Jerusalem Post & Palestinian premier slouching toward Armageddon
1. Interesting piece (posted as a comment below) in The Jerusalem Post, following upon last week’s turmoil in the mideast and this week’s arrival of Baker/Gates in D.C. as the new voices of American foreign policy. (Gates was confirmed by Senate after saying the US policy in Iraq was garbage in, garbage out. And Baker’s Iraq Study Group released it’s recommendations: Turn the Bush policy on its head.)
Today the lead editorial in The Jerusalem Post responded — with an angry and rather frightened & frightening assessment of the new American policy. And concluded with a call to Olmert & co. to “immediately” strike Iran’s nuke facilities and “regime command and control centers.” Of course they know this would mean war.
War, then, before the Dems take over Congress? Or enhanced sabre-rattling?
Was this why Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for two hours last weekend? Getting ducks in line best he could? Including perhaps a suggestion that the production cuts OPEC has been signaling the past few weeks (for the meeting this coming Thursday the 14th) should be turned off; that the oil suppliers of the so-called Western democracies may soon have to ratchet production up rather than down, to compensate for the disruption an attack on Iran would produce.
Idle speculation that one hope goes unrealized. But there’s no lack of clarity about the Likud’s reaction (in the Jerusalem Post piece) to the new (old) faces in Washington.
2. MEANWHILE the Palestinian premier in Tehran echos the fey Iranian prez’s calls for Israel’s destruction:
QUOTE Mr Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, speaking at Friday prayers at the University of Tehran, said: “The world arrogance [a reference to the US] and Zionists … want us to recognise the usurpation of the Palestinian lands and stop jihad and resistance and accept the agreements reached with the Zionist enemies in the past.Ignoring US and British calls to recognise Israel, Mr Haniyeh said: “We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem. END QUOTE
It does seem the genie is out of the bottle. Israel’s future, as its past, is war, and it seems a war Israeilis cannot win. They can keep fighting in perpetuity, as the Jerusalem Post calls upon them to do. But peace through war seems at best now a nightmare.
It IS very much like Syracuse and Athens. The former an affluent colony of the latter, planted in Sicily during the height of classical Athens, ca 450 bc.
Syracuse flourished but from the start had to fight to carve out their space. Athens sent troops to assist to Sicily. But slowly its colony at Syracuse, outnumbered, died. But not before drawing Athens into a much larger war with its powerful Greek neighbors, who banded together to defeat the Athenians. Upon which the famous foundational Athenian democracy collapsed, to be succeeded by a parade of tyrannical cabals. Along the way Socrates was compelled to drink hemlock for corrupting young minds with questions.
That seems the template. Israel is for most geopolitical intents and purposes a bumptious American colony, like Syracuse affluent but alone among angry neighbors who fail to forgive and forget a foundational war of conquest.
Israel may or may not have been in dire peril in 1992 (when the Likud lobby began its campaign to realize the U.S. mideast policy we see in progress today). But today Israel’s survival does seem at stake. Its attack on Beirut this summer was a horrendous war crime that no Arab among 200+ million will forgive or forget. Hezbollah has now been vested with the prestige of Al Qaeda and seems intent upon toppling the Lebanese government. Iraq continues to devolve. And China and Russia continue to signal muscular support for Tehran. The cult of war has won out.
Perhaps nothing but war was possible for an Israel hoping to found itself in Palestine in 1948. Yet there was an alternative, at the time — a proposal to site the Jewish homeland in South America.
One of Rumsfeld’s chief intellectual “mentors,” I’m sorry to say, was Robert Goldwin, an practical philosopher associated with my undergrad college for a while before he went to Washington. Goldwin (Jewish) was somewhat influential at the time of Israel’s founding, argued for the Guyana alternative, and thought it a fatal & tragic (in wake and light of the nazi assault) error when the brits and americans consented to make the zionist theories real, authorizing, among other things, the claim on Jerusalem, which seems as absurd as the legends that plague serbian politics. Goldwin’s mantra was “America is the Promised Land.”
