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Liberman Says He Won’t Join Netanyahu Coalition: Tamar Pileggi & Stuart Winer, Times of Israel, May 4, 2015 — Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said his Yisrael Beytenu would not join a new coalition with the ruling Likud party, throwing a wrench in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to form a government days before a looming deadline.
The New Government’s Greatest Tasks: Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 23, 2015—In testimony last week before the House committee in charge of State Department funding, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power acknowledged that the Obama administration intends to abandon the US’s 50 year policy of supporting Israel at the United Nations.
The Emergency: John Podhoretz, Commentary, May 1, 2015 — We have entered a state of emergency.
War With Iran: Lee Smith, Tablet, Apr. 20, 2015 — Ever since it announced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran last month, the Obama administration has flooded the news media with technical details elaborating the many virtues of the proposed framework agreement.
Unravel the Deal: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Apr. 20, 2015
Congress Must Approve of Any Iran Deal: Sen. Ted Cruz, Washington Times, Apr. 29, 2015
Focus on North Korea to Stop Iran: John Bolton, New York Post, Apr. 30, 2015
Iran Won't Give Up on Its Revolution: Soner Cagaptay, James F. Jeffrey & Mehdi Khalaji, New York Times, Apr. 26, 2015
LIBERMAN SAYS HE WON’T JOIN NETANYAHU COALITION
Tamar Pileggi & Stuart Winer
Times of Israel, May 4, 2015
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said his Yisrael Beytenu would not join a new coalition with the ruling Likud party, throwing a wrench in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to form a government days before a looming deadline. Liberman, who also announced he would resign as foreign minister, said that he chose to be in the opposition rather that serve in a government that he called opportunist, conformist and not “nationalistic.”
“We have come to a unanimous decision that it would not be right for us to join the coalition,” Liberman said during a press conference in the Knesset in which he announced his decision. “We chose our principles over cabinet seats.” The announcement puts Netanyahu in a corner as he attempts to cobble together a government before a May 7 deadline. Yisrael Beytenu’s six seats were thought key to bolstering Netanyahu’s nascent government, which may now have to rule with a razor-thin 61-seat majority. Netanyahu has thus far signed coalition agreements only with the Kulanu and United Torah Judaism factions, giving him 46 seats. He is considered close to closing deals with Jewish Home and Shas to give him a majority.
Liberman said that the prime minister’s Likud party made concessions in coalition agreements with other parties that Yisrael Beytenu could not accept. “The Jewish-state Bill was so important in the last Knesset – suddenly no one is talking about it,” he said, referring to the controversial legislation proposed last year that would enshrine Israel as a Jewish state. Liberman further criticized Netanyahu for his weak stance toward terrorism, and charged that the future government “had no intention of uprooting Hamas in Gaza.”
The comments echoed ones made by Liberman over the summer that exposed a rift between him and Netanyahu. The two ran together under a joint list in the 2013 election. Liberman also lamented that the future government would likely not permit the building of new homes in the major settlement blocs. In recent weeks, Liberman has criticized Netanyahu’s concessions to ultra-Orthodox parties on the issues of conversion and recruitment to the IDF.
Both issues are important to the electorate of Yisrael Beytenu, which is largely composed of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Liberman also accused Netanyahu of planning a coalition reshuffle in the future, predicting that the prime minister would bring the Labor Party into the government after it holds a primary election next year.
THE NEW GOVERNMENT’S GREATEST TASKS
Caroline Glick
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 23, 2015
In testimony last week before the House committee in charge of State Department funding, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power acknowledged that the Obama administration intends to abandon the US’s 50 year policy of supporting Israel at the United Nations. After going through the tired motions of pledging support for Israel, “when it matters,” Power refused to rule out the possibility that the US would support anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council to limit Israeli sovereignty and control to the lands within the 1949 armistice lines – lines that are indefensible. Such a move will be taken, she indicated, in order to midwife the establishment of a terrorist-supporting Palestinian state whose supposedly moderate leadership does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, calls daily for its destruction, and uses the UN to delegitimize the Jewish state.
In other words, the Obama administration intends to pin Israel into indefensible borders while establishing a state committed to its destruction. In about a week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s new government will be sworn in. The new government will have no grace period before it will be called upon to forge and implement policies to lead Israel through perhaps the most trying time in its history. Clearly, developing the means to cope with our deteriorating relations with the US is one of the most urgent issues on the agenda. But it is not the only issue requiring the attention of our leaders.
