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Israel to U.S.: “You Are the Weakest Link!”

June 15, 2010 By: Scott Spiegel Category: Israel

Middle_east_graphic_2003
Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

The list of countries that have provided tacit support to Israel for its imminent launch of preemptive missile attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities now includes: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, and… not-the-United-States.

The Saudi government recently conducted drills to ensure that their missile defense system does not shoot down Israeli jets that might fly over their airspace in the near future.  This is crucial for any bombing raids Israel may conduct on Iranian nuclear facilities, because the only feasible route to Iran’s nuclear plants is over a wide swath of Saudi Arabia.  Israel might also need to fly over Jordan and Kuwait, which have not objected to this arrangement.

A much quicker, as-the-crow-flies route to Iran’s cluster of nuclear facilities at Natanz, Qom, Isfahan, and Arak would be directly over Iraq.  However, use of this flight plan has one sticking point: the U.S. commander-in-chief’s stubborn refusal to allow Israel to fly jets through Iraq’s airspace.

In arriving at this position, President Obama may have been following the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, who infamously offered the charming advice last year that if Israel tried to use Iraqi airspace to attack Iran, the U.S. should shoot Israeli jets down.

Saudi Arabia has never exactly considered Israel an ally, as the U.S. does.  Yet the Saudi government recognizes the danger a nuclear Iran poses to their country and the region, and is willing to clear a corridor of airspace for Israel over their country.  Why is Obama unwilling to do the same over Iraq, which isn’t even his country?

In 2007 Turkey allowed Israel use of its airspace in a sneak attack on a developing nuclear plant in Syria, Iran’s primary ally in the region.  At the time, the Syria attack was seen as a test run for an upcoming Israeli attack against Iran’s facilities, which means that Turkey was essentially helping Israel prepare for such an attack.

Egypt has also recently looked the other way as Israel sent warships and a nuclear-capable submarine down the Suez Canal toward the Arabian Sea in preparation for a conflict with Iran.

But due to Obama’s creepy, subtly anti-Semitic foreign policy, Israel must instead hurl its jets in a wide, boomerang-shaped flight path all the way around the southern tip of Iraq, across the Persian Gulf, and back up to central-northern Iran to get to the country’s primary nuclear facilities.

George W. Bush was certainly no hawk regarding the prospect of the U.S. attacking Iran under his watch.  However, it’s safe to assume, given the precipitous progress of Iran’s nuclear program over the past two years, Iran’s alarming self-declaration as a nuclear state this spring, and Israel’s brave willingness to confront Iran alone, that Bush would not have denied Israel the right to fly over Iraq if he were still President.

To put all of this in perspective: our current president is refusing to allow the only stable democracy in the Middle East (Israel) to serve as the U.S.’s front line of attack against the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (Iran), by letting them fly over a country we recently liberated (Iraq) in order that they might serve as a model for neighboring dictatorships on the brink of regime change (such as Iran).

Ah, you say, but surely Obama has some other diplomatic maneuver up his sleeve, some nonmilitary means of pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors into the country.

Actually, no—the Obama administration has been working to weaken Congress’s proposed U.S. sanctions against Iran.  Obama fears that these injunctions may go too far and anger our allies.

These are not the sanctions imposed by the UN last week—the ones which we waited forever to be implemented, which two of the largest nations in the world (Brazil and Turkey) rejected, and which are watered down to the point of futility.  These are additional sanctions that would apply only to U.S. companies and not be legally binding on other countries.

The EU has already agreed to oil and gas sanctions of their own that go beyond the mild-mannered penalties imposed by the UN.  So even the likes of France and Germany are going further than the U.S. in isolating Iran, yet Obama still sees the need to appease our allies.

Americans ought to be deeply troubled by a U.S. foreign policy that fails to be as supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself as the doctrines of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt.

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How About a Relief Vessel Called the Yasser Arafat?

June 09, 2010 By: Scott Spiegel Category: Israel

800px-Mavi_Marmara_leaving_port
Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Perhaps the heartrending lament that the Turkish aid flotilla Mavi Marmara—headed for Gaza and stopped by the Israeli Navy last week—contained a bevy of innocent Nobel Peace laureates would be more compelling if recent Nobel Peace laureates didn’t include the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.

