Tag Archives: Turkey

Time to plan for war

So much for US President Barack Obama’s famed powers of persuasion. At the UN’s Nuclear Non-Poliferation Treaty review conference which opened this week, the Obama administration managed to lose control over the agenda before the conference even started.

Obama administration officials said they intended to use the conference as a platform to mount international pressure on Iran to stop its illicit nuclear proliferation activities. But even before the conference began, with a little prodding from Egypt, the administration agreed that instead of focusing on Iran, the conference would adopt Iran’s chosen agenda: attacking Israel for its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were conducting negotiations with Egypt about Egypt’s demand that the NPT review conference call for sanctions against Israel for refusing to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. The Journal quoted a senior administration official involved in the discussions saying, "We’ve made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the U.S. has been willing to do before."

Among other possibilities, that proposal may have included a US agreement to appoint a UN envoy responsible for organizing a UN conference calling for the Greater Middle East to become a nuclear-free zone. In diplomatese, "Middle East nuclear-free zone" is a well-accepted euphemism for stripping Israel of its purported nuclear capability while turning a blind eye to Iranian, Syrian and other Islamic nuclear weapons programs. Egypt’s demand, which it convinced more than a hundred members of the Non-Aligned bloc to sign onto, is for Israel to open its nuclear installations to international inspectors as a first step towards unilateral nuclear disarmament.

On Wednesday the US joined the other four permanent members of the Security Council in signing a statement calling for a nuclear-free Middle East and urging Israel, Pakistan and India to accede to the NPT as non-nuclear states. Following the US’s lead, on Thursday Yukiya Amano, the new Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote a letter to IAEA member states asking for their suggestions for how to convince Israel to sign the NPT.

So as Iran — an NPT signatory — makes a mockery of the treaty by building nuclear weapons in contempt of its treaty obligations, the US has actively supported Iran’s bid to use the NPT review conference as yet another UN forum for bashing Israel.

It bears recalling that the primary goal of the NPT is to prevent nuclear proliferation. From the amount of attention Israel is receiving at the NPT review conference, you could easily get the impression that Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal is the gravest proliferation threat in the world today. But history shows that this is nonsense.

Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race. Notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, Israel’s neighbors fully recognize that the purpose of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal is to guarantee Israel’s survival and consequently only threatens those who would attack the Jewish state with the intention of annihilating it. This is why although it is four decades old; Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal has never caused a regional nuclear arms race. It has never harmed or called into question the relevance or usefulness of the NPT’s international non-proliferation agenda. Moreover, as a non-signatory to the NPT, Israel has the right to develop a nuclear program.

Iran on the other hand gave up that right when it joined the NPT regime. So too, in sharp contrast to Israel’s alleged program, it is clear that Iran’s nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive. Consequently, it is universally recognized that if Iran becomes a nuclear power, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other states will begin developing their own nuclear arsenals in short order. That is, it is absolutely clear that if the NPT is to have any relevance in the coming years, if there is to be any hope that counter-proliferation regimes can be useful; preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons must be its signatories’ chief aim.

But due to the Obama administration’s diplomatic fecklessness and ideological blinders, administration officials were incapable of making these points. And so, instead through its actions, the administration has advanced the cause of nuclear proliferation. The US has now joined the ranks of fools who claim that nuclear weapons in the hands of states like the US and Israel are as problematic as nuclear weapons in the hands of states like Iran and North Korea.

BUT THEN, in the end it makes no difference that the US has followed Iran’s lead at the NPT conference. Even if the administration had managed to make Iran’s nuclear weapons program the focus of debate, it wouldn’t have mattered because diplomacy is no longer a relevant tool for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Appeasement has failed. Sanctions are dead in the water in the Security Council. 
And even if the Security Council passes a sanctions resolution, they will have no impact on Iran’s behavior. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made that much clear in his speech on Monday and in subsequent remarks to the media. As he put it, "While we do not welcome sanctions, we do not fear them either. Sanctions cannot stop the Iranian nation."

What all of this demonstrates is that the diplomatic track – from appeasement to sanctions – is irrelevant for contending with Iran’s nuclear program. The only way to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs is to use military force to destroy or severely damage its nuclear installations.

And this of course is something Obama will do. His begging-to-shake-hands policy towards Iran and the one hand and his iron fist policy towards Israel on the other makes it absolutely clear that Obama will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Rather than correct his abysmal failures, Obama seeks to hide them by minimizing the seriousness of the threat.

In remarks to the media this week, a White House official downplayed the Iranian threat. He told the Financial Times that Iran’s "nuclear clock has slowed down. They are not making dramatic technical progress given the difficulties they are facing in their [uranium] enrichment program and the fact that their efforts to build secret facilities have been disclosed."

The fact that the US’s published intelligence estimates of Iran’s nuclear program contradict this claim didn’t seem to faze the official.

The US’s abdication of its responsibility as the leader of the free world to prevent the most dangerous regimes from acquiring the most dangerous weapons means that the responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has fallen on Israel’s shoulders. Only Israel has the means and the will to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And the message the NPT follies convey is that Israel must develop contingency plans for attacking Iran as quickly as possible.

Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km range and. This week Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

As for Hamas, since Operation Cast Lead Iran’s Palestinian proxy Hamas has expanded its own missile arsenal. Today it reportedly has projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond.

As for Iran, as its seemingly endless military exercises make clear, the mullocracy has the capacity to use conventional weapons to imperil global oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. So too, this week’s report that Osama Bin Laden may have decamped to Iran in 2003 merely served to underline Iran’s ability to utilize jihadist terror forces throughout the world.

From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores.