Israel must quickly determine clear strategies for contending with the consequence of US’s strategic shift away from its allies, Iran’s nuclear project. It must also determine the principles that will guide its moves in contending with the regional instability engulfing or threatening to engulf our Arab neighbors. As tempting as it may be to believe that all we need to do is wait out Obama, the fact is that we have no way of knowing how the US will behave once he has left office. The Democratic Party has become far more radical under Obama’s leadership than it was before he came into office. Hillary Clinton may very well become the next president, particularly if Jeb Bush is the Republican nominee. And she has evinced no significant interest in moving the party back to the center.
As secretary of state during Obama’s first term in office, Clinton was a full partner in his foreign policy. Although she appears less ideologically driven than Obama, there are many indications that her basic world view is the same as his. Moreover, the world has changed since 2009. The Middle East is far more volatile and lethal. The US military is far less capable than it was before Obama slashed its budgets, removed its most successful commanders and subjected its troops to morale-destroying mantras of diversity and apologetics for Islamic terrorism.
In light of these changed circumstances, there are in essence two major principles that should guide our leaders today. First, we need to reduce our strategic dependence on the US. Second, we need to expand our policy of openly and unapologetically making the case for our positions to the American public. On the first score, the need to limit our dependence on US security guarantees became painfully obvious during Operation Protective Edge last summer. Obama’s interference in military-to-military cooperation between the Defense Ministry and the Pentagon, and his decision to implement an unofficial arms embargo on Israel in the middle of a war, was a shocking rebuke to the powerful voices inside the IDF General Staff and in policy circles that Israel can and must continue to trust the US to back it up in crises.
Our need to limit our dependence on the US to the greatest practicable degree will have consequences on everything from our domestic military production and development industries to intelligence and operational cooperation with the US and other governments. It is imperative as well that we develop a plan to wean ourselves off of US military aid within the next three-five years. Netanyahu’s critics continue to attack him for his decision to abandon the longstanding policy of settling disputes with the US administration through quiet diplomacy. They blame Netanyahu’s decision to publicly air Israel’s opposition to Obama’s nuclear diplomacy for the crisis in relations. But they are confusing cause and effect. Netanyahu had no choice.
Obama has made clear through both word and deed that he is completely committed to a policy of reaching a détente with Iran by enabling Iran to join the nuclear club. He will not voluntarily abandon this policy, which his closest aides have acknowledged is the signature policy of his second term. Under these circumstances, it has long been clear that quiet diplomacy gets Israel nowhere. Open confrontation with the administration is the only way that Israel can hope to limit the damage the administration’s policies can cause. By publicly laying out its positions on issues in dispute, Israel can provide administration critics with legitimacy and maneuver room in their own critiques of Obama’s policies.
The public debate in the US regarding Obama’s policy of appeasing Iran was transformed by Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress last month. Before he came to town, most of the voices in the US warning against Obama’s nuclear diplomacy were dismissed as alarmist. Netanyahu’s speech changed the discourse in the US in a fundamental way.
Today, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is highly controversial and unpopular. And this brings us to the second burning issue the next government will need to contend with immediately upon entering office: Iran.
Since word of Iran’s nuclear weapons program got out more than a decade ago, Israel has operated under the assumption that a sufficient number of members of the policy community in Washington were committed to a policy of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to make the abandonment of that policy politically impossible. Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program has centered on convincing those policy-makers to take action, whether through sanctions on Iran or through other means that would make it impossible for Obama to conclude a deal with Iran that would give the nuclear program an American seal of approval.
In recent weeks, we have seen the collapse of that assumption. The Senate’s feckless handling of Obama’s nuclear accommodation of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism exposed Israel’s operating assumption as overly optimistic. So the policy must be updated. An updated policy must be based on two understandings. First, the US will not stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Second, due to Obama’s commitment to nuclear accommodation of Iran, at this point unless Iran’s nuclear installations are destroyed through military force, it will become a nuclear power. Israel’s survival will be compromised and a nuclear arms race throughout the region will ensue.