However that may be, here we are, fifty-eight years later, the foundational war having never ceased in peace, with the Palestinian premier calling from Fortress Tehran for the liberation of Jerusalem. While the sharp woman at The Jerusalem Post shouts “Bring it on!” There seems no way to stop this war. Three generations have been decimated by it. They shall overcome to the bitter end. How deeply the U.S., Russia, Iran and China share the cup seems the only question.
ed says:
Here is the full Jerusalem Post column from December 8:
Column One: Jews Wake Up! — by Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 8, 2006
When the history of our times is written, this week will be remembered as the week that Washington decided to let the Islamic Republic of Iran go nuclear. Hopefully it will also be remembered as the moment the Jews arose and refused to allow Iran to go nuclear.
With the publication of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group chaired by former US secretary of state James Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the debate about the war in Iraq changed. From a war for victory against Islamofascism and for democracy and freedom, the war became reduced to a conflict to be managed by appeasing the US’s sworn enemies in the interests of stability, and at the expense of America’s allies.
Baker and his associates claim that the US cannot win the war in Iraq and so the US must negotiate with its primary enemies in Iraq and throughout the world – Iran and Syria – in the hopes that they will be persuaded to hold their fire for long enough to facilitate an “honorable” American retreat from the country.
Like his unsupported assertion that the US cannot win in Iraq, Baker also asserts – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that Iran and Syria share America’s “interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.” Because of this supposed shared interest, Baker maintains that with the proper incentives, Iran and Syria can be persuaded to cooperate with a US withdrawal from Iraq ahead of the 2008 presidential primaries.
The main incentive Baker advocates offering is Israel.
Baker believes that Iran will agree to temporarily hold its fire in Iraq in exchange for US acceptance of Iran as a nuclear power and an American pledge not to topple the regime. Syria will assist the US in exchange for US pressure on Israel to hand over the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to Hamas.
Obviously, if implemented, the Baker-Hamilton group’s recommendations will be disastrous for Israel. Just the fact that they now form the basis for the public debate on the war is a great blow. But it isn’t only Israel that is harmed by their actions. The US too, will be imperiled if their views become administration policy.
Although Baker – and incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who served on his commission until Bush announced his appointment last month – believes that there is a deal to be done that will end Iranian and Syrian aggression against the US, its vital interests and its allies, the fact of the matter is that there is no such deal. Contrary to what the Baker report argues and what Gates said in his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Iran is not analogous to the Soviet Union and the war against the global jihad is not a new cold war.
Even if the US were to somehow get them to agree to certain understandings about Iraq, there is no reason to believe that the Iranians and Syrians would keep their word. Not only would the US be approaching them as a supplicant and so emboldening them, but to date the US has never credibly threatened anything either Syria or Iran value. Indeed, through supporting negotiations between the EU and Iran, empowering the UN to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, and forcing Israel to accept a cease-fire with Hizbullah last summer that effectively gave victory to the Syrian and Iranian proxy, the US has consistently rewarded the two countries’ aggression.
Worse than that, from a US perspective, although Gates admitted Tuesday that he cannot guarantee that Iran will not attack Israel with nuclear weapons, he ignored the fact that Iran – whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad daily calls for the destruction of the US – may also attack the US with nuclear weapons.
Gates admitted in his Senate hearing that Iran is producing many bombs – not just one.
Since it is possible to destroy Israel with just one bomb, the Americans should be asking themselves what Iran needs all those other bombs for. There are senior military sources in the US who have been warning the administration to take into consideration that the day that Iran attacks Israel with a nuclear bomb, 10 cities in the US and Europe are liable to also be attacked with nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, no one is listening to these voices today.
IT IS particularly upsetting that Washington has chosen now of all times to turn its back on the war. Ahmadinejad hinted Monday that Iran has completed the nuclear fuel cycle and so has passed the point of no return on its nuclear program. He also made a statement indicating that Iran will have its nuclear arsenal up and running by March – just four months away.
Serious disagreement exists in Washington over the status of the Iranian program. Some claim that Iran is four or five years away from nuclear weapons capabilities. Others maintain that Iran has recently experienced serious technical setbacks in their uranium enrichment activities and that the North Korean nuclear bomb test in October, in which Iranian officials participated, was a failure.
But there are also engaged officials who agree with Ahmadinejad’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear progress. Those officials maintain first that the North Korean-Iranian test in October was successful and should be taken as a sign that Iran already has a nuclear arsenal. Second, they warn that the US and Israel have six months to act against Iran’s nuclear installations and to overthrow the regime or face the prospect of the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of several US cities as a result of an Iranian nuclear offensive.