AS THEY CONSIDER Israel’s options going forward, Israel’s political and military leaders have to take two considerations into account. First, the side that initiates the conflict will be the side that controls the battle space. And second, there is a real possibility that the Obama administration will refuse to resupply Israel with vital weapons systems in the course of the war. The fact that Israel will be roundly condemned by the UN and its component parts is a certainty regardless of who initiates the conflict and therefore is irrelevant for operational planning.

Armed with these understandings, it is apparent that Israeli contingency plans for war must have limited goals and should be guided by the overarching aim of beginning and ending the war quickly. Luckily, Israel excels at limited, swift campaigns.

Responding to one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s recent threats, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman promised last month that if Assad attacks Israel, Israel will bring down his regime. While bringing about the utter defeat of Iran’s regional proxies is a reasonable goal, it cannot be Israel’s goal in the coming war.

In the coming war, Israel will have only one goal: to destroy or seriously damage Iran’s nuclear installations. Every resource turned against Iran’s proxies must be aimed at facilitating that goal. That is, the only thing Israel should seek to accomplish in contending with Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas is to prevent them from diverting Israeli resources away from attacking Iran’s nuclear installations.

This means that Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Hizbullah’s missiles and missile launchers, Syria’s missiles, artillery and launchers, and Hamas’s missiles and launchers. As for their short-range rockets, Israel should do its best to intercept them and otherwise hunker down to weather the storm of Katyushas and Qassams. Life of the homefront won’t be easy. But it won’t be impossible either, as we saw in 2006. 

Almost every assessment of a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations has assumed that Israel will use its air force to strike. All that can be said of that analysis is that, just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. An Israeli strike should utilize all of them to keep the Iranians off balance and on the defensive.

These are dangerous times. Iran, which seeks to position itself as a regional superpower, has been emboldened by the Obama administration’s abdication of US global leadership. Only Israel can prevent Iran from endangering the world. But time is of the essence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Get ready for a nuclear Iran

Negotiations grind on toward a fourth U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives in New York to address the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference. Sanctions advocates acknowledge that the Security Council’s ultimate product will do no more than marginally impede Iran’s progress.

In Congress, sanctions legislation also creaks along, but that too is simply going through the motions. Russia and China have already rejected key proposals to restrict Iran’s access to international financial markets and choke off its importation of refined petroleum products, which domestically are in short supply. Any new U.S. legislation will be ignored and evaded, thus rendering it largely symbolic. Even so, President Obama has opposed the legislation, arguing that unilateral U.S. action could derail his Security Council efforts.

The further pursuit of sanctions is tantamount to doing nothing. Advocating such policies only benefits Iran by providing it cover for continued progress toward its nuclear objective. It creates the comforting illusion of "doing something." Just as "diplomacy" previously afforded Iran the time and legitimacy it needed, sanctions talk now does the same.

Speculating about regime change stopping Iran’s nuclear program in time is also a distraction. The Islamic Revolution’s iron fist, and willingness to use it against dissenters (who are currently in disarray), means we cannot know whether or when the regime may fall. Long-term efforts at regime change, desirable as they are, will not soon enough prevent Iran from creating nuclear weapons with the ensuing risk of further regional proliferation.

We therefore face a stark, unattractive reality. There are only two options: Iran gets nuclear weapons, or someone uses pre-emptive military force to break Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle and paralyze its program, at least temporarily.

There is no possibility the Obama administration will use force, despite its confused and ever-changing formulation about the military option always being "on the table." That leaves Israel, which the administration is implicitly threatening not to resupply with airplanes and weapons lost in attacking Iran-thereby rendering Israel vulnerable to potential retaliation from Hezbollah and Hamas.

It is hard to conclude anything except that the Obama administration is resigned to Iran possessing nuclear weapons. While U.S. policy makers will not welcome that outcome, they certainly hope as a corollary that Iran can be contained and deterred. Since they have ruled out the only immediate alternative, military force, they are doubtless now busy preparing to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons.

President Obama’s likely containment/deterrence strategy will feature security assurances to neighboring countries and promises of American retaliation if Iran uses its nuclear weapons. Unfortunately for this seemingly muscular rhetoric, the simple fact of Iran possessing nuclear weapons would alone dramatically and irreparably alter the Middle East balance of power. Iran does not actually have to use its capabilities to enhance either its regional or global leverage.

Facile analogies to Cold War deterrence rest on the dubious, unproven belief that Iran’s nuclear calculus will approximate the Soviet Union’s. Iran’s theocratic regime and the high value placed on life in the hereafter makes this an exceedingly dangerous assumption.

Even if containment and deterrence might be more successful against Iran than just suggested, nuclear proliferation doesn’t stop with Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and perhaps others will surely seek, and very swiftly, their own nuclear weapons in response. Thus, we would imminently face a multipolar nuclear Middle East waiting only for someone to launch first or transfer weapons to terrorists. Ironically, such an attack might well involve Israel only as an innocent bystander, at least initially.

We should recognize that an Israeli use of military force would be neither precipitate nor disproportionate, but only a last resort in anticipatory self-defense. Arab governments already understand that logic and largely share it themselves. Such a strike would advance both Israel’s and America’s security interests, and also those of the Arab states.

Nonetheless, the intellectual case for that strike must be better understood in advance by the American public and Congress in order to ensure a sympathetic reaction by Washington. Absent Israeli action, no one should base their future plans on anything except coping with a nuclear Iran.

 

Originally published in the Wall Street Journal

John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

 

Exploiting the crisis

There is an element of irony in the crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although President Barack Obama and his advisers deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand, on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, adopted during his second term in office. Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever.

This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama’s White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad, of course, is that Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past 10 days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisers.

First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist.

