Tag Archives: Turkey

Erdogan and Assad at War

Why is the Turkish government acting so aggressively against the Assad regime in Syria?

Perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes that lobbing artillery shells into Syria will help bring a satellite government to power in Damascus. Maybe he expects that sending a Turkish war plane into Syrian air space or forcing down a Syrian civilian plane en route from Russia will win him favor in the West and bring in NATO to intervene. Conceivably, it’s all a grand diversion from an imminent economic crisis due to borrowing too much.

Erdogan’s actions fit into a context going back a half-century. During the Cold War, Ankara stood with Washington as a member of NATO while Damascus served as the Cuba of the Middle East, a highly reliable client state for Moscow. Bad Turkish-Syrian relations also havelocal sources, including a border dispute, disagreement over water resources, and Syrian backing of the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group. The two states reached the brink of war in 1998, but the Assad government’s timely capitulation averted armed conflict.

A new era began in November 2002 when Erdogan’s AKP, a clever Islamist party that avoids terrorism and global-caliphate rants, replaced the center-right and -left parties that long had dominated Ankara. Governing competently and overseeing an unprecedented economic boom, the AKP saw its share of the electorate grow from one-third in 2002 to one-half in 2011. It was on track to achieving Erdogan’s presumed goal of undoing the Ataturk revolution and bringing sharia to Turkey.

Feeling its oats, the AKP abandoned Washington’s protective umbrella and struck out on an independent neo-Ottoman course, aiming to be a regional power as in centuries past. With regard to Syria, this meant ending decades-old hostilities and winning influence through good trade and other relations, symbolized by joint military exercises, Erdogan and Bashar Assad vacationing together, and a bevy of their ministers literally raising the barrier that had closed their mutual border.

These plans started unraveling in January 2011 when the Syrian people woke from 40 years of Assad despotism and agitated, at first nonviolently, then violently, for the overthrow of their tyrant. Erdogan initially offered constructive political advice to Assad, which the latter rebuffed in favor of violent repression. In response, the Sunni Erdogan emotionally denounced the Alawi Assad and began assisting the largely Sunni rebel forces. As the conflict became more ruthless, sectarian, and Islamist, effectively becoming a Sunni-Alawi civil war, with 30,000 dead, many times that number injured, and even more displaced, Turkish refuge and aid became indispensable to the rebels.

It is now clear that initially seemed like a masterstroke was in fact Erdogan’s first major misstep. His jailing of much of the Turkish military leadership on the basis of outlandish conspiracy theories has left him with a less-than-effective fighting force. Unwelcome Syrian refugees have crowded into Turkish border towns and beyond. Turks overwhelmingly oppose the war policy vis-à-vis Syria, with especially powerful opposition coming from the Alevis, a religious community making up 15 to 20 percent of Turkey’s population, distinct from Syria’s Alawis but sharing a Shiite heritage with them. Assad took revenge by reviving support for the PKK, whose escalating violence creates a major domestic problem for Erdogan. Indeed, Kurds – who missed their chance when the Middle East was carved up after World War I – may be the major winners from the current hostilities; for the first time, the outlines of a Kurdish state with Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and even Iranian components can be imagined.

Damascus still has a great patron in Moscow, where the government of Vladimir Putin offers its assistance via armaments and United Nations vetoes. Plus, Assad benefits from unstinting, brutal Iranian aid, which continues despite the mullah regime’s deep economic problems. In contrast, Ankara may still belong, formally, to NATO and enjoy the theoretical privilege of its famous Article 5, which promises that a military attack on one member country will lead to “such action as . . . necessary, including the use of armed force,” but NATO heavyweights show no intention of intervening in Syria.

A decade of success went to Erdogan’s head, tempting him into a Syrian misadventure that could undermine his popularity. He might yet learn from his mistakes and backtrack, but for now the padishah of Ankara is doubling down on his jihad against the Assad regime, driving hard for its collapse and his salvation.

To answer my opening question: Turkish bellicosity results primarily from one man’s ambition and ego. Western states should stay completely away and let him be hoist with his own petard.

– Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Originally published at National Review

Israel faces the cynical world

This week a German doctor in Bavaria filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg.

Rabbi Goldberg’s “crime”? He performs ritual circumcisions on Jewish male infants in accordance with Jewish law.

The doctor’s complaint came shortly after a ruling by a court in Cologne outlawing the practice of male circumcision.

The Austrians and the Swiss also took the ruling to heart and have banned infant male circumcision in several hospitals in Switzerland as well as in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Denmark and Scandinavian governments are also considering limiting the practice of circumcision which has constituted one of the foundational rituals of Judaism for four thousand years.

Meanwhile, in Norway Dr. Anne Lindboe has come up with the perfect way out of the artificial crisis. Lindboe serves a Norway’s ombudsman for children’s rights. And she proposes that we Jews just change our religion to satisfy anti-Jewish sensitivities. She suggests we replace circumcision with “a symbolic, nonsurgical ritual.”

It’s worth mentioning that circumcision isn’t the only Jewish ritual these enlightened Europeans find objectionable. Sweden, Norway and Switzerland have already banned kosher slaughter.

Attacking circumcision isn’t just a European fetish. The urge to curb Jewish religious freedom has reached the US as well. Last year San Francisco’s Jewish Community Relations Council had to sue the city to strike a measure from last November’s ballot that would have banned circumcision if passed. The measure’s sponsor gathered the requisite 12,000 signatures to enter the proposition on the ballot. Circumcising males under the age of 18 would have been classified as a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Sponsors of the measure distributed anti-Semitic materials depicting rabbis performing circumcisions as villains.

The people involved in banning or attempting to ban circumcision are not on the political fringe of their societies. They are part of a leftist establishment. They are doctors and lawyers, judges and politicians. This doesn’t mean that all their fellow leftists are anti-Semites. But it does mean the political Left in the Western world feels comfortable keeping company with anti-Semites.

This state of affairs is even more striking in international affairs than in domestic politics. On the international level the Left’s readiness to rub elbows with anti-Semites has reached critical levels.

While the Europeans have long been happy to cater to the anti-Semitic whims of the Islamic world, the escalation of the West’s willingness to accept anti-Semitism as a governing axiom in international affairs is nowhere more apparent than in the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

And the American Left’s willingness – particularly the American Jewish Left’s willingness – to cover up the administration’s collusion with anti- Semitic regimes at Israel’s expense is higher today than ever before.

A clear-cut example of both the Obama administration’s willingness to adhere to anti- Semitic policies of anti-Semitic governments and the Left’s willingness to defend this bigoted behavior is the Obama administration’s decision not to invite Israel to participate in its new Global Counterterrorism Forum.

The GCTF was founded with the stated aim of fostering international cooperation in fighting terrorism. But for the Obama administration, it was more important to make Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, who supports the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups, feel comfortable, than it was to invite Israel to participate.

Not only did the US exclude Israel, at the GCTF’s meeting last month in Spain, Maria Otero, the State Department’s under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, seemed to embrace the Muslim world’s obscene claim that Israelis are not victims of terrorism because terrorism against Israel isn’t terrorism.

In her speech, titled “Victims of Terrorism,” Otero spoke of terror victims in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, India and the US. But she made no mention of Israeli terror victims.

Rather than criticize the administration for its decision to appease bigots at the expense of their victim, American Jewish leftists have defended the administration. Writing in The Atlantic, Zvika Kreiger, senior vice president of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, wrote that allowing the Jewish state entry to the GCTF parley would have “undermined the whole endeavor.”

Kreiger sympathetically quoted a State Department official who explained that actually, by ostracizing Israel the administration was helping Israel.

The source “reasoned the progress made by the organization would ultimately better serve Israel’s interests (not to mention those of the United States) than would the symbolic benefits of including it in a group that likely wouldn’t accomplish anything. [Moreover]… once the organization was up and running, and its agenda was established, they could find ways to include Israel that would not be disruptive.”

So despite the fact that Israel is a major target of terrorism, and despite the fact that many of the states the US invited to its forum condone terrorism against Israel and support terrorist groups that murder Israeli Jews, Israel is better off being excluded, because the anti-Jewish governments invited by the Obama administration will somehow totally change their perspective on anti-Jewish terrorism as long as they don’t have to suffer the irritation of sitting in the same room as real-live representatives of the Jewish state.