Obviously, Israel cannot risk the possibility that the last group of officials is correct. And since Washington has decided to go to sleep, it is up to Israel alone to act.
WHAT MUST Israel do?
First, it must plan an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities and regime command and control centers. To pave the way for such an attack, the IDF must move now to neutralize second order threats like the Palestinian rocket squads and the Syrian ballistic missile arsenals in order to limit the public’s exposure to attack during the course of or in the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Second, Israel must work to topple the Iranian regime. As the Defense Minister’s advisor Uri Lubrani told Ha’aretz last week, the regime in Iran is far from stable today and ripe for overthrow.
The overwhelming majority of Iranians despise the regime. There are rebellious groups in every ethnic group and province in the country – Azeris, Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen and even Persians – that are actively working to destabilize the regime. Every day there are strikes of workers, women and students. Every few weeks there are reports of violent clashes between anti-regime groups and regime forces.
Recently, oil pipelines were sabotaged in the oil-rich Khuzestan province in the south where the Ahwazi Arabs are systematically persecuted by the regime. Westerners who recently visited Iran claim that Israel operating alone could overthrow the regime by extending its assistance to these people.
Thirdly, in his testimony in the Senate on Tuesday, Gates casually mentioned that Israel has nuclear weapons. In so doing, he unceremoniously removed four decades of ambiguity over Israel’s nuclear status. While his statement caused dismay in Jerusalem, perhaps Israel should see this as an opportunity.
With the threat of nuclear destruction hanging over us, it makes sense to conduct a debate about an Israeli second strike. While such a discussion will not dissuade Iran’s fanatical leaders from attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, it could influence the Iranian nation to rise up against their leaders.
Moreover, such a debate could influence other regimes in the region like Saudi Arabia which today behave as if Israel’s annihilation will have no adverse impact on them. Americans like Baker, Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their European friends need to understand that as goes Israel so go the Persian Gulf’s oil fields. Such an understanding may influence their willingness to enable Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Tragically, in these perilous times, we are being led by the worst, most incompetent government we have ever had.
Prime Minister Olmert’s way of dealing with the Iranian threat is to pretend that it is none of his business. During his visit to the US last month, Olmert abdicated responsibility for safeguarding Israel from nuclear destruction to President Bush. It didn’t bother him that Bush didn’t accept the responsibility. By mindlessly adhering to non-existent cease-fires with Iranian proxies in Gaza and Lebanon and squawking about peace with them, Olmert continues to behave as if this is someone else’s problem.
For her part, reacting to the possibility of national extinction, Education Minister YuliTamir this week cocked her pedagogical pistol and shot at her rear. By ordering the public schools to demarcate the 1949 armistice lines on the official maps and so wipe Israel off maps of Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights, Tamir worked to divide the nation over second order issues at a time when unity of purpose is most essential. Olmert, who refused to overturn her scandalous decree, was doubtlessly pleased with her political stunt. For two days the media devoted itself entirely to stirring up internal divisions and so ignored the threat hanging over our heads and Olmert’s refusal to deal with it.
Next Thursday, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations Malcolm Hoenlein and former ambassador to the UN Dore Gold will hold a press conference in New York where they will call for the US to indict Ahmadinejad under the International Convention Against Genocide for his call to annihilate Israel. This is doubtlessly a welcome initiative. But it is insufficient.
In a few months, Iran may well be in possession of nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the Jewish state. With the US withdrawing from the war and Israel in the hands of incompetents, the time has come for the Jewish people to rise up.
GUARANTEEING our survival begins with each of us deciding that we are willing to fight to survive. And today the challenge facing us is clear.
Either the Iranian regime is toppled and its nuclear installations are destroyed or Israel will be annihilated. The Jews in the Diaspora must launch mass demonstrations and demand that their governments take real action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The citizens of the State of Israel must also take to the streets. The government that led us to defeat in Lebanon this summer is leading us to a disaster of another order entirely. All citizens must demand that Olmert, his ministers and the generals in the IDF General Staff make an immediate decision. They now hold the responsibility for acting against Iran. They must either act or resign and make way for others who will.
America just abdicated its responsibility to defend itself against Iran and so left Israel high and dry. Nevertheless, the Jewish people is far from powerless. And the State of Israel also is capable of defending itself. But we must act and act immediately.
(End of Jerusalem Post story)
December 13th, 2006 at 8:16 pm