Next, there was the somewhat anodyne – if substantively incorrect – written testimony by US Army Gen. David Petraeus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations.

In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petraeus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petraeus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally, there is the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Dennis Ross of "dual loyalties."

Ross, of course, has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

These moves would be sufficient to throw US-Israel relations into a tailspin. When combined with the administration’s ultimatum demanding a moratorium on Jewish construction in Jerusalem and its threat to coerce Israel into accepting an Obama plan for Palestinian statehood that will imperil Israel’s security, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no way to make this crisis go away. There is a crisis in US relations with Israel today because the president of the United States has very publicly taken a torch to those relations and he responds to any sign that the flames are waning by dousing fresh kerosene on the fire.

AND YET, when Obama’s personal animus is set aside and one examines the substance of his actual policies, ironically, there is little difference between the current administration’s policies and those of its immediate predecessor.

In his second term in office, Bush ignored the significance of Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006 and its takeover of Gaza in June 2007. The US expanded its training program for the Palestinian armed forces and pushed Israel to accept a framework for Palestinian statehood that would more or less push it back to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.

From 2004, the Bush administration sought to appease Iran into giving up its nuclear program – first indirectly through the negotiations that France, Britain and Germany conducted with Teheran. Then, in 2006, the administration began direct negotiations with the mullahs.

Bush personally rejected repeated Israeli requests to purchase refueling aircraft and bunker buster bombs necessary for attacking Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities. And he refused to back Israeli plans to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. So, too, Bush stopped calling for regime change in Iran. After the November 2007 publication of the falsified National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program, Bush discarded the possibility of a US military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities altogether.

In the 2006 war between Israel and the Iranian- and Syrian-proxy force Hizbullah, ignoring Hizbullah’s membership in the Lebanese government and the Lebanese military’s active support for Hizbullah’s war effort, Bush forbade Israel from attacking Lebanese government targets. In so doing, he forced Israel to fight a regional foe as if it were a local street gang and so rendered the ultimate result of that war – Israel’s first strategic military defeat – a foregone conclusion.

Despite Syria’s open sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, its strategic alliance with Iran, as well as its sponsorship of Hizbullah, Hamas and al-Qaida in Iraq and Lebanon, the Bush administration sought to prevent Israel from destroying Syria’s Iranian-financed, North Korean-built nuclear installation. After Israel destroyed the installation in September 2007, the Bush administration demanded that Israel keep silent about the significance of the Iranian-North Korean-Syrian nuclear alliance.

Finally, the Bush administration denied the inherent hostility of the Islamist government in Turkey. Instead it cultivated the fantasy that this anti-American, anti-Israel, Hamas-, Syria- and Iran-supporting regime is a trustworthy ally.

Israel went along with all of these US policies despite their strategic madness because Israel wanted to be a team player. The Sharon and Olmert governments and the Israeli public as a whole believed that Israel had an ally in the Bush administration and that when push came to shove, the massive risks Israel took supporting the US’s policies on Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and the Palestinians would be rewarded.

With Obama, of course, things are different. Probably if Obama treated Israel with the same friendliness his predecessor showered on its leaders, Netanyahu would have been willing to walk the plank just as Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon did, in the interests of helping the team. But what Obama has made clear in his mistreatment of Israel is that he doesn’t want Netanyahu to walk the plank for the team. He wants Israel off the team.

ALTHOUGH UNSETTLING, this dismal state of affairs has a bright side. It provides Israel with a rare opportunity to stop acceding to US policies that are bad for Israel and the US alike. After all, if the US is willing to instigate a crisis in its relations with Israel over plans to zone for housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Ramat Shlomo and French Hill, then clearly Israel can do no right. And if Israel can do no right in the eyes of the administration, then there is no point in bending to its will. Instead, Israel must simply do what it must to secure its interests.

In the hope of winning over the Obama administration, Israel has kept the Iranian opposition at arm’s length. This should end. Israel should employ covert and overt means to help Iran’s Green Movement destabilize the Iranian regime with the aim of toppling it. At the same time, Israel should employ covert and overt means to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.

This week, Sen. John Kerry travelled to Lebanon and Syria to raise the prospects of peace talks between Israel and both countries. Rather than applaud his efforts, Israel should point out that Hizbullah controls the Lebanese government and that US support for the Lebanese military and government strengthens Hizbullah. So, too, Israel should make clear that since Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Arab water boy, it is preposterous to call for Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to his regime. Instead of rehashing the same nonsense, Israel should actively support Syria’s Kurds in their bid for autonomy and champion the cause of political prisoners languishing in Syrian jails.

Turkey’s announcement this week that it supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions should be recognized for what it was: An announcement that the NATO member state has joined the Iranian axis with Syria, Lebanon, Hamas and Hizbullah. Israel should respond to Turkey’s announcement by announcing a moratorium on weapons sales to Turkey, and so end its counterproductive attempts to paper over the fact that its former strategic ally has become its enemy.

As for the Palestinians, rather than succumb to US demands in the interest of starting doomed-to-fail negotiations with Fatah, Israel should tell the truth. It has nothing to negotiate about and no one to negotiate with. Fatah’s leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad reject Israel’s right to exist. They support terrorism. They already rejected a "two-state solution" less than two years ago. Aside from that, they lack the support of their own electorate, which prefers Hamas’s more direct approach to destroying Israel.

Instead of pretending that begging these impotent adversaries for peace serves its interests, Israel should get off its knees and adopt policies that will enhance its interests. For instance, given that the Obama administration views Ramat Shlomo as the equivalent of Eli and E-1, Israel should build up the neighborhood in Eli that was home to fallen IDF commanders Majors Roi Klein and Eliraz Peretz and implement its construction plans for E-1.