THE CYNICISM of the State Department official’s statement to Kreiger is only outpaced by Kreiger’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that cynicism.

Kreiger’s behavior makes sense. If he acknowledges the bigoted nature of the Obama administration’s policies he will have to stop defending them.

To a degree, Kreiger’s willingness to defend and justify the Obama administration’s anti-Israel behavior parallels the behavior of Israelis who argue against Israel unilaterally striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to delay the Iranian regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Since 2003, when Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the world community, Iran’s leaders have succeeded in convincing world leaders that Israel is No. 1 on their target list. And so, the international debate about what a nuclear-armed Iran will mean for the world has always followed the Iranians’ lead and centered on the dangers it would pose to Israel.

Israel’s leaders from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon down to the last governmental spokesman have maintained that Iran’s nuclear program threatens the entire Free World. Sharon – like his leftist disciples today – claimed that given the threat Iran’s nuclear program constitutes for global security, Israel has no reason to lead the global fight to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Indeed, Israeli leadership of the campaign against Iran’s nuclear program would cause some countries to do nothing because they hate Israel even more than they fear Iran.

Like his followers today, Sharon insisted that the US, as the leader of the Free World, is responsible for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And they are right. Iran’s nuclear program does threaten global security and Iran’s nuclear program does threaten the US specifically. Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei just ordered his troops to carry out terror attacks against the US in retaliation for US moves to overthrow Iran’s Syrian puppet Bashar Assad. Iran was the principle sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and remains the principle supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It’s not that Israel’s leaders belittle the threat Iran’s nuclear weapons program constitutes for Israel. Across the spectrum on the Iran debate in Israel – from former Mossad director Meir Dagan and President Shimon Peres on the Left to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the Right – everyone agrees that in light of the Iranian regime’s religious fanaticism and its millenarian belief that Armageddon will hearken the coming of the Shi’ite messiah, Iran cannot be trusted not to use nuclear weapons against Israel.

Everyone admits that given Iran’s open sponsorship of terrorism, it is a certainty that terror groups would use the Iranian nuclear umbrella to massively expand their terrorist war against Israel.

Just as Dagan, Peres and their associates share Netanyahu’s assessment of the threat Iran’s nuclear program poses for Israel, Netanyahu agrees with their assessment that Israel’s options for contending militarily with Iran’s nuclear program are limited and imperfect. No one argues that Israel has a magic bullet to destroy Iran’s nuclear project.

Netanyahu and Barak have repeatedly warned that Israel has no perfect strike option. They have also warned that a response from Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon to an Israeli strike will likely be harsh and deadly. All they say is that it is better than the alternative of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The doves agree with Netanyahu that a limited Israeli strike is better than the alternative of a nuclear-armed Iran. They differ with Netanyahu on only one issue: their assessment of the US’s willingness to use military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Voicing the doves’ assessment of the Obama administration and Europe, this week former commander of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Aharon Zeevi Farkash told NBC news, “I think Western leaders realize a nuclear Iran is the No. 1 challenge facing the world.”

Unfortunately, Farkash is wrong. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, made this point earlier this week in an interview from Afghanistan. There Dempsey said frankly, “Israel sees the Iranian threat more seriously than the US sees it, because a nuclear Iran poses a threat to Israel’s very existence.”

In other words, Dempsey told us that Iran’s cynical packaging of its nuclear program as an anti-Israel initiative has worked. The Americans – and the Europeans – believe that Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s problem to deal with. The Israelis are right that as the leader of the Free World it is the US’s responsibility to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But as Dempsey’s statement shows, the US is not interested in fulfilling its responsibility.

Like the Europeans, the Americans will only act when Iran forces them to do so. And that means they will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing the bomb. They will only move when Tehran has already crossed Israel off the top of its target list.

Israeli opponents of an Israeli strike against Iran don’t want to believe that Americans are capable of such cynicism. They would like to believe that the only government capable of behaving cynically is their own. They want to believe that the US – with its vastly superior military capabilities to destroy Iran’s nuclear program – will do the right thing and not leave it to Israel – with its limited means – to take care of the problem for a cynical world.

But just as Kreiger’s defense of the Obama administration’s courtship of anti-Semites at Israel’s expense crosses the line separating naivete from willful, bigotry-enabling blindness, so Peres, Dagan and their colleagues cross the line. And it is not mere bigotry they are enabling.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Who ‘Lost’ Egypt?

In 1949, the Communist takeover of China rattled the US foreign policy establishment to its core. China’s fall to Communism was correctly perceived as a massive strategic defeat for the US. The triumphant Mao Zedong placed China firmly in the Soviet camp and implemented foreign policies antithetical to US interests.

For the American foreign policy establishment, China’s fall forced a reconsideration of basic axioms of US foreign policy. Until China went Red, the view resonant among foreign policy specialists was that it was possible for the US to peacefully coexist and even be strategic allies with Communists.

With Mao’s embrace of Stalin this position was discredited. The US’s subsequent recognition that it was impossible for America to reach an accommodation with Communists served as the intellectual architecture of many of the strategies the US adopted for fighting the Cold War in the years that followed.

Today the main aspect of America’s response to China’s Communist revolution that is remembered is the vindictive political hunt for scapegoats. Foreign Service officers and journalists who had advised the US government to support Mao and the Communists against Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists were attacked as traitors.

But while the “Red Scare” is what is most remembered about that period, the most significant consequence of the rise of Communist China was the impact it had on the US’s understanding of the nature of Communist forces. Even Theodore White, perhaps the most prominent journalist who championed Mao and the Communists, later acknowledged that he had been duped by their propaganda machine into believing that Mao and his comrades were interested in an alliance with the US.

As Joyce Hoffmann exposed in her book Theodore White and Journalism as Illusion, White acknowledged that his wartime report from Mao’s headquarters in Yenan praising the Communists as willing allies of the US who sought friendship, “not as a beggar seeks charity, but seeks aid in furthering a joint cause,” was completely false.

As he wrote, the report was “winged with hope and passion that were entirely unreal.”

What he had been shown in Yenan, Hoffmann quotes White as having written, was “the showcase of democratic art pieces they (the Communists) staged for us American correspondents [and] was literally, only showcase stuff.”

Contrast the US’s acceptance of failure in China in 1949, and its willingness to learn the lessons of its loss of China, with the US’s denial of its failure and loss of Egypt today.

On Sunday, new President Mohamed Morsy completed Egypt’s transformation into an Islamist state. In the space of one week, Morsy sacked the commanders of the Egyptian military and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists, and fired all the editors of the state-owned media and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists.

He also implemented a policy of intimidation, censorship and closure of independently owned media organizations that dare to publish criticism of him.

Morsy revoked the military’s constitutional role in setting the foreign and military policies of Egypt. But he maintained the junta’s court-backed decision to disband the parliament. In so doing, Morsy gave himself full control over the writing of Egypt’s new constitution.

As former ambassador to Egypt Zvi Mazel wrote Tuesday in The Jerusalem Post, Morsy’s moves mean that he “now holds dictatorial powers surpassing by far those of erstwhile president Hosni Mubarak.”

In other words, Morsy’s actions have transformed Egypt from a military dictatorship into an Islamist dictatorship.

The impact on Egypt’s foreign policy of Morsy’s seizure of power is already becoming clear. On Monday, Al-Masri al-Youm quoted Mohamed Gadallah, Morsy’s legal adviser, saying that Morsy is considering revising the peace accord with Israel. Gadallah explained that Morsy intends to “ensure Egypt’s full sovereignty and control over every inch of Sinai.”

In other words, Morsy intends to remilitarize Sinai and so render the Egyptian military a clear and present threat to Israel’s security. Indeed, according to Haaretz, Egypt has already breached the peace accord and deployed forces and heavy weaponry to Sinai without Israeli permission.

The rapidity of Morsy’s moves has surprised most observers. But more surprising than his moves is the US response to his moves.

For instance, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, one administration official dismissed the significance of Morsy’s purge of the military brass, saying, “What I think this is, frankly, is Morsy looking for a generational change in military leadership.”

