ‘pushed’ Israel into doing something it doesn’t want, and by extension AIPAC, but only because Israel is such a good little poodle it will obey it’s master.
The reality is that Israel has been lobbying for this for a long time – but as usual it wants American blood and treasury to be spent, not it’s own – and Obama simply demanded that at least they expense political capital, and now the lobby is making great and dramatic gestures as if this is a huge problem for them.
If you’ve been reading Israeli media, they’ve all been heckling Obama and demanding that he bombs Assad, and preferably yesterday.
Obama’s merely asking the mere minimum from them and even this causes great anguish.
There’s a good word for this, I can’t remember it right now…
Ah, wait… chutzpah.
So Rosen wrote this for Foreign Policy magazine. I have a question. Is Foreign Policy fact-checked? Because there’s a big brazen lie that leaps out at me: Rosen’s claim that Iran has a “nuclear weapons program”, that Iran “is crossing the nuclear threshold”, that Iran is “completing its nuclear weapons program”, etc etc.
All lies. Iran has no nuclear weapons, nor a program for obtaining them.
Iran has a program for enriching uranium, which they are entitled to do, under the non-proliferation treaty, a treat which Iran has signed and followed.
Rosen cleverly refers to Iran’s “nuclear program”, deliberately blurring the difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power for generating electricity.
Iran has signed the non-proliferation treaty. Israel, on the other hand, has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And Israel does have hundreds of nuclear weapons.
When the US built its first nuclear weapons in the 1940’s, the Manhattan Project employed over 100,000 people. So a program of that size could not be disguised. It’s not like a few scientists and engineers could put it together in an overlooked laboratory.
On two different occasions, US intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has no program for obtaining nuclear weapons.
But the Israelis, and their supporters, keep planting these stories in the media about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons.
Once again, my original question: is Foreign Policy magazine fact-checked? Doesn’t look like it!
Rosen owes the Obama administration his freedom. Absent DOJ political appointees that reigned in his Espionage Act prosecution, there’s a good possibility that he and his coworker would be sitting in a jail cell after they passed purloined classified information to their Israeli “diplomat” friends.
Obama can rest assured that, just like the Reagan administration after the sordid Iran-Contra affair went south, Rosen will always be there with unsolicited advice to further the interests of his Israeli principals.
http://irmep.org/ILA/reagan/12031986_Steve_Rosen.pdf
“Israel’s permanent reality is that it lives in that very bad neighborhood, faced with an existential crisis and a Syrian civil war in danger of spiraling out of control”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1c5f1352-79d5-11e2-9015-00144feabdc0.html
“In 1976, Saul Bellow wrote: “No one is at ease in Zion. No one can be. The world crisis is added to the crisis of the state, and both are added to the problems of domestic life.”
Israel can’t live in a state of permanent war. It requires far too much American political support .
The notion that Israel can procrastinate with the Palestinians indefinitely is another dud. Israelis are too afraid of peace.
Re : living in a bad neighborhood- Israel is like the drug king moaning that the middleclasses have all moved out
If c-span callers are any example it is wide spread knowledge now, at least among news followers, that most US policy and actions in the ME are for Israel.
I didnt listen to the entire program (this was yesterday) but heard one caller after another complain that this was another war ‘for Israel’.
Also in looking at comments on everything from Yahoo to WP and other news blogs the majority of comments cite Israel as the main reason for
US intervention in the ME in everything. And for anyone who thinks a good % of the public doesnt understand the Iran factor for Israel , that was cited also.
There were some that had also caught onto the Saudi factor in this but they werent as numerous .