Ironically, all of these policies are consonant not only with Israel’s strategic needs, but with the US’s own strategic interests. And since Obama’s hostility to Israel is not subject to change, rather than focus on winning over the White House, the Netanyahu government should devote its energies to selling its policies to the American people. Repeated polls have shown that the American public supports an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. By the same token, commonsense policies towards the likes of Fatah, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Turkey, combined with the unapologetic assertion of Israel’s rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, will find a strong core of support in the US that can offset some of the damage Obama is doing to US ties with Israel.

Although much maligned, Emmanuel’s call not to let a good crisis go to waste can be taken as a crass way of saying that every cloud has a silver lining. Israel did not ask for this fight with Obama. It would have been willing to keep up the fantasy that Bush’s second-term policies made sense. But since a fight is what it got, Israel has no choice but to strike out on its own. As it happens, if Israel does so, not only will it protect itself, it will protect the US from the dangerous policies its leader has opted to pursue.

Why Obama is waging war on Israel

Why has US President Barak Obama decided to foment a crisis in US relations with Israel?

Some commentators have claimed that it is Israel’s fault. As they tell it, the news that Israel has not banned Jewish construction in Jerusalem – after repeatedly refusing to ban such construction – drove Obama into a fit of uncontrolled rage from which he has yet to recover.

While popular, this claim makes no sense. Obama didn’t come to be called "No drama Obama" for nothing. It is not credible to argue that Jerusalem’s local planning board’s decision to approve the construction of 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo drove cool Obama into a fit of wild rage at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Obama himself claims that he has launched a political war against Israel in the interest of promoting peace. But this claim too, does not stand up to scrutiny.

On Friday Obama ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to present Netanyahu with a four-part ultimatum.

  • First, Israel must cancel the approval of the housing units in Ramat Shlomo.
  • Second, Israel must prohibit all construction for Jews in Jerusalem neighborhoods built since 1967.
  • Third, Israel must make a gesture to the Palestinians to show them we want peace. The US suggests releasing hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons.
  • Fourth, Israel must agree to negotiate all substantive issues, including the partition of Jerusalem, (including the Jewish neighborhoods constructed since 1967 that are now home to more than a half million Israelis), and the immigration of millions of hostile foreign Arabs to Israel under the rubric of the so-called "right of return," in the course of indirect, Obama administration-mediated negotiations with the Palestinians. To date, Israel has maintained that substantive discussions can only be conducted in direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials.

If Israel does not accept all four US demands, then the Obama administration will boycott Netanyahu and his senior ministers. In the first instance, this means that if Netanyahu comes to Washington next week for the AIPAC conference, no senior administration official will meet with him.

Obama’s ultimatum makes clear that mediating peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a goal he is interested in achieving.

Obama’s new demands follow the months of American pressure that eventually coerced Netanyahu into announcing both his support for a Palestinian state and a ten month ban on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria. No previous Israeli government had ever been asked to make the latter concession.

Netanyahu was led to believe that in return for these concessions Obama would begin behaving like the credible mediator his predecessors were. But instead of acting like his predecessors, Obama has behaved like the Palestinians. Rather than reward Netanyahu for taking a risk for peace, in the model of Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Obama has pocketed Netanyahu’s concessions and escalated his demands. This is not the behavior of a mediator. This is the behavior of an adversary.

With the US President treating Israel like an enemy, the Palestinians have no reason to agree to sit down and negotiate. Indeed, they have no choice but to declare war.

And so, in the wake of Obama’s onslaught on Israel’s right to Jerusalem, Palestinian incitement against Israel and Jews has risen to levels not seen since the outbreak of the last terror war in September 2000. And just as night follows day, that incitement has led to violence. This week’s Arab riots from Jerusalem to Jaffa, and the renewed rocket offensive from Gaza are directly related to Obama’s malicious attacks on Israel.

But if his campaign against Israel wasn’t driven by a presidential temper tantrum, and it isn’t aimed at promoting peace what explains it? What is Obama trying to accomplish?

There are five explanations for Obama’s behavior. And they are not mutually exclusive.

First, Obama’s assault on Israel is likely related to the failure of his Iran policy. Over the past week, senior administration officials including General David Petraeus have made viciously defamatory attacks on Israel insinuating that the construction of homes for Jews in Jerusalem is a primary cause for bad behavior on the part of Iran and its proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. By this line of thinking, if Israel simply returned to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, Iran’s centrifuges would stop spinning, and Syria, al Qaida, the Taliban, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards would all beat their swords into plowshares.

Even more important than its usefulness as a tool to divert the public’s attention away from the failure of his Iran policy, Obama’s assault against Israel may well be aimed at maintaining that failed policy. Specifically, he may be attacking Israel in a bid to coerce Netanyahu into agreeing to give Obama veto power over any Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. That is, the anti-Israel campaign may be a means to force Israel to stand by as Obama allows Iran to build a nuclear arsenal.

For the past several months, an endless line of senior administration officials have descended on Jerusalem with the expressed aim of convincing Netanyahu to relinquish Israel’s right to independently strike Iran’s nuclear installations. All of these officials have returned to Washington empty-handed. Perhaps Obama has decided that since quiet pressure has failed to cow Netanyahu, it is time to launch a frontal attack against him.

This brings us to the third explanation for why Obama has decided to go to war with the democratically elected Israeli government. Obama’s advisors told friendly reporters that Obama wants to bring down Netanyahu’s government. By making demands Netanyahu and his coalition partners cannot accept, Obama hopes to either bring down the government and replace Netanyahu and Likud with the far-leftist Tzipi Livni and Kadima, or force Yisrael Beitenu and Shas to bolt the coalition and compel Netanyahu to accept Livni as a co-prime minister. Livni of course, won the Obama’s heart when in 2008 she opted for new elections rather than accept Shas’s demand that she protect the unity of Jerusalem.