Perhaps the fact that nine passengers were accidentally killed in the struggle would carry more emotional punch if the excursion hadn’t been funded by an Islamist, anti-Israeli, Hamas-allied, Turkish front group whose dream is to unaccidentally kill six million Jews.

Perhaps the claim that helpless crew members were unarmed and sought no confrontation with Israeli soldiers would ring truer if the Mavi Marmara hadn’t been stocked with butcher knives and heavy baton-shaped pipes and sticks.

Notwithstanding Pat Buchanan’s idiotic comparison of the ship’s passengers to civil rights protestors, and Israel’s stopping the flotilla to a garden-variety carjacking, Israel is not indiscriminately lobbing cannonballs into Gaza-bound aid ships and sinking them, or raiding them for loot and hostages, Somali pirate-style.

Firing on these “aid” ships that pro-Palestinian groups keep using to try to break Israel’s blockade would actually be justifiable, given that such groups are forever trying to sneak steel, concrete, and other weapons supplies to Gaza for the purpose of constructing more rockets to fire into neighboring Israeli cities.

Instead of reacting as, say, the United States would have if Germany or Japan had tried to break its naval blockade during World War II, the Israeli Navy patiently sends multiple radio warnings to ships entering the blockade zone and gently escorts them to a nearby port, where they inspect the ships, separate any items constituting genuine aid from those that could be used to build weapons, and offer to truck the permitted goods to Gaza at Israel’s cost.

The delivery of confiscated aid to Gaza is invariably turned away.

For example, Israel allowed the Rachel Corrie, a ship named after a dumb American from the hippie Northwest who was crushed to death after she stood in the way of IDF bulldozers clearing the way for Israeli settlements, to dock in the port Ashdod last Saturday, and offered to inspect its cargo after the passengers did not engage in murderous resistance.  The Rachel Corrie held only 11 passengers and, for once, was sponsored by a group that renounces violence.  Gaza’s refusal to accept the aid confiscated by Israel disproves pro-Hamas activists’ lie that Israel is a ruthless, bloodthirsty military state out to slaughter human rights activists and prevent vital aid from getting to starving Gazans.

The United States supports the blockade, which Israel instituted after years of suicidally tolerating aid ships delivering contraband to Gaza and Hamas’s ongoing offensive in which they have fired thousands of rockets into Israel’s most populous cities.

As with all too many international affairs, it looks as though the United States and Israel will have to go this one alone.  Even in the U.S., Israel has its detractors, such as the editorial board at the New York Times, which planted the following anti-Israeli zingers in a pseudo-balanced editorial last weekend: “Turkey is understandably furious about Israel’s disastrous attack on the Turkish-flagged aid ship that tried to run the Gaza blockade…  Israel deserves to be criticized for the flotilla disaster…  [Israel] has a strong interest in repairing relations with Turkey [but] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still doesn’t get this.”

Imagine for a second if Staten Island were populated by trigger-happy terrorists who repeatedly stated as their goal the destruction of Manhattan and the tossing of all Manhattanites into the Hudson River.  Imagine if Staten Islanders had a history of smuggling in weapons-building materials from ships sent from: Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and upstate New York.  Imagine if Staten Islanders periodically launched thousands of rockets into the center of Manhattan.  Imagine if Mayor Bloomberg shipped thousands of tons of aid to Staten Island every day, to appease the New York Times, but instituted a naval blockade around Staten Island to prevent weapons from being sent there.

Now imagine if pro-Staten Islander phony aid ships repeatedly violated the blockade, filling its passenger lists with homicidal jihadists, deadly weapons, and a few token peace activists, and refused all offers for genuine humanitarian aid to be trucked to Staten Island and distributed at Manhattan’s expense.

I think there would be just a bit more sympathy toward Manhattan’s taking steps to defend itself—even at The Times.

Here’s a suggestion to pro-Hamas groups: how about calling the next phony relief vessel to Gaza the Yasser Arafat?  How do you think that would go over on the world stage?  After all, Arafat was a humanitarian Nobel Prize laureate!

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