The Journal reported that Egypt’s new defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sissi, is known as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer. But the Obama administration quickly dismissed the reports as mere rumors with no significance. Sissi, administration sources told the Journal, ate dinner with US President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan during Brennan’s visit to Cairo last October. Aside from that, they say, people are always claiming that Morsy’s appointments have ties to Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood.

A slightly less rose-colored assessment came from Steven Cook in Foreign Affairs. According to Cook, at worst, Morsy’s move was probably nothing more than a present-day reenactment of Gamal Abel Nasser’s decision to move Egypt away from the West and into the Soviet camp in 1954.

Most likely, Cook argued, Morsy was simply doing what Sadat did when in 1971 he fired other generals with whom he had been forced to share power when he first succeeded Nasser in 1969.

Certainly the Nasser and Sadat analogies are pertinent. But while properly citing them, Cook failed to explain what those analogies tell us about the significance of Morsy’s actions. He drew the dots but failed to see the shape they make.

Morsy’s Islamism, like Mao’s Communism, is inherently hostile to the US and its allies and interests in the Middle East. Consequently, Morsy’s strategic repositioning of Egypt as an Islamist country means that Egypt – which has served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world for 30 years – is setting aside its alliance with the US and looking toward reassuming the role of regional bully.

Egypt is on the fast track to reinstating its war against Israel and threatening international shipping in the Suez Canal. And as an Islamist state, Egypt will certainly seek to export its Islamic revolution to other countries. No doubt fear of this prospect is what prompted Saudi Arabia to begin showering Egypt with billions of dollars in aid.

It should be recalled that the Saudis so feared the rise of a Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt that in February 2011, when US President Barack Obama was publicly ordering then-president Hosni Mubarak to abdicate power immediately, Saudi leaders were beseeching him to defy Obama. They promised Mubarak unlimited financial support for Egypt if he agreed to cling to power.

The US’s astounding sanguinity in the face of Morsy’s completion of the Islamization of Egypt is an illustration of everything that is wrong and dangerous about US Middle East policy today.

Take US policy toward Syria.

Syria is in possession of one of the largest arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in the world. The barbarism with which the regime is murdering its opponents is a daily reminder – indeed a flashing neon warning sign – that Syria’s nonconventional arsenal constitutes a clear and present danger to international security. And yet, the Obama administration insists on viewing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s murderous behavior as if it were a garden variety human rights crisis.

During her visit with Turkey’s Islamist Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last Saturday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t even mention the issue of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons. Instead she continued to back Turkey’s sponsorship of the Islamist-dominated opposition and said that the US would be working with Turkey to put together new ways to help the Islamist opposition overthrow Assad’s regime.

Among other things, she did not rule out the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria.

The party most likely to be harmed from such a move would be Israel, which would lose its ability to bomb Syrian weapons of mass destruction sites from the air.

Then of course, there is Iran and its openly genocidal nuclear weapons program. This weekThe New York Times reported a new twist in the Obama administration’s strategy for managing this threat. It is trying to convince the Persian Gulf states to accept advanced missile defense systems from the US.

This new policy makes clear that the Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Its actions on the ground are aimed instead at accomplishing two goals: convincing Iran’s Arab neighbors to accept Iran as a nuclear power and preventing Israel from acting militarily to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The missile shields are aspects of a policy of containment, not prevention. And the US’s attempts to sabotage Israel’s ability to strike Iran’s nuclear sites through leaks, political pressure and efforts to weaken the Netanyahu government make clear that as far as the US is concerned, Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not the problem.

The prospect of Israel preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the problem.

Several American commentators argue that the Obama administration’s policies are the rational consequence of the divergence of US and Israeli assessments of the threats posed by regional developments. For instance, writing in the Tablet online magazine this week, Lee Smith argued that the US does not view the developments in Egypt, Iran and Syria as threatening US interests. From Washington’s perspective, the prospect of an Israeli strike on Iran is more threatening than a nuclear-armed Iran, because an Israeli strike would immediately destabilize the region.

The problem with this assessment is that it is nonsense. It is true that Israel is first on Iran’s target list, and that Egypt is placing Israel, not the US in its crosshairs. So, too, Syria and its rogue allies will use their chemical weapons against Israel first.

But that doesn’t mean the US will be safe. The likely beneficiaries of Syrian chemical weapons – Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations – have attacked the US in the past. Iran has a history of attacking US shipping without a nuclear umbrella. Surely it would be more aggressive in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz after defying Washington in illegally developing a nuclear arsenal. The US is far more vulnerable to interruptions in the shipping lanes in the Suez Canal than Israel is.

The reason Israel and the US are allies is that Israel is the US’s first line of defense in the region.

If regional events weren’t moving so quickly, the question of who lost Egypt would probably have had its moment in the spotlight in Washington.

But as is clear from the US’s denial of the significance of Morsy’s rapid completion of Egypt’s Islamic transformation; its blindness to the dangers of Syrian chemical and biological weapons; and its complacency toward Iran’s nuclear weapons program, by the time the US foreign policy establishment realizes it lost Egypt, the question it will be asking is not who lost Egypt. It will be asking who lost the Middle East.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s American Defenders