The fourth explanation for Obama’s behavior is that he seeks to realign US foreign policy away from Israel. Obama’s constant attempts to cultivate relations with Iran’s unelected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ahmadinejad’s Arab lackey Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan make clear that he views developing US relations with these anti-American regimes as a primary foreign policy goal.

Given that all of these leaders have demanded that in exchange for better relations Obama abandon Israel as a US ally, and in light of the professed anti-Israel positions of several of his senior foreign policy advisors, it is possible that that Obama is seeking to downgrade US relations with Israel. His consistent castigation of Israel as obstructionist and defiant has led some surveys to claim that over the past year US popular support for Israel has dropped from 77 to 58 percent.

The more Obama fills newspaper headlines with allegations that Israel is responsible for everything from US combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran’s nuclear program, the lower those numbers can be expected to fall. And the more popular American support for Israel falls, the easier it will be for Obama to engineer an open breach with the Jewish state.

The final explanation for Obama’s behavior is that he is using his manufactured crisis to justify adopting an overtly anti-Israel position vis-a-vis the Palestinians. On Thursday The New York Times reported that administration officials are considering having Obama present his own "peace plan." Given the administration’s denial of Israel’s right to Jerusalem, an "Obama plan," would doubtless require Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel some 700,000 Jews from their homes.

Likewise, the crisis Obama has manufactured with Israel could pave the way for him to recognize a Palestinian state if the Palestinians follow through on their threat to unilaterally declare statehood next year regardless of the status of negotiations with Israel. Such a US move could in turn lead to the deployment of US forces in Judea and Samaria to "protect" the unilaterally declared Palestinian state from Israel.

Both Obama’s behavior and the policy goals it indicates make it clear that Netanyahu’s current policy of trying to appease Obama by making concrete concessions is no longer justified. Obama is not interested in being won over. The question is what should Netanyahu do?

One front in the war Obama has started is at home. Netanyahu must ensure that he maintains popular domestic support for his government to scuttle Obama’s plan to overthrow his government. So far, in large part due to Obama’s unprecedented nastiness, Netanyahu’s domestic support has held steady. A poll conducted for IMRA news service this week by Maagar Mohot shows that fully 75 percent of Israeli Jews believe Obama’s behavior towards Israel is unjustified. As for Netanyahu, 71 percent of Israeli Jews believe his refusal to accept Obama’s demand to ban Jewish building in Jerusalem proves he is a strong leader. Similarly, a Shvakim Panorama poll for Israel radio shows public support for Kadima has dropped by more than 30 percent since last year’s elections.

The other front in Obama’s war is the American public. By blaming Israel for the state of the Middle East and launching personal barbs against Netanyahu, Obama seeks to drive down popular American support for Israel. In building a strategy to counter Obama’s moves, Netanyahu has to keep two issues in mind.

First, no foreign leader can win a popularity contest against a sitting US president. Therefore, Netanyahu must continue to avoid any personal attacks on Obama. He must limit his counter-offensive to a defense of Israel’s interests and his government’s policies.

Second, Netanyahu must remember that Obama’s hostility towards Israel is not shared by the majority of Americans. Netanyahu’s goal must be to strengthen and increase the majority of Americans who support Israel. To this end, Netanyahu must go to Washington next week and speak at the annual AIPAC conference as planned despite the administration’s threat to boycott him.

While in Washington, Netanyahu should meet with every Congressman and Senator who wishes to meet with him as well as every administration member who seeks him out. Moreover, he should give interviews to as many television networks, newspapers and major radio programs as possible in order to bring his message directly to the American people.

Obama has made clear that he is not Israel’s ally. And for the remainder of his term, he will do everything he can to downgrade US relations with Israel while maintaining his constant genuflection to the likes of Iran, Syria, the Palestinians and Turkey.

But like Israel, the US is a free country. And as long as popular support for Israel holds steady, Obama’s options will be limited. Netanyahu’s task is to maintain that support in the face of administration hostility, as he implements policies towards Iran and the Arabs alike that are necessary to ensure Israel’s long-term survival and prosperity.

 

The speech we need

President Obama’s much-anticipated speech at West Point Tuesday night constitutes an opportunity with the potential to be as strategically momentous as Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.  Mr. Obama is in a unique position to tell the truth about the nature of the enemy we confront, not just in Afghanistan but worldwide, and thereby put the effort to defeat that enemy on a sound, coherent and supportable footing.  Will he rise to the occasion?

With a Muslim background and a year-long record of assiduous efforts to cultivate better relations with what he calls the "Muslim world," the incumbent President can exploit the sort of latitude his anti-communist predecessor did thirty-seven years ago with an opening to Red China.  If Mr. Obama’s bow to the Saudi monarch, his highly publicized addresses to Muslim audiences in Turkey and Egypt, his efforts to curry favor with the Palestinians and his co-sponsorship with the Organization of the Islamic conference of a resolution limiting free speech are of any positive value, they should afford him the running room to say the following:

"We are at war today not with Islam or certainly with all Muslims.  But Muslims who adhere to the brutally repressive and supremacist theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah are, in accordance with that program, at war with us.  Shariah dictates the triumph of an Islamic theocracy and, to that end, the use where possible of violent jihad.  Where violence is not practicable, more stealthy forms of jihad must be employed.

"That means we confront threats not just from al Qaeda or even from al Qaeda and the Taliban.  To be sure, they are adherents to Shariah, but so are millions of other Muslims elsewhere, including those like Major Nidal Malik Hasan here in the United States.

