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November 19, 2013

Obama’s Iran Moves Could Start World War III

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According to a recent news report, President Barack Obama has for over a year secretly conducted negotiations with Iran (through his adviser Valerie Jarrett) and the Geneva talks on Iranian nukes now appear to be just a facade providing international legitimacy for Obama’s secret deal with Iran.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s contradictory criticism of Israeli objections to that deal only suggests more bad faith by the Obama administration. Kerry claims that Israel has been kept fully apprised of the negotiations with Iran but then argues that Israel has never seen the terms of the proposed deal with Iran and therefore shouldn’t question it. The Obama administration apparently wants to present the nuclear deal as a fait accompli that Israel must simply accept as is.
In what is becoming a familiar pattern, Russia is readily moving in to the Mideast areas where U.S. influence has waned because of Obama’s many fumbles in the region. Last August, Saudi Arabia made it clear that it would happily replace US aid to Egypt (highlighting one of many issues straining U.S. relations with yet another Mideast ally).
Yaakov Amidror, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, recently indicated that the Israeli Air Force has been preparing for a potential strike on Iran. According to Amidror, such a strike could set back Iran’s nuclear program “for a very long time.” So Israel can go it alone, if it must, although the results will be far messier than those produced by a stronger U.S. approach.

While the Obama administration has suggested that critics of the current Geneva deal are “on a march to war,” it is that very deal — which gives Iran a nuclear breakout capacity — that will force the states most threatened by Iran to take preemptive military action.

Even if one accepts Obama’s apparent view that decades-long alliances matter no more than do U.S. assurances, there are other compelling reasons for Obama to reverse his disastrous Iran policy before it’s too late.  Granting an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout capability will produce catastrophic consequences  (many of which Obama himself acknowledged, in his March 2012 speech):

1) The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will effectively be finished. The world’s most volatile region will become even more explosive as other regional players scramble to establish their own nuclear arsenals to counter Iran’s. And rogue nations will realize that by following Iran’s deceptive playbook, they too can develop a nuclear capability.

2)  The force of U.N. Security Council Resolutions will be further diluted, as Iran will continue flouting six of them with impunity.

3) Iran-backed terrorist organizations — including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah — will grow emboldened by the nuclear umbrella of their patron.
4) Terrorism could go nuclear, should Iran share some of its nuclear materials with the terrorist groups that it supports.
5) U.S. influence in the Middle East will erode even more, as Obama further damages U.S. relationships and influence in the region.
6) U.S. credibility throughout the world will plummet. If the U.S. cannot be trusted to provide strong leadership on the national security issue of greatest concern to the free world, where U.S. interests are directly at stake, what does that mean for U.S. credibility more generally?

7) Global instability and oil prices will skyrocket. If Israel, with Saudi assistance, strikes Iran’s nuclear program, the Iranian retaliation that follows could spark World War III. Will Iran attack Saudi oil fields or otherwise pour more fuel onto the Sunni-Shia fire in Syria? Will Iran and Iran-backed Hezbollah (estimated to have at least 45,000 missiles) launch a massive attack killing thousands of Israeli civilians? Will some of the Syrian chemical weapons held by Assad (another Iranian ally) end up hitting Israel? How would Israel respond? Is this how Armageddon happens?

8) U.S. interests will be attacked. Obama may think that his policy of appeasement will shield the U.S. from Iranian reprisals, but the opposite is true. When the U.S. appears so weak and ready to abandon allies (as with Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia), Iran has less fear of attacking the U.S. and more reasons to do so, as a way to exacerbate U.S. tensions with Israel.

Will attacking U.S. interests be yet another Obama “red line” that gets crossed with impunity? If so, then whatever is left of U.S. deterrence and credibility will have been destroyed. If not, then the U.S. will get sucked into another Mideast war but on terms dictated by the adversary, and without any first-strike advantage.

The catastrophic consequences outlined above would all directly result from Obama’s disastrously weak — but still reversible — policies on the Iranian nuclear threat.
The Jewish people have a long memory, and it pervades the thinking of Israeli civilians and top brass alike. Thus, Israel’s brief history is replete with daring military operations to protect its security. In Netanyahu’s speech at the last UN General Assembly, in what may have been Israel’s final warning to the world to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat before Israel must, the Prime Minister summed up — from his personal family history — the collective experience that guides Israel on fateful decisions:
“[O]ne cold day in the late 19th century, my grandfather Nathan and his younger brother Judah were standing in a railway station in the heart of Europe. They were seen by a group of anti-Semitic hoodlums who ran towards them waving clubs, screaming ‘Death to the Jews.’ My grandfather shouted to his younger brother to flee and save himself, and he then stood alone against the raging mob to slow it down. They beat him senseless, they left him for dead, and before he passed out, covered in his own blood, he said to himself ‘What a disgrace, what a disgrace. The descendants of the Macabees lie in the mud powerless to defend themselves.’ He promised himself then that if he lived, he would take his family to the Jewish homeland and help build a future for the Jewish people. I stand here today as Israel’s prime minister because my grandfather kept that promise.”
Obama should know by now that if he forces Israel’s hand, then Israel alone will neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat, regardless of how messy the aftermath may be. Netanyahu — like any other responsible Israeli leader — would rather bring about World War III than the last Israelis.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

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November 11, 2013

Can Israel Survive Obama?