On Wednesday, John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, made a quick trip to Israel to discuss Hezbollah’s massacre of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last week.
Hopefully it was an instructive meeting for the senior US official, although his Israeli interlocutors were undoubtedly dumbstruck by how difficult it was to communicate with him. Unlike previous US counterterror officials, Brennan does not share Israel’s understanding of Middle Eastern terrorism.
Brennan’s outlook on this subject was revealed in a speech he gave two years ago in Washington. In that talk, Brennan spoke dreamily about Hezbollah. As he put it, "Hezbollah is a very interesting organization."
He claimed it had evolved from a "purely terrorist organization" to a militia and then into an organization with members in Lebanon’s parliament and serving in Lebanon’s cabinet.
Brennan continued, "There are certainly elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern for us what they’re doing. And what we need to do is find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements."
Perhaps in a bid to build up those "moderate elements," in the same address, Brennan referred to Israel’s capital city Jerusalem as "al Quds," the name preferred by Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords.
Brennan’s amazing characterization of Hezbollah’s hostile takeover of the Lebanese government as proof that the terrorist group was moderating was of a piece with the Obama administration’s view of Islamic jihadists generally.
If there are "moderate elements," in Hezbollah, from the perspective of the Obama administration, Hezbollah’s Sunni jihadist counterpart – the Muslim Brotherhood – is downright friendly.
On February 10, 2011, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made this position clear in testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Clapper’s testimony was given the day before then Egyptian president and longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign from office. Mubarak’s coerced resignation owed largely to the Obama administration’s decision to end US support for his regime and openly demand his immediate abdication of power. As Israel warned, Mubarak’s ouster paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendance to power in Egypt.
In his testimony Clapper said, "The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc."
Watching Clapper’s testimony in Israel, the sense across the political spectrum, shared by experts and casual observers alike was that the US had taken leave of its senses.
The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is "Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the path of Allah is our highest hope." 
How could such a high-level US official claim that such an organization is "largely secular"? 
Every day Muslim Brotherhood leaders call for the violent annihilation of Israel. And those calls are often combined with calls for jihad against the US. For instance, in a sermon from October 2010, Muslim Brotherhood head Mohammed Badie called for jihad against the US. 
As he put it "Resistance [i.e. terrorism] is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it."
Badie then promised his congregants that the death of America was nigh. In his words, "A nation that does not champion moral and human values cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has had His say, as happened with [powerful] nations in the past. The US is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise."
The obliviousness of Brennan and Clapper to the essential nature of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are symptoms of the overarching ignorance informing the Obama administration’s approach to Middle Eastern realities.
Take, for instance, the Obama administration’s policy confusion over Syria. This week The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration lacks any real knowledge of the nature of the opposition forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian regime. Whereas one senior official told the paper, "We’re identifying the key leaders, and there are a lot of them. We are in touch with them and we stay in touch," another official said that is not the case.
As the latter official put it, "The folks that have been identified have been identified through Turkey and Jordan. It is not because of who we know. It’s all through liaison."
The fact that the US government is flying blind as Syria spins out of control is rendered all the more egregious when you recognize that this was not inevitable. America’s ignorance is self-inflicted.
In the 16 months that have passed since the Syrian civil war broke out, the administration passed up several opportunities to develop its own ties to the opposition and even to shape its agenda. Two examples suffice to make this clear.
First, in October 2011, according to the Beirut-based Arabic news portal al Nashra, Dalia Mogahed, Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at the White House. According to al Nashra, Mogahed canceled the meeting at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt.
The White House canceled the meeting days after Rai visited with then French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. During that meeting Rai angered the French Foreign Ministry when he warned that it would be a disaster for Syria’s Christian minority, and for Christians throughout the region, if the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is overthrown. Rai based this claim on his assessment that Assad would be replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Islamist regime.
And nine months later it is obvious that he was right. With Syria’s civil war still raging throughout the country, the world media is rife with reports about Syria’s Christians fleeing their towns and villages en masse as Islamists from the Syrian opposition target them with death, extortion and kidnapping.
Then there are the US’s peculiar choices regarding the opposition figures it favors. Last August, in a bid to gain familiarity with the Syrian opposition, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with opposition representatives at the State Department. Herb London from the Hudson Institute reported at the time that the group Clinton met with was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the non-Islamist, pro-Western Syrian Democracy Council composed of Syrian Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Druse, Assyrians and non-Islamist Sunnis were not invited to the meeting.
Clinton did reportedly agree to meet with representatives of the council separately. But unlike the press carnival at her meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood members, Clinton refused to publicize her meeting with the non-Islamist opposition leaders. In so acting, she denied these would-be US allies the ability to claim that they enjoyed the support of the US government.
The question is why? Why is the Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies? Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere? 
In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, and perhaps to cause the administration to rethink its policies, a group of US lawmakers, members of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees led by Rep. Michele Bachmann sent letters to the inspectors-general of the State, Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice departments as well as to the inspector-general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In those letters, Bachmann and her colleagues asked the Inspectors General to investigate possible penetration of the US government by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.
In their letters, and in a subsequent explanatory letter to US Rep. Keith Ellison from Rep. Bachmann, the lawmakers made clear that when they spoke of governmental penetration, they were referring to the central role that Muslim groups, identified by the US government in Federal Court as Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, play in shaping the Obama administration’s perception of and policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied movements in the US and throughout the world.
That these front groups, including the unindicted terror funding co-conspirators, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), play a key role in shaping the Obama administration’s agenda is beyond dispute. Senior administration officials including Mogahed have close ties to these groups. There is an ample body of evidence that suggests that the administration’s decision to side with the hostile Muslim Brotherhood against its allies owes to a significant degree to the influence these Muslim Brotherhood front groups and their operatives wield in the Obama administration.
To take just one example, last October the Obama administration agreed to purge training materials used by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and eliminate all materials that contained references to Islam that US Muslim groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood had claimed were offensive. The administration has also fired counterterrorism trainers and lecturers employed by US security agencies and defense academies that taught their pupils about the doctrines of jihadist Islam. The administration also appointed representatives of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned US Muslim groups to oversee the approval of training materials about Islam for US federal agencies.
For their efforts to warn about, and perhaps cause the administration to abandon its reliance on Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Bachmann and her colleagues have been denounced as racists and McCarthyites. 
These attacks have not been carried out only by administration supporters. Republican Senator John McCain denounced Bachmann from the floor of the Senate. Republican Senator Marco Rubio later piled on attacking her for her attempt to convince the administration to reconsider its policies. Those policies again place the most radical members of the US Muslim community in charge of the US government’s policies toward the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist movements.
It is clear that the insidious notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and friendly force has taken hold in US policy circles. And it is apparent that US policymaking in the Middle East is increasingly rooted in this false and dangerous assessment.
In spearheading an initiative to investigate and change this state of affairs, Bachmann and her colleagues should be congratulated, not condemned. And their courageous efforts to ask the relevant questions about the nature of Muslim Brotherhood influence over US policymakers should be joined, not spurned by their colleagues in Washington, by the media and by all concerned citizens in America and throughout the free world.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Useful Idiots