"As a result, while the dangers posed to us by such folks are evident in Afghanistan – and must guide our actions there – they are not confined to that distant land and its long-suffering people.  We need to increase our military presence in Afghanistan, and will, in accordance with the recommendations put forward by our commander on the ground, General Stanley McChrystal, and the counter-insurgency strategy our administration adopted last March. 

"Our enemies in Afghanistan and those seeking refuge in neighboring Pakistan are on notice that this is not a short-term commitment.  We are determined to ensure that the Afghan people are not condemned to a reprise of the Taliban’s reign of terror – and the safe-haven that regime afforded to those who have in the past attacked us.

"But we are under no illusions:  Our civilization and way of life are anathema to those who follow Shariah.  That is not because of what we have done or are doing; it is because of who we are.  Shariah demands the subjugation and destruction of societies like ours that believe in democratic rule, equal rights for women, freedom of speech and other basic liberties, the separation of church and state, etc.

"Thus, we have no choice but to resist the attempted imposition of Shariah, whether through violent or non-violent means.  Under our administration, we will do so comprehensively, at home and abroad.  We will use military power were necessary and the array of other techniques at our disposal to preserve our civilization in the face of a threat that knows no boundaries. 

"Let me be clear:  In so doing, we will reach out at every opportunity to Muslims who wish no more to live under Shariah than do the rest of us.  Such Muslims are our natural allies and we will make common cause with them against our mutual foe. 

"This struggle is the defining one of our time.  If we get it right, the costs – while substantial – will be manageable.  If we get it wrong, they will be unbearably high.

"We call on all nations – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – who face, in due course, the prospect of being subjected to Shariah to join us in this effort.  By so doing, we maximize the chances of preserving both the unique character of such nations and the opportunity for each to express that character in ways that reflect the traditions and values of their respective societies.  This is a goal for which we have, frankly, no choice but to strive."

It is deeply regrettable that the American people and those who love freedom elsewhere around the world have not heard a president of the United States utter such words to date.  That failure has condemned us to the prosecution of open-ended and, at best, inconclusive military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, uninformed by any understanding of what actually animates our enemies. 

From now on, we must recognize the reality that these are but two fronts in a truly global war.  We cannot succeed in either, let alone both, of these theaters – to say nothing of the world-wide conflict more generally – unless we come to grips with the catalytic role being played in that war by Shariah. 

President Barack Obama can draw on his credentials in the Muslim world, just as Richard Nixon did with his anti-communist bona fides in opening relations with the PRC, to redefine and redirect our national efforts to achieve the required victory over Shariah.  Let us all pray he will do so.

 

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program,  Secure Freedom Radio.

How Turkey was lost

Once the apotheosis of a pro-Western, dependable Muslim democracy, this week Turkey officially left the Western alliance and became a full member of the Iranian axis.

It isn’t that Ankara’s behavior changed fundamentally in recent days. There is nothing new in its massive hostility toward Israel and its effusive solicitousness toward the likes of Syria and Hamas. Since the Islamist AKP party first won control over the Turkish government in the 2002 elections, led by AKP chairman Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the Turks have incrementally and inexorably moved the formerly pro-Western Muslim democracy into the radical Islamist camp populated by the likes of Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, al-Qaida and Hamas.

What made Turkey’s behavior this week different from its behavior in recent months and years is that its attacks were concentrated, unequivocal and undeniable for everyone outside of Israel’s scandalously imbecilic and flagellant media.

Until this week, both Israel and the US were quick to make excuses for Ankara. When in 2003 the AKP-dominated Turkish parliament prohibited US forces from invading Iraq through Kurdistan, the US blamed itself. Rather than get angry at Turkey, the Bush administration argued that its senior officials had played the diplomatic game poorly.

In February 2006, when Erdogan became the first international figure to host Hamas leaders on an official state visit after the jihadist group won the Palestinian elections, Jerusalem sought to explain away his diplomatic aggression. Israeli leaders claimed that Erdogan’s red carpet treatment for mass murderers who seek the physical destruction of Israel was not due to any inherent hostility on the part of the AKP regime toward Israel. Rather, it was argued that Ankara simply supported democracy and that the AKP, as a formerly outlawed Islamist party, felt an affinity toward Hamas as a Muslim underdog.

Jerusalem made similar excuses for Ankara when during the 2006 war with Hizbullah Turkey turned a blind eye to Iranian weapons convoys to Lebanon that traversed Turkey; when Turkey sided with Hamas against Israel during Operation Cast Lead, and called among other things for Israel to be expelled from the UN; and when Erdogan caused a diplomatic incident this past January by castigating President Shimon Peres during a joint appearance at the Davos conference. So, too, Turkey’s open support for Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its galloping trade with Teheran and Damascus, as well as its embrace of al-Qaida financiers have elicited nothing more than grumbles from Israel and America.

Initially, this week Israel sought to continue its policy of making excuses for Turkish aggression against it. On Sunday, after Turkey disinvited the IAF from the Anatolian Eagle joint air exercise with Turkey and NATO, senior officials like Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and opposition leader Tzipi Livni tried to make light of the incident, claiming that Turkey remains Israel’s strategic ally.

But Turkey wasted no time in making fools of them. On Monday, 11 Turkish government ministers descended on Syria to sign a pile of cooperation agreements with Iran’s Arab lackey. The Foreign Ministry didn’t even have a chance to write apologetic talking points explaining that brazen move before Syria announced it was entering a military alliance with Turkey and would be holding a joint military exercise with the Turkish military. Speechless in the wake of Turkey’s move to hold military maneuvers with its enemy just two days after it canceled joint training with Israel, Jerusalem could think of no mitigating explanation for the move.