Given this reality, Israel’s public diplomacy should no longer be viewed as a means to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Rather, Israel should view it as a means to empower American lawmakers and others to stand with Israel in the event that it carries out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons. Open support for Israel by the US public and by politicians and media organs will make it more difficult for the administration to harm Israel in retribution for such action…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
John Podhoretz
Commentary, May 1, 2015
We have entered a state of emergency. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that effectively serve the purposes of one of America’s greatest foes and treat one of America’s dearest friends as though it were an adversary. The White House has implicitly taken up the cause of normalizing Iran and has become at the very least complicit in the international goal of isolating Israel.
Barack Obama has decided the key to his legacy is a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will enshrine its nuclear capacity but delay its ability to build and deploy a bomb for a time—that is, assuming Iran doesn’t cheat, which is an assumption that requires a leap of geopolitical faith Blaise Pascal would have blanched at. Meanwhile, 970 miles from Tehran, the State of Israel finds itself the unwanted focus of another Obama legacy effort: the effort to drive a wedge between the two countries and thereby realign America’s interests in the Middle East away from Israel’s interests.
In making clear his desire to establish a working relationship with a nation that does not abide by any standards of civilized conduct, a nation that oppresses in medieval fashion at home and that is the worst state sponsor of terrorism abroad, the president is tacitly accepting the everyday behavior and casting a blind eye on the plain language of one of the world’s most monstrous regimes.
“There is a practical streak to the Iranian regime,” the president told Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times on April 5. “There [is] an appetite among the Iranian people for a rejoining with the international community, an emphasis on the economics and the desire to link up with a global economy. And so what we’ve seen over the last several years, I think, is the opportunity for those forces within Iran that want to break out of the rigid framework that they have been in for a long time to move in a different direction. It’s not a radical break, but it’s one that I think offers us the chance for a different type of relationship.”
The overall purpose here is to remake the geopolitical map and include Iran among the nations with which we can and should do business. From this perspective, Iran’s systematic record of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and its role as the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism are not bugs but features: Iran is important not only because it is an oil-rich state with religious and ideological ambitions, but also because it has set itself against the United States and the West. And so it must be attended to, its concerns taken seriously, its desires and wishes accorded respect. In Obama’s view, it is with adversaries that America must enmesh itself to find some form of common ground.
This theory has governed most of the Obama administration’s foreign-policy approaches over the past six years, from the Russian reset to the opening to Cuba. The corollary is that little or no positive attention needs to be paid to allies, especially if those allies are inconveniently situated either geographically or ideologically. Thus, in 2009, Obama had no problem abrogating the long-standing deal to put missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, even though they are two stalwart friends of the United States, because they interfered with his efforts to improve the American relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Even those countries that we should not call our friends but with which many of our national interests align are to be consigned to the second ring of concern. Thus, while the president speaks gently of Iran and draws parallels between its politics and ours—it is a “complicated country,” he said to Friedman, “just as America is a complicated country”—he offers systematic criticism of the internal dynamics of the Sunni Arab nations in the Middle East that have expressed alarm over the thaw: “I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.”
The Obama policy of behaving high-handedly toward friends and charitably toward foes is most striking in the case of the State of Israel. The president and his people speak with barely disguised disgust about the policies of a friendly government and rough election-day tactics in a vibrant democracy in which 72.3 percent of those eligible to vote did so. They talk of revisiting the relationship with Israel, reevaluating it—all of which is code-speak for withdrawing American protection from Israel in the international bodies that wish to do it injury. It was not mere chance that these two legacy policies converged in the month of March 2015. Something more sinister was at work.
The results of Israel’s election on March 17 were disappointing to the president and his team, given how tirelessly they had worked to undermine the eventually victorious Netanyahu. A key Obama campaign aide named Jeremy Bird had been dispatched to the Holy Land to manage a get-out-the-vote group called V15 whose sole campaign message was “Anyone But Bibi.” In the end, Netanyahu’s Likud party garnered 30 seats, as opposed to the 18 seats it had won just two years earlier—a result that has to be seen as a conscious rebuke of Obama’s effort to unseat the Israeli prime minister. In choosing not to reject Netanyahu but to strengthen him, Israelis effectively endorsed the views of Obama’s most dangerous critic—the only democratically elected leader on earth who might find it necessary to act drastically to save his country in a way that would scuttle Obama’s vision for the future of the Middle East.