You have to hand it to the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. They know how to play power politics. They know how to acquire power. And they know how to use power.
Last Friday, the day before voters by most accounts elected the Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsy to serve as Egypt’s next president, The Wall Street Journal published a riveting account by Charles Levinson and Matt Bradley of how the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the secular revolutionaries to take control of the country’s political space.
The Brotherhood kept a very low profile in the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 that led to the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood’s absence from Tahrir Square at that time is what enabled Westerners to fall in love with the Egyptian revolution.
Those demonstrations led to the impression, widespread in the US, that Mubarak’s successors would be secular Facebook democrats. The role that Google’s young Egyptian executive Wael Gonim played in organizing the demonstrations was reported expansively. His participation in the anti-regime protests – as well as his brief incarceration – was seen as proof that the next Egyptian regime would be indistinguishable from Generation X and Y Americans and Europeans.
In their report, Levinson and Bradley showed how the Brotherhood used the secularists to overthrow the regime, and to provide them with a fig leaf of moderation through March 2011, when the public voted on the sequencing of Egypt’s post-Mubarak transformation from a military dictatorship into a populist regime. The overwhelming majority of the public voted to first hold parliamentary elections and to empower the newly elected parliament to select members of the constitutional assembly that would write Egypt’s new constitution.
As Egypt’s largest social force, the Brotherhood knew it would win the majority of the seats in the new parliament. The March 2011 vote ensured its control over writing the new Egyptian constitution.
In July 2011, the Brotherhood decided to celebrate its domination of the new Egypt with a mass rally at Tahrir Square. Levinson and Bradley explained how in the lead-up to that event Egypt’s secular revolutionaries were completely outmaneuvered.
According to their account, the Brotherhood decided to call the demonstration "Shari’a Friday." Failing to understand that the game was over, the secularists tried to regain what they thought was the unity of the anti-regime ranks from earlier in the year.
"Islamists and revolutionary leaders spent three days negotiating principles they could all support at the coming Friday demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. They reached an agreement and the revolution seemed back on track."
One secularist leader, Rabab el-Mahdi, referred to the agreement as "The perfect moment. A huge achievement." 
But then came the double cross.
"Hours before the demonstration, hard-line Salafi Islamists began adorning the square with black-andwhite flags of jihad and banners calling for the implementation of Islamic law. Ms. Mahdi made frantic calls to Brotherhood leaders, who told her there was little they could do." 
Checkmate.
THE DIFFERENCE between the Brotherhood and the secularists is a fundamental one. The Brotherhood has always had a vision of the Egypt it wants to create. It has always used all the tools at its disposal to advance the goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt.
For their part, the secularists have no ideological unity and so share no common vision of a future Egypt. They just oppose the repression of the military. Opposing repression is not a political program. It is a political act. It can destroy. It cannot rule.
So when the question arose of how to transform the protests that caused the US to abandon Mubarak and sealed the fate of his regime into a new regime, the secularists had no answer. All they could do was keep protesting military repression.
The Brotherhood has been the most popular force in Egypt for decades. Its leaders recognized that to take over the country, all they needed was the power to participate in the elections and the authority to ensure that the election results mattered – that is, control over writing the constitution. And so, once the secularists fomented Mubarak’s overthrow, their goal was to ensure their ability to participate in the elections and to ensure that the parliament would control the constitution-writing process.
To achieve these goals, they were equally willing to collaborate with the secularists against the military and with the military against the secularists. To achieve their goals they were willing – as they did before Shari’a Friday last July – to negotiate in bad faith.
While instructive, the Journal’s article fell short because the reporters failed to recognize that the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the military junta in the same way that it outmaneuvered the secularists. The article starts with the premise that the military’s decision to stage an effective coup d’etat last week spelled an end to the Egyptian revolution and the country’s reversion to the military dictatorship that has ruled the state since the 1950s.
Levinson and Bradley claim, "Following the rulings by the high court this week [which canceled the results of the parliamentary elections and ensured continued military control over the country regardless of the results of the presidential elections], the Brotherhood’s strategy of cooperation with the military seems failed."
But actually, that is not the case. By permitting the Brotherhood to participate in the elections for parliament and the presidency, the military signed the death warrant of its regime. The Brotherhood will rule Egypt. The only thing left to be determined is whether its takeover will happen quickly or slowly.
To understand why this is the case, it is important to notice what happened in Turkey. When the Islamist AKP party won the 2002 elections, the Turkish military was constitutionally authorized to control the country. As the guardians of Turkey’s secular state, Turkey’s military was constitutionally empowered to overthrow democratically elected governments.
Ten years later, Turkey is a populist, authoritarian, Islamic state. Half the general officer corps is in prison, held without charge or on trumped up charges. Turkey’s judiciary and civil service are controlled by Islamists. The AKP is filling the military’s officer corps with its loyalists.
When you know what you want, you use all the tools at your disposal to achieve your goals. When you don’t know what you want, no matter what tools you hold, you will fail to achieve your goals.
The Egyptian military today is far weaker than the Turkish military was in 2002. And it has already been outmaneuvered by the Brotherhood. The only way for it to secure its hold on power is through brute force. And the generals have already shown they are unwilling to use sufficient force to repress the Brotherhood.
The regime’s decision to outlaw the parliament and decree the military above the president was not a show of strength. It was a panicked act of desperation by a regime that knows its days are numbered. So was its decision to delay announcing the winner of the presidential elections.
When Morsy declared victory in the presidential elections on Sunday, he did so surrounded by members of the just-dissolved parliament. His act was a warning to the military. The Brotherhood will not allow the ruling to stand.
It is possible the Brotherhood will stand down in this confrontation with the military over the parliamentary election. But the military will emerge vastly weakened. And when the next round of confrontation inevitably arrives, the military will have even less clout. And so on and so forth.
THE INEVITABILITY of the Islamic takeover of Egypt means that the peace between Israel and Egypt is meaningless. Confrontation is coming. The only questions that remain are how long it will take and what form it will come in. If it happens slowly, it will be characterized by a gradual escalation of cross-border attacks from Sinai by Hamas and other jihadist groups. Hamas’s sudden eagerness to take responsibility for the mortar attacks against southern Israel as well as Monday morning’s murderous cross-border attack are signs of things to come.
With the Brotherhood ascending to power, the security cooperation Israel has received from the Egyptian security forces in Sinai is over. And the regime won’t suffice with doing nothing to stop terror. It will encourage it. Just as the Egyptian military sponsored and organized the fedayeen raids from Gaza in the 1950s, so today the regime will sponsor and eventually organize irregular attacks from Sinai and Gaza.
In the rapid-path-to-confrontation scenario, the Egyptian military itself will participate in attacks against Israel. Egyptian troops may take potshots at Israelis from across the border. They may remilitarize Sinai. They may escalate attacks against the US-commanded MFO forces in Sinai that are supposed to keep the peace with the goal of convincing them to withdraw.
Whether the confrontation happens tomorrow or in a year or two, the question of whether the military remains the titular ruler of Egypt or not is irrelevant to Israel.
In their attempt to maintain their power and privilege, the first bargaining chip the generals will sacrifice is their support for the peace with Israel. With the US siding with the Brotherhood against the military, maintaining the peace treaty has ceased to be important for the generals.
This dismal situation requires Israel’s leaders to take several steps immediately. First, our leaders must abandon their diplomatic language regarding Egypt. No point is served by not acknowledging that the southern front – dormant since 1981 – has reawakened and that Israel’s peace with Egypt is now meaningless.
Recall that it was under Mubarak’s leadership that the Egyptian media reported that the Mossad was deploying sharks as secret agents and ordering them to attack tourists along Egypt’s seacoast in an effort to destroy Egypt’s tourism industry.
Since Israel doesn’t need to actually do or say anything to cause the Egyptians to attack, we might as well be honest in our own discussion of the situation. At a minimum, frank talk will ensure that the steps we take on the ground to meet the challenge of Egypt will be based on reality and not on an attempt to ignore reality.
Straight talk is also important in the international arena. For the past 30 years, in the interest of protecting the peace treaty, Israel never defended itself against Egypt’s diplomatic assaults on its very right to exist. Now it can and must fight back with full force.
At a minimum, this will enable Israel to wage a coherent diplomatic defense of whatever military action it will eventually need to take to defend itself against Egyptian aggression.
As to that aggression, we don’t have any good options on the ground. We cannot operate openly in Sinai. If we retaliate against missile attacks with air strikes, the Brotherhood-led Egyptian government will use our defensive action to justify war. So we need to massively expand our ability to operate covertly.
Aside from that, we must equip and train our military to win a war against the US-trained and-armed Egyptian military.
However the Egyptian election results pan out, the die has been cast. We must prepare for what is coming.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Dreamy foreign policies

With her unbridled hostility towards Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton provides us with an abject lesson in what happens when a government places its emotional aspirations above its national interests.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, many of Israel’s elite have aspired to be embraced by Europe. In recent years, nearly every government has voiced the hope of one day seeing Israel join the EU.

To a significant degree, Israel’s decision to recognize the PLO in 1993 and negotiate with Yasser Arafat and his deputies was an attempt by Israel’s political class to win acceptance from the likes of Ashton and her continental comrades. For years the EU had criticized Israel for refusing to recognize the PLO.

Until 1993, Israel’s leaders defied Europe because they could tell the difference between a national interest and an emotional aspiration and preferred the former over the latter. And now, Israel’s reward for preferring European love to our national interest and embracing our sworn enemy is Catherine Ashton.

To put it mildly, Ashton is not a friend of Israel. Indeed, she is so ill-disposed against Israel that she seems unable to focus for long on anything other than bashing it. Her obsession was prominently displayed in March when she was unable to give an unqualified condemnation of the massacre of French Jewish children by a French Muslim. Ashton simply had to use her condemnation as yet another opportunity to bash Israel.

Her preoccupation with Israel was again on display on Tuesday. During a boilerplate, vacuous speech about President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his fellow Syrians, apropos of nothing the baroness launched into an unhinged, impassioned, and deeply dishonest frontal assault against Israel.

The woman US President Barack Obama has empowered to lead the West’s negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program stood at the podium in the European Parliament and threw an anti-Israel temper tantrum.

The same woman who couldn’t be bothered to finish her speech about Assad’s massacre of children, the same woman who is so excited about her Iranian negotiating partners’ body language that she doesn’t think it is necessary to give them an ultimatum about ending their quest for a nuclear bomb, seemed to lack a sufficiently harsh vocabulary to express her revulsion with Jewish “settlers.”

As she put it, “We are also seriously concerned by recent and increasing incidents of settler violence which we all condemn.”

It’s not clear what “recent and increasing incidents of settler violence” she was referring to. But in all likelihood, she didn’t have a specific incident in mind. She probably just figured that those sneaky Jews are always up to no good.

ASIDE FROM condemning imaginary Israeli crimes more emphatically than real Syrian crimes, Ashton’s speech involved a presentation of the EU’s policy on Israel and the Palestinians.

That policy is based on three premises: The EU falsely claims that all Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal.

It rejects Israel’s legal right to assert its authority over Area C – the area of Judea and Samaria that is empty of Palestinian population centers.

And it will only soften its anti-Israel positions if the Palestinians do so first.

Aside from its jaw-dropping animosity towards Israel, what is notable about the EU’s position is that it is actually far more hostile to Israel than the Palestinians’ position towards Israel as that position was revealed in the agreements that the Palestinians signed with Israel in the past. In those agreements, the Palestinians accepted continued sole Israeli control over Area C. They did not require Israel to end the construction of Jewish communities outside the 1949 armistice lines. The peace process ended when the Palestinians moved closer to the EU’s position.

The EU’s antipathy towards Israel as personified in Ashton’s behavior teaches us two important lessons. First, it is often hard to tell our friends from our foes. Israelis – particularly those born to families that emigrated from Europe – have traditionally viewed Europe as the last word in enlightened democracy and sophistication and style. We wanted to be like them. We wanted to be accepted by them.

Indeed we were so swept away by the thought that they might one day love us back that we adopted policies that were inimical to our national interest and so weakened us tremendously.

It never occurred to us that the fact that Europe insisted that we adopt policies that undercut our national survival meant that the Europeans wished us ill.

They seemed so nice.