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In the spring of 2012, when I wrote “The Last Israelis,” I thought that the pessimistic premise of my cautionary tale on Iranian nukes was grounded in realism. I had imagined a U.S. president who passively and impotently reacted to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, leaving it to tiny Israel to deal with the threat. But something far worse is happening: the Obama administration is actively making it harder for Israel to neutralize Iran’s nukes, and more likely that Iran will develop a nuclear arsenal.
A few months after my apocalyptic thriller was published, the New York Times reported that “intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials [dating] almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term” resulted in an agreement to conduct one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. In those secret talks, did Obama long ago concede to Iran a nuclear capability? If so, then the current Geneva negotiations merely provide the international imprimatur for what Iran and the US have already privately agreed. That might explain why France (of all countries) had to reject a Geneva deal that would have left Iran with a nuclear breakout capability.

An investigation by the Daily Beast also reveals that the “Obama administration began softening sanctions on Iran after the election of Iran’s new president last June, months before the current round of nuclear talks in Geneva…” The report notes that Treasury Department notices show “that the U.S. government has all but stopped the financial blacklisting of entities and people that help Iran evade international sanctions since the election of its president, Hassan Rouhani, in June.”Obama’s desperately eager posture towards the smiling Mullahs has doomed any negotiation to failure by signaling that the U.S. fears confrontation more than anything else. Obama’s pathetic approach to the world’s most pressing national security threat also makes U.S. military action virtually impossible from a public relations and diplomatic standpoint because it promotes the naive idea that more diplomacy will resolve what a decade of talking hasn’t. And as long as the Iranians are “talking,” world opinion will also oppose an Israeli military strike, so naturally Iran will find ways to keep talking until it’s too late for Israel to act.

Obama has been downright duplicitous towards key Mideast allies. When in campaign mode or speaking to Israel supporters, Obama emphatically rejected containment as a policy option for dealing with Iranian nukes but he’s now taking steps that effectively make containment the only option available (while repeating the same empty reassurance that he has Israel’s back and won’t be duped by the smiling Iranians).

Despite his repeated reassurances, Obama rejected Israel’s estimates for how much more time Iran needs to develop its nuclear capability, and accepted overly optimistic timetables that assumed at least a year for more talking. Soon afterwards, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) confirmed Israel’s estimates that Iran could be just weeks away from the critical nuclear threshold. Ignoring these critical facts, Obama has given diplomatic cover to Iran’s nuclear program by seizing on the cosmetic changes presented by the Iranian regime’s Ahmadinejad-to-Rouhani facelift.

That this makeover is just a ruse becomes obvious from this video, in which Rouhani boasts about masterfully manipulating diplomacy to achieve Iran’s nuclear objectives. So Obama must have known all along that “talks” are a fool’s errand that allow him to “fall back to” what has been his position all along: containment.

And despite repeated assurances from Secretary of State John Kerry that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” the current Geneva talks appear headed towards precisely that: a bad deal that leaves Iran with the very nuclear breakout capability that a diplomatic “solution” was supposed to prevent.

On the other hand, after Obama’s weak response to Syria’s crossing of his “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, the threat of U.S. force against Iranian nukes lost all credibility, making it even harder to change Iranian nuclear behavior without force. So containing the mess produced by weak negotiations is really all that’s left of Obama’s Iran “strategy.”

Only epic ineptitude or anti-Israel hostility no longer checked by reelection considerations can explain Obama’s moves on Iran. And the stakes couldn’t be higher for the rest of the world. After all, if Iran is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism without nuclear weapons, what will terrorism look like once Iran goes nuclear? And there are already hints of the nuclear proliferation nightmare that will follow Iran’s nuclearization: Saudi Arabia has Pakistani nukes already lined up for purchase. Remarkably, Obama has known this since 2009 and apparently doesn’t care about that consequence any more than he does about Israel’s security. How else to explain his acceptance of the dreadful Geneva proposal granting Iran a nuclear weapons capability?
Exacerbating an existential threat against Israel is bad enough, but Obama has been an abysmal ally in other respects. Despite being history’s most aggressive president to punish leakers (except when they make him look good), Obama’s administration has repeatedly leaked sensitive Israeli information that could have easily provoked a Syrian-Israeli war. Obama summarily dumped a decades-long alliance with Egypt (that is also key to Israeli security) over some Egyptian state violence that is dwarfed by the decades-long brutality and terrorism of the Iranian regime now enjoying Obama’s overzealous courtship. And Obama’s image as a multi-lateralist who subordinates U.S. interests to higher principles has been exposed as a fraud following reports that he knew that the U.S. was spying on close European allies (contrary to his denials).
Add to that list Kerry’s increasing hostility to Israel and reports that the U.S. plans to impose its undoubtedly risky vision of peace on Israel in a few months, and you have Israel’s worst nightmare in the White House. The irony is that the less Israel feels secure because of Obama’s betrayals, the less likely it is to behave as Obama would like. Why humor Obama’s requests and take unrequited risks for peace with the Palestinians or indulge yet another round of counter-productive “talks” about Iran’s nuclear program when Obama has apparently abandoned Israel anyway?
As if Israel didn’t face enough threats and challenges, it must now survive the Obama nightmare until he’s out of office in 38 months. Isolated like never before thanks to Obama, the stark choices facing Israel’s leadership are unimaginably difficult. With roughly 75 times more territory, 10 times as many people, and two times as big an economy, Iran is a Goliath compared to Israel, and has repeatedly threatened to destroy it. So what does David (Israel) do now that Obama’s perfidy has been exposed? If the neighborhood bully is bigger than you, has threatened you, and is reaching for a bat, do you preemptively attack him before he gets the bat and becomes even more dangerous?

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