Netanyahu has made it clear that he cannot stand by while a course is charted to a future in which Iran can build and deploy a nuclear weapon, given that its millenarian leaders have vowed to wipe Israel off the map. But under the terms of the strange April 2 agreement-with-Iran-that-is-not-really-an-agreement—terms we know the president had already conceded well before the Israeli elections on March 17—Obama has effectively endorsed a future in which Iran will have the power and the means to do exactly that…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Apr. 20, 2015
Ever since it announced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran last month, the Obama administration has flooded the news media with technical details elaborating the many virtues of the proposed framework agreement. Indeed, the White House sent its energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, onto the Sunday shows to helpfully explain the knotty fine points that are likely to be lost on laymen—or anyone who doesn’t celebrate its signal accomplishment.
If you don’t think it’s a good deal, said CIA director John Brennan, you don’t know the facts. The science is in! But like it does with so much else, the White House is using “science” as a smokescreen to obscure its failure in Lausanne. John Kerry and the American negotiating team were supposed to lock down not technical details but political arrangements, like the pace of sanctions relief and inspectors’ access to Iranian nuclear sites. None of these issues has been resolved—nor, says Iran, will it accept White House demands.
As the deans of American foreign policy, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, wrote last week in an important Wall Street Journal article: “Debate regarding technical details of the deal has thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications.” It’s time then to look at the bigger picture that the proposed deal points to—a new Cold War.
Advocates of the deal make Panglossian assumptions about the nature of the Iranian regime. As Kissinger and Shultz note, to some, a deal would represent “a moderation of Iran’s 3½ decades of militant hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East.” That’s a pipedream. Iran now boasts of controlling four Arab capitals. Tehran and its allies have fomented war throughout the Middle East, from Beirut and Damascus to Baghdad and Sanaa. The White House’s coordination with Iran in the campaign against ISIS hardly conceals the fact that Iran is targeting American allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia, and now Jordan.
Some argue, write Kissinger and Shultz, that “the nuclear deal is a way station toward the eventual domestic transformation of Iran.” The opposite is true. Domestically, a deal strengthens the hardliners who actually manage the nuclear weapons program. “Some advocates,” Kissinger and Shultz explain, “have suggested that the agreement can serve as a way to dissociate America from Middle East conflicts.” But this is not what happens when a state goes nuclear. Rather, such a state only becomes a bigger threat.
Right now, that means primarily in the Middle East—from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. An Iranian bomb will push Riyadh to acquire one as well, setting off a nuclear arms race that may come to include the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan. Accordingly, the regional Sunni-Shia conflagration now embroiling Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon will be funded and fought by two or more nuclear powers.
As a nuclear power, Iran will find new friends eager to sign on to its project of challenging the established order—an order underwritten by American power. In effect, an Iranian bomb will engender another empire in thrall to evil. Tehran has already seeded assets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment contends that within a year, the Iranians will have a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.
The White House argues that the only alternative to its terrible deal is war, but that’s nonsense. Iran has no ability to make war on the United States except as a continuation of the terrorist war it has been waging against us for the last 36 years. As the former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak and Senator Tom Cotton have argued, the White House is overstating both the nature of the military strike that would bring Iran’s program to a halt and Iran’s capacity to retaliate.
But all that changes once Iran gets the bomb. At that point, as Kissinger and Shultz know only too well, we must contend with the prospect that they will use it. A similar prospect caused the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in a high-stakes struggle on four continents for nearly half a century. Obama’s foreign policy legacy, enshrined by a deal that opens the door to an Iranian nuke, wouldn’t be a historic reconciliation with an adversarial regime, but a return to the nightmare of the Cold War.
Unravel the Deal: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Apr. 20, 2015—What is to be done about Obama’s Iran “deal”? We could, fatalistically, lament the collapse of American foreign policy.
Congress Must Approve of Any Iran Deal: Sen. Ted Cruz, Washington Times, Apr. 29, 2015—Today, there is no greater threat to U.S. national security than the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
Focus on North Korea to Stop Iran: John Bolton, New York Post, Apr. 30, 2015 —Recent Chinese estimates of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons capabilities should have shattered our complacency about Pyongyang’s proliferation threat.
Iran Won't Give Up on Its Revolution: Soner Cagaptay, James F. Jeffrey & Mehdi Khalaji, New York Times, Apr. 26, 2015 —The announcement last month of a preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran has led some to believe that Tehran will now enter the international system as a responsible actor. But such optimism ignores the fact that Iran’s current government still bears the imprint of a long imperial history and longstanding Persian regional ambitions.
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