The second thing we learn from Ashton’s anti-Israel mania is that when we engage in foreign policy, we need to base our judgments about our ability to influence the behavior of our foreign counterparts on a sober-minded assessment of two separate things: our interlocutor’s ideology and his interests. In Ashton’s case, both parameters make clear that there is no way to win her over to Israel’s side. She is ideologically opposed to Israel. And the citizens of Europe are becoming more and more hostile to Israel and to Jews.

These twin parameters for judging foreign leaders and representatives came to mind on Wednesday with the publication of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s critical report on the government’s handling of the Turkish-government supported, pro-Hamas flotilla in May 2010. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the report is that up until a week before the flotilla set sail, led by the infamous Mavi Marmara, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was under the impression that he had reached a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu believed that through third parties, including the US government and then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he had convinced Erdogan to cancel the flotilla. He had a deal.

The fact that Netanyahu thought he had a deal with Erdogan is startling and unnerving. It means that Netanyahu was willing to ignore the basic facts of Erdogan’s nature and the way that Erdogan perceives his interests, in favor of a fiction.

By May 2010 it was abundantly clear that Erdogan was not a friend of Israel. He had been in power for eight years. He had already ended Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel. In 2006, Erdogan was the first major international leader and NATO member to host Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh. His embrace of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood made clear that he was Israel’s enemy. It is a simple fact that you cannot be allied with Israel and with the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time. The same year he allowed Iran to use Turkish territory to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War.

In 2008, Erdogan openly sided with Hamas against Israel in Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, he called President Shimon Peres a murderer to his face.

By the time the flotilla was organized, Erdogan had used Turkey’s position as a NATO member to effectively end the US-led alliance’s cooperative relationship with Israel, by refusing to participate in military exercises with Israel.

THE NATURE OF the flotilla organizers was also known in the months ahead of its departure for Gaza. The IHH’s ties to al-Qaida had been documented. Netanyahu’s staff knew that the IHH was so extreme that the previous Turkish government had barred its operatives from participating in humanitarian relief efforts after the devastating 1999 earthquake. They feared the group would use its relief efforts to radicalize the local population.

In and of itself, the fact that Erdogan was openly supporting IHH’s leading role in the flotilla told Israel everything it needed to know about the Turkish leader’s intentions. And yet, up until a week before the flotilla set sail, Netanyahu was operating under the impression that he had struck a deal with Erdogan.

It is likely that Netanyahu was led to believe that a deal had been crafted by the Americans.

Obama is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional view.

According to a senior congressional source, Turkey’s success in winning over the US Congress is the result of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups, the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.

Turkey’s bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after international forum – most recently the upcoming US-hosted counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.

Certainly Turkey’s strategic transformation under Erdogan’s leadership from a pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its senses or not is its business.

Israel had no business buying into the fiction in 2010 that Erdogan could be reasoned with.

True, today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.

Ours is a dangerous world and an even more dangerous neighborhood. Everywhere we look we see cauldrons of radicalism and sophisticated weaponry waiting to explode. The threat environment Israel faces today is unprecedented.

At this time we cannot afford to be seduced by our dreams that things were different than they are. They are what they are.

We do have options in this contest. To maximize those options we need to ground our actions and assessments in clear-headed analyses and judgments of the people we are faced with. Their actions will be determined by their beliefs and their perception of their interests – not by our pretty face.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The reign of the fantasists

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has done it again. Speaking on Wednesday at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Barak warned that if Israel can’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it should consider surrendering Judea and Samaria in exchange for nothing.
Even the diehard leftists in the media had a hard time swallowing his words. After all, when Barak was premier, he oversaw Israel’s unilateral surrender of south Lebanon in 2000. Barak promised that by giving Hezbollah south Lebanon, Israel would force the Iranian proxy army to disarm and behave like a Western political party.
Whoopsie.
Then of course, there is the Gaza precedent.
Ignoring the lesson of Lebanon, Barak’s successor Ariel Sharon reenacted his unilateral surrender policy in Gaza in 2005. Like Barak, Sharon promised that once Gaza was cleared of all Jewish presence, it would magically transform itself into a Middle Eastern version of Singapore.
Whoopsie.
Both Barak and Sharon promised that their unilateral surrender policies would do more than merely transform Hezbollah and Hamas into liberal democrats. They said that by cutting and running, Israel would earn the love of the international community, and winning the love of the likes of Washington and Brussels, they said, was the most urgent item on Israel’s agenda.
Apparently Barak was referring to the same imperative when on Wednesday he said that Israel needs to act fast because, "We are on borrowed time. We will reach a wall, and we’ll pay the price."
So yes, Hezbollah has taken over not just south Lebanon, but all of Lebanon. And true, there is no one in the Palestinian Authority today who is willing to accept the continued existence of Israel in any borders. But that just means we need the West to love us even more. And the only way to get the West to love us is by imperiling our very existence by handing our heartland over to people who wish to destroy our country.
Given the high value Barak and his comrades place on winning the love of the West, it is worth considering what motivates the West – or more to the point, the US, which leads the Western world.
Unfortunately, the situation is not pretty. US President Barack Obama’s policies are just as irrational as the ones that Barak is urging Israel to implement in order to win Obama’s support. And Obama’s rationales for adopting these policies are just as divorced from reality as Barak’s are.
The place where this irrationality is displayed most prominently today is in Obama’s policy regarding Iran. As Michael Singh rightly noted on Wednesday in the New York Daily News, under Obama, US policy towards Iran is based on the view "that at the root of the Iran nuclear crisis is US-Iran conflict, and that the root cause of that conflict is mistrust."
THIS VIEW is pure fantasy. No Iranian leader has ever given the US any reason to believe that this is the case. To the contrary, every Iranian leader since the 1979 Islamic Revolution has made clear that the regime is dedicated to the destruction of the US and Israel.
The Iranians do not wish to destroy the US and Israel because they distrust them. The likes of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and all of their comrades wish to destroy Israel and the US because they hate us. They hate us because as they see it, both nations represent forces that are antithetical to their revolution’s goal of Islamic world domination.
Rather than accept this fundamental, but unpleasant truth, Obama and his advisors base their policy of engaging Iran on fairy tales about nonexistent fatwas that purportedly ruled out the development of nuclear weapons. As Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon put it delicately this week, the Iranians are "laughing all the way to a bomb."
Ya’alon explained, "During talks with world powers, the Iranians have managed to enrich 750 kilograms of uranium to 3.5 percent, and 36 kilograms of uranium to 20 percent."
And while the Iranians were enriching all that uranium, according to satellite imagery published on Wednesday by the Institute for Science and International Affairs, they were destroying buildings at the Parchin nuclear site.
The buildings in question were suspected of being used to conduct high explosive tests pertinent to the development of nuclear weapons.
And yet, despite Iran’s obvious bad faith, and despite the fact that the much-touted sanctions against Iran have done nothing to slow the pace of its sprint to the nuclear finish line, the Obama administration insists on clinging to the fantasy that it can convince the Iranians that they can trust the US and therefore convince them to give up their nuclear weapons program.
Lacking any substantive means of defending this Tinkerbell-fairy-dust policy towards the most pressing threat to international security today, the only thing the Obama administration can tell increasingly distressed Israeli leaders is that we should trust them. They know what they are doing.
Allowing Iran to go nuclear isn’t the only price Obama has been willing to pay to fulfill his fantasy of solving Iran’s conflict with the US by building trust. He is also willing to destroy any chance of Syria becoming a responsible actor on the international stage.
Obama’s willingness to sit on his thumbs for 14 months as Syrian President Bashar Assad has killed as many as 15,000 of his countrymen owes in part to Obama’s desire to win the trust of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Since Assad is Iran’s client, any US move to overthrow him would weaken Iran. And since as far as Obama is concerned Iran doesn’t have anything against the US, but simply suffers from a chronic lack of trust in Washington, it would be wrong to harm Tehran’s interests by overthrowing the ayatollahs’ Syrian lackey.
Obama’s Syria policy is not only a product of his fantasy-based policy towards Iran. It is also a consequence of his fantasy-based policy towards Turkey. Rather than intervene early in the conflict and support pro-Western forces in Syria as an alternative to Assad’s tyranny, Obama outsourced the organization of the Syrian opposition to Turkey’s Islamic Prime Minister Recip Erdogan.
In Obama’s fantasy world, Erdogan is a great ally of the US. The fact that Erdogan has redefined Turkey away from the West and towards Tehran and the Muslim Brotherhood; rendered incoherent NATO’s strategic mission; ended Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel; used advanced US arms to kill Kurdish civilians, and threatens war in the eastern Mediterranean over natural gas deposits that do not belong to him is irrelevant. All that matters is the fantasy that Erdogan is America’s friend. And since Obama embraces this fantasy, he subcontracted the formation of the Turkish opposition to Erdogan.
Lo and behold, the opposition Erdogan established was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. And now, according to a report by Jacques Neriah from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Syrian opposition is dominated not only by the Muslim Brotherhood, but increasingly by al-Qaida. So whereas a year ago the US had an opportunity to build and shepherd into power a multiethnic, pro-Western Syrian opposition, in the throes of his fantasies about Iran and Turkey, Obama squandered the opportunity. As a result, today we are faced with the grim reality that the world might be safer leaving Assad alone than intervening to overthrow him.
THIS BRINGS us back to Barak, and the Israeli establishment that cannot rid itself of the notion that we need to give away the store to the Palestinians to win the support of the "international community," that is, to win Obama’s support. But towards the Palestinians as well, Obama has embraced fantasy over reality. This week the State Department had the bureaucratic equivalent of an apoplectic fit when it learned that US Sen. Mark Kirk inserted an amendment into the State Department funding bill that will require the department to provide Congress with two pieces of information: the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and the number of their descendants administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA.
The Palestinians claim that there are some five million refugees. They demand that Israel allow all of them to immigrate to its territory as part of a peace deal. UNRWA and the Palestinians claim that not only are the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 to be considered refugees, their descendants are also to be considered refugees.
Estimates place the number of Palestinians alive today who were physically displaced from Israel at 30,000.
All Kirk wants is the information. And for his effort to bring some facts into the discourse about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, the State Department came down on him like a wall of bricks. In a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides wrote that Kirk’s "proposed amendment would be viewed around the world as the United States acting to prejudge and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue."
As far as the State Department is concerned, until the Palestinians and Israel reach an agreement, the US must keep faith with the international community by supporting a policy regarding Palestinian refugees that is both factually absurd and deeply hostile to Israel.
This policy is in perfect alignment with the US policy on Jerusalem. In late March we learned that in the interests of not prejudging the outcome of nonexistent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians over eastern Jerusalem, the US refuses to recognize Israeli sovereignty not only over eastern Jerusalem, but over any part of Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital is of no interest. The fact that US law requires the US government to recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem is irrelevant. To appease the international community, the US won’t even recognize Israeli sovereignty over western Jerusalem.
So according to Barak and his associates, to prevent Israel’s isolation by securing US support, Israel ought to ignore the lessons of the Lebanon withdrawal, the phony peace process with the PLO, and the withdrawal from Gaza and move full speed ahead with policies that will make it impossible to defend the country.
As for the US, to win the support of Europe, Iran and Turkey, Obama has adopted policies that enable Iran to become a nuclear power, make Assad the most attractive leader in Syria, empower the most anti-American forces in Turkey and pressure Israel to renounce its right and ability to defend itself.
Standing alone never looked so good.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama’s all-hat-no-cattle diplomacy