Tuesday was characterized by escalating verbal assaults on the Jewish state. First Erdogan renewed his libelous allegations that Israel deliberately killed children in Gaza. Then he called on Turks to learn how to make money like Jews do.

Erdogan’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic blows were followed on Tuesday evening by Turkey’s government-controlled TRT1 television network’s launch of a new prime-time series portraying IDF soldiers as baby- and little girl-killers who force Palestinian women to deliver stillborn babies at roadblocks and line up groups of Palestinians against walls to execute them by firing squad.

The TRT1 broadcast forced Israel’s hand. Late on Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry announced it was launching an official protest with the Turkish Embassy. Unfortunately, it was unclear who would be coming to the Foreign Ministry to receive the demarche, since Turkey hasn’t had an ambassador in Israel for three weeks.

TURKEY’S BREAK with the West; its decisive rupture with Israel and its opposition to the US in Iraq and Iran was predictable. Militant Islam of the AKP variety has been enjoying growing popularity and support throughout Turkey for many years. The endemic corruption of Turkey’s traditional secular leaders increased the Islamists’ popularity. Given this domestic Turkish reality, it is possible that Erdogan and his fellow Islamists’ rise to power was simply a matter of time.

But even if the AKP’s rise to power was eminently predictable, its ability to consolidate its control over just about every organ of governance in Turkey as well as what was once a thriving free press, and change completely Turkey’s strategic posture in just seven years was far from inevitable. For these accomplishments the AKP owes a debt of gratitude to both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as to the EU.

The Bush administration ignored the warnings of secular Turkish leaders in the country’s media, military and diplomatic corps that Erdogan was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Rather than pay attention to his past attempts to undermine Turkey’s secular, pro-Western character and treat him with a modicum of suspicion, after the AKP electoral victory in 2002 the Bush administration upheld the AKP and Erdogan as paragons of Islamist moderation and proof positive that the US and the West have no problem with political Islam. Erdogan’s softly peddled but remorselessly consolidated Islamism was embraced by senior American officials intent on reducing democracy to a synonym for elections rather than acknowledging that democracy is only meaningful as a system of laws and practices that engender liberal egalitarianism.

In a very real sense, the Bush administration’s willingness to be taken in by Erdogan paved the way for its decision in 2005 to pressure Israel to allow Hamas to participate in the Palestinian elections and to coerce Egypt into allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in its parliamentary poll.

In Turkey itself, the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of the AKP meant that Erdogan encountered no Western opposition to his moves to end press freedom in Turkey; purge the Turkish military of its secular leaders and end its constitutional mandate to preserve Turkey’s secular character; intimidate and disenfranchise secular business leaders and diplomats; and stack the Turkish courts with Islamists. That is, in the name of its support for its water-downed definition of democracy, the US facilitated Erdogan’s subversion of all the Turkish institutions that enabled liberal norms to be maintained and kept Turkey in the Western alliance.

As for the Obama administration, since entering office in January it has abandoned US support for democracy activists throughout the world, in favor of a policy of pure appeasement of US adversaries at the expense of US allies. In keeping with this policy, President Barack Obama paid a preening visit to Ankara where he effectively endorsed the Islamization of Turkish foreign policy that has moved the NATO member into the arms of Teheran’s mullahs. Taken together, the actions of the Bush and Obama White Houses have demoralized Westernized Turks, who now believe that their country is doomed to descend into the depths of Islamist extremism. As many see it, if they wish to remain in Turkey, their only recourse is to join the Islamist camp and add their voices to the rising chorus of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism sweeping the country.

Then there is the EU. For years Brussels has been stringing Turkey along, promising that if it enacts sufficient human rights reforms, the 80-million strong Muslim country will be permitted to join Europe. But far from inducing more liberal behavior on the part of Turkey, those supposedly enlightened reforms have paved the way for the Islamist ascendance in the country. By forcing Turkey to curb its military’s role as the guarantor of Turkish secularism, the EU took away the secularists’ last line of defense against the rising tide of the AKP. By forcing Turkey to treat its political prisoners humanely and cancel the death penalty, the EU eroded the secularists’ moral claim to leadership and weakened their ability to effectively combat both Kurdish and Islamist terror.

At the same time, by consistently refusing to permit Turkey to join the EU, despite Ankara’s moves to placate its political correctness, Brussels discredited still further Turkey’s secularists. When after all their self-defeating and self-abasing reforms, Europe still rejected them, the Turks needed to find a way to restore their wounded honor. The most natural means of doing so was for the Turks writ large to simply turn their backs on Europe and move toward their Muslim brethren.

FOR ITS part, as the lone Jewish state that belongs to no alliance, Israel had no ability to shape internal developments in Turkey. But still, Turkey’s decision to betray the West holds general lessons for Israel and for the free world as a whole. These lessons should be learned and applied moving forward not only to Turkey, but to a whole host of regimes and sub-national groups in the region and throughout the world.

In the first instance it is crucial for policy-makers to recognize that change is the only permanent feature of the human condition. A country’s presence in the Western camp today is no guarantee that it will remain there in the future. Whether a regime is democratic or authoritarian or somewhere in the middle, domestic conditions and trends play major roles in determining its strategic posture over time. This is just as true for Turkey as it is for the US, for Iran and for Sweden and Egypt.

The loss of Turkey shows that countries can and do change. The best way to influence that change is to remain true to one’s friends, even if those friends are imperfect. Only by strengthening those who share one’s country’s norms and interests – rather than its procedures and rhetoric – can governments exert constructive influence on internal changes in other states and societies.