The multinational negotiations held over the weekend in Turkey with the ostensible purpose of halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be followed by – drum roll – yet another round of talks in late May.  Not surprisingly, the Iranian regime is calling this diplomatic exercise "a success."
 
Indeed, it is from their perspective.  The Persians are, after all, the people who invented chess.  They have millennia-old experience haggling about carpets and other merchandise in the bazaar.  And they have the Obama administration and the rest of the so-called "international community" right where such strategically minded folks with a gift for besting their interlocutors want them:  Talking, seemingly endlessly.
 
The Iranians know that as long as the United States and the other members of the Perm 5-plus-1 – diplo-speak for the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council (the U.S., Britain, France and the mullahs’ patron/protectors, Russia and China) and Germany – are engaged in a diplomatic dance, they will insist that Israel not take matters into its own hands and strike Iran.
 
The predictable effect will be to give Tehran the time it needs to complete its longstanding bid to get the Bomb, even as President Obama’s campaign flaks and foreign policy acolytes congratulate him on skillfully managing the vexing Iran portfolio.
 
Such a posture reminds me of the old cowboy put-down of someone who is "all hat and no cattle."  If ever there were a case of someone who is good at the hat bit – talking big, gesticulating forcefully – but abysmal at the business of delivering, it is Barack Obama.
 
Sadly, the Iranian debacle is not the only example of Team Obama’s all-hat-no-cattle foreign policy.  A small sample of the most important of such behavior would include:

 

  • A reset with Russia that has amounted to nothing more than a serial give-away to the Kremlin on missile defense, on nuclear deterrence and the political cover the Russians’ persist in providing rogue states like North Korea, Iran and Syria.  One can only imagine how much worse this will get if the President gets reelected and can be even more "flexible" on such matters than he has been to date.
  • Coddling of China, even as it arms to the teeth with weapons designed to attack American forces and infrastructure – a number of which have emerged to the complete surprise of U.S. intelligence.  In the face of such developments, to say nothing of what amount to acts of war as sustained PRC government-linked hacker attacks on public and private sector computer networks, the Obama administration has maintained what can only be described as a cordially accommodating, business-as-usual approach to Beijing.
  • Ignoring the strategic implications of the impending demise of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  The President’s participation at the Summit of the Americas over the weekend could have been an opportunity to forge a hemispheric commitment to democracy in Venezuela.  At the very least, the United States could have put a strong marker down in opposition to the prospective hijacking of thatlong-suffering country by the narco-generals Chavez has put into power as his cancer metastasizes.  In this case, even the President’s big hat was obscured by the scandal involving his womanizing Secret Service detail.
  • Perhaps most worrying of all is Team Obama’s recent and intensifying engagement with the virulently anti-American and anti-infidel Muslim Brotherhood.  Far from contributing to democracy in Egypt and regional peace with Israel, the prospect for either, let alone both, have become substantially worse, thanks to the administration’s appalling conduct.  The latter includes: opening formal relations with a group whose declared purpose is "destroying Western civilization from within"; feting a Brotherhood delegation in Washington; turning over to the Brotherhood-led Egyptian government in one lump-sum payment $1.5 billion in military assistance; and doling out a further $180-plus million to the Brothers’ franchise in "Palestine," Hamas, which is now partnered with the Palestinian Authority in a unity government there.

 
The all-hat-no-cattle policy is advancing the three practical effects of the Obama Doctrine: emboldening our enemies, undermining our friends and diminishing our country.
 
Speaking of friends, press reports are circulating in the wake of the weekend’s negotiations with Iran, that Israel is reportedly about to strike that Islamic republic. If true, it’s deeply regrettable that such early warning is being given to the Iranians.  
 
But the prospect that the Obama administration has every intention of allowing the Iranians to run the clock out leaves the Israelis with no choice but to attack if they are to stave off an existential threat to their people. We should be helping them do that, not helping the mullahs – and not encouraging still other enemies of this country, actual and prospective, to believe that the costs of taking us on are minimal thanks to our all-hat-no-cattle administration.
 
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Obama’s rhetorical storm

The Obama administration is absolutely furious at Russia and China. The two UN Security Council permanent members’ move on Saturday to veto a resolution on Syria utterly infuriated  US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And they want us all to know just how piping mad they really are.
Rice called the vetoes "unforgivable," and said that "any further blood that flows will be on their hands." She said the US was "disgusted."
Clinton called the move by Moscow and Beijing a "travesty." She then said that the US will take action outside the UN, "with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future."
The rhetoric employed by Obama’s top officials is striking for what it reveals about how the Obama administration perceives the purpose of rhetoric in foreign policy.
Most US leaders have used rhetoric to explain their policies. But if you take the Obama administration’s statements at face value you are left scratching your head in wonder. Specifically on Syria, if you take these statements literally, you are left wondering if Obama and his advisers are simply clueless. Because if they are serious, their indignation bespeaks a remarkable ignorance about how decisions are made at the Security Council.
Is it possible that Obama believed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would betray Bashar Assad, his most important strategic ally in the Middle East? Is it possible that he believed that the same Chinese regime that systematically tramples the human rights of its people would agree to intervene in another country’s domestic affairs? 
Outside the intellectual universe of the Obama administration – where stalwart US allies such as Hosni Mubarak are discarded like garbage and foes such as Hugo Chavez are wooed like Hollywood celebrities – national governments tend to base their foreign policies on their national interests.
In light of this basic reality, Security Council actions generally reflect the national interests of its member states. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be. And it is hard to believe that the Obama administration was unaware of this basic fact.
In fact, it is impossible to believe that the administration was unaware that its plan to pass a Security Council resolution opposing Assad’s massacre of his people – and so jeopardize Russian and Chinese interests – had no chance of success. The fact that they had to know the resolution would never pass leads to the conclusion that Obama and his advisers weren’t trying to pass the resolution on Syria at all.
Rather they were trying to pass the buck on Syria.
We have two pieces of evidence to support the view that the Obama administration has no intention of doing anything even vaguely effective to end Assad’s reign of terror that has so far taken the lives of between five and ten thousand of his countrymen.
First, for the past 10 months, as Assad’s killing machine kicked into gear, Obama and his advisers have been happy to sit on their hands. They supported Turkey’s feckless diplomatic engagement with Assad. They sat back as Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayep Erdogan employed the IHH, his regime-allied terror group, to oversee the organization of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.
Second, the administration supported the Arab League’s farcical inspectors’ mission to Syria. That mission was led by Sudanese Gen. Muhammad al- Dabi. Dabi reportedly was one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur. Clearly, a mission under his leadership had no chance of accomplishing anything useful. And indeed, it didn’t.
AND SO, after nearly a year, the issue of Assad’s butchery of his citizens finally found its way to the Security Council last month. Many in the US expected Obama to use the opportunity to finally do something to stop the killing, just as he and his NATO allies did something to prevent the killing in Libya last year.
Ten months ago Obama, Rice, Clinton and National Security Council member Samantha Power decided that the US and its allies had to militarily intervene in Libya to ensure that Muammar Gaddafi didn’t have the opportunity to kill his people as Assad is now doing. That is, to prevent the type of human rights calamity that the Syrian people are now experiencing, Obama used the UN as a staging ground to overthrow Gaddafi through force.
Sadly for the people of Syria, who are being shot dead even as they try to bury their families who were shot dead the day before, unlike the situation in Libya, Obama has never had the slightest intention of using his influence to take action against Assad. And faced with the rapidly rising public expectation that he would take action at the Security Council to stop the killing, Obama opted for diplomatic Kabuki.
Knowing full well that Putin – who is still selling Assad weapons – would veto any resolution, rather than accept that the Security Council is a dead end, Obama had Rice negotiate fecklessly with her Russian counterparts. The resolution that ended up being called to a vote on Saturday was so weak that US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement on Friday calling for the administration to veto it.
As Ros-Lehtinen put it, the draft resolution "contains no sanctions, no restrictions on weapons transfers, and no calls for Assad to go, but supports the failed Arab League observer mission," and so isn’t "worth the paper it’s printed on."
She continued, "The Obama administration should not support this weak, counterproductive resolution, and should also reconsider the legitimacy that it provides to the Arab League – an organization that continues to boycott Israel – when it comes to the regime in Damascus."
But instead of vetoing it, the administration backed it to the tilt and then expressed disgust and moral outrage when Russia and China vetoed it.
The lesson of this spectacle is that it we must recognize that the Obama administration’s rhetoric hides more than it reveals about the president’s actual policies.
THE FIRST place that we should apply this lesson is to the hemorrhage of administration rhetoric about Iran.
For the past several weeks we have been treated to massive doses of verbiage from Obama and his senior advisers about Iran. The most notable of these recent statements was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s conversation with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius last week.
Panetta used Ignatius to communicate two basic messages. First, he wanted to make clear that the administration adamantly opposes an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. And second, he wanted to make clear that if Iran strikes Israeli population centers, the US will come to Israel’s defense.
The purpose of the first message is clear enough. Panetta wished to increase pressure on Israel not to take preemptive action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The purpose of the second message is also clear. Panetta spoke of the US’s obligation to Israel’s defense in order to remove the justification for an Israeli attack. After all, if the US is obliged to defend it, then Israel mustn’t risk harming US interests by defending itself.
When taken together, Panetta’s message sounds balanced and responsible. But when examined carefully, it is clear that it is not. 
It is far from responsible for the US government to tell its chief ally that it should be willing to absorb an attack on its population centers from Iran. No government can be expected to sit back and wait to be attacked with nuclear weapons because if it is, the Americans will retaliate against its attacker. 
Panetta’s message was not just irresponsible. It was obnoxious.
And this leaves the first message. Since Obama was elected the US has devoted most of its energies not to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but to pressuring Israel not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And Panetta’s remarks to Ignatius were consistent with this mission.
Some have argued that the US’s stepped-up naval presence in the Persian Gulf is evidence that the US is itself gearing up to attack Iran. But as retired US naval analyst J.E. Dyer explained in an essay last month at the Optimistic Conservative blog, the US posture in the Persian Gulf is defensive, not offensive.
The US has not deployed anywhere near the firepower it would need to conduct a successful military campaign against Iran’s nuclear installations. The only thing the US deployment may serve to accomplish is to deter Israel from launching a preemptive air strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.
It is true that to a certain extent, Israel has brought this escalating American rhetorical storm on itself with its own flood of rhetoric about Iran. Over the past week nearly every senior Israeli military and political official has had something to say about Iran’s nuclear program.
But this stream of words does not reflect a change in Israel’s strategic timetable. Rather it is a function of the rather mundane calendar of Israel’s annual conference circuit. It just so happened that the annual Herzliya Conference took place last week. It is standard fare for Israel’s security and political leadership to bloviate about Iran’s nuclear program at Herzliya. They do it every year. They did it this year.
And in truth, no one said anything at the conference that we didn’t already know. We learned nothing new about Iran’s program or Israel’s intentions. Had there been no conference last week, there would likely have been no flood of Israeli statements.
We only know three things for certain about Iran. It is getting very late in the game for anyone to take any military actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will not stop its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. And Obama will not order US forces to take action to stop Iran’s nuclear project.
What remains uncertain still is how Israel plans to respond to these three certainties. The fact that Israel has waited this long to strike presents the disturbing prospect that our leaders may have been confused by the Obama administration’s rhetoric. Perhaps they have been persuaded that the US is on our side on this issue and that we don’t have to rely only on ourselves to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
But as the foregoing analysis of the administration’s very angry words on Syria and very sober words on Iran demonstrates, Obama and his deputies use rhetoric not to clarify their intentions, but to obfuscate them. Just as they will do nothing to prevent Assad from continuing his campaign of murder and terror, so they will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Hamas and the Washington establishment

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America’s collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an "invented people."
As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians’ main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.
For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates’ debates.
The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates’ debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country "is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists." He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.
Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America’s received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.
After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas’s terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US’s indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.
The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice’s optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.
Rice’s starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama’s even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran’s chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.
In the face of Turkey’s openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.
Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas’s largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas’s terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero’s welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.
COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey’s sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran’s abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s refusal to actively assist Iran’s other Arab client – Syrian President Bashar Assad – in massacring his domestic opponents.
These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran’s rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.
And why would they want to cut off that relationship? 
By serving as Hamas’s chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.
The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas’s main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.
Iran became Hamas’s chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas’s most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad’s survival.
In light of Erdogan’s enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry’s factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan’s close relationship with Obama – like his previously close relationship with Rice – renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway "experts" to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey’s counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.
CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas’s leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris – who remain major funders – as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.
In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas’s protector, it is necessary to consider not only the corrosive impact of Washington’s relations with Turkey, but also the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.
Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel’s avoidance of concession making.
Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority – run by Fatah – to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah’s two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel’s demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA. 
If Israel has no peace partner, then it can’t make concessions. And if it can’t make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.
It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah’s negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama’s actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.
Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, "If history is any guide, progress is made in the ‘peace process’ when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013."
The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders’ attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.
Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.
Fatah’s glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.
And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich’s and Perry’s statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.