Moreover, it is only by being willing to recognize what makes an ally an ally and an adversary an adversary that the West will adopt policies that leave it more secure in the long run. A military-controlled Turkish democracy that barred Islamists from political power was more desirable than a popularly elected AKP regime that has moved Turkey into the Iranian axis. So, too, a corrupt Western-dependent regime in Afghanistan is more desirable than a Taliban-al-Qaida terror state. Likewise an unstable, weakened mullocracy in Iran challenged by a well-funded, liberal opposition is preferable to a strong, stable mullocracy that has successfully repressed its internationally isolated liberal rivals.

Turkey is lost and we’d better make our peace with this devastating fact. But if we learn its lessons, we can craft policies that check the dangers that Turkey projects and prepare for the day when Turkey may decide that it wishes to return to the Western fold.

Apostasy and the Islamic Nations

The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or so-called "Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam", was drafted and subsequently ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Now a 57 state collective which includes every Islamic nation on earth, the OIC, currently headed by Turkey’s Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thus represents the entire Muslim umma (or global community of individual Muslims), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations (UN). 

Both the preamble and concluding articles (24 and 25) make plain that the OIC‘s Cairo Declaration is designed to supersede Western conceptions of human rights as enunciated, for example, in the US Bill of Rights, and the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The opening of the preamble to the Cairo Declaration repeats a Koranic injunction affirming Islamic supremacism, (Koran 3:110; "You are the best nation ever brought forth to men…you believe in Allah"), and states,

Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah which Allah made the best nation…

The preamble continues,

Believing that fundamental rights and universal freedoms in Islam are an integral part of the Islamic religion and that no one as a matter of principle has the right to suspend them in whole or in part or violate or ignore them in as much as they are binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets to complete the preceding divine messages thereby making their observance an act of worship and their neglect or violation an abominable sin, and accordingly every person is individually responsible  —  and the Ummah collectively responsible  —  for their safeguard."

In its concluding articles 24 and 25, the Cairo Declaration maintains, [article 24],

All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a"; and [article 25] "The Islamic Shari’a is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration.

These statements capture the indelible influence of the Islamic religious law Shari’a — the Cairo Declaration claiming supremacy based on "divine revelation," which renders sacred and permanent the notion of inequality between the community of Allah, and the infidels. Thus we can see clearly the differences between the Cairo Declaration, which sanctions the gross inequalities inherent in the Shari’a, and its Western human rights counterparts (the US Bill of Rights; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which do not refer to any specific religion or to the superiority of any group over another, and stress the absolute equality of all human beings.

 

Continue Reading at The American Thinker…

America’s exceptional ally

There has been much talk in recent months about the prospect of Syria bolting the Iranian axis and becoming magically transformed into an ally of the West. Although Syria’s President-for-life Bashar Assad’s daily demonstrations of fealty to his murderous friends has exposed this talk as nothing more than fantasy, it continues to dominate the international discourse on Syria.

In the meantime, Syria’s ongoing real transformation, from a more or less functioning state into an impoverished wasteland, has been ignored.

Today, the country faces the greatest economic catastrophe in its history. The crisis is causing massive malnutrition and displacement for hundreds of thousands of Syrians. These Syrians – some 250,000 mainly Kurdish farmers – have been forced off their farms over the past two years because their lands were reclaimed by the desert.

Today shantytowns have sprung up around major cities such as Damascus. They are filled with internally displaced refugees. Through a cataclysmic combination of irrational agricultural policies embraced by the Ba’athist Assad dynasty for the past 45 years that have eroded the soil, and massive digging of some 420,000 unauthorized wells that have dried out the groundwater aquifiers, Syria’s regime has done everything in its power to dry up the country. The effects of these demented policies have been exacerbated in recent years by Turkey’s diversion of Syria’s main water source, the Euphrates River, through the construction of dams upstream, and by two years of unrelenting drought. Today, much of Syria’s previously fertile farmland has become wasteland. Former farmers are now destitute day laborers with few prospects for economic recovery.

Imagine if in his country’s moment of peril, instead of clinging to his alliance with Iran, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, and Hamas, Assad were to turn to Israel to help him out of this crisis?

Israel is a world leader in water desalination and recycling. The largest desalination plant in the world is located in Ashkelon. Israeli technology and engineers could help Syria rebuild its water supply.

Israel could also help Syria use whatever water it still has, or is able to produce through desalination and recycling more wisely through drip irrigation – which was invented in Israel. Israel today supplies 50 percent of the international market for drip irrigation. In places like Syria and southern Iraq that are now being dried out by the Turkish dams, irrigation is primitive – often involving nothing more than water trucks pumping water out of the Euphrates and driving it over to fields that are often less than a kilometer away.

Then there are Syria’s dwindling oil reserves. No doubt, Israeli engineers and seismologists would be able to increase the efficiency and productivity of existing wells and so increase their output. It is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Israeli scientists and engineers could even discover new, untapped oil reserves.

BUT, OF COURSE, Syria isn’t interested in Israel’s help. Syria wants to have its enemy and eat it too. As Assad has made clear repeatedly, what he wants is to receive the Golan Heights – and through it Israel’s fresh water supply – for nothing. He wants Israel to surrender the Golan Heights, plus some Israeli land Syria illegally occupied from 1948 until1967, in exchange for a meaningless piece of paper.

In this demand, Assad is supported by none other than Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan, whose country is drying Syria out. It is Erdogan after all, who mediated talks aimed at convincing then-prime minister Ehud Olmert to give up the Golan Heights and it is Erdogan today who is encouraging the Obama administration to pressure Israel to surrender its water to Syria.

Beyond demanding that Israel give him the Golan Heights, Assad is happy associating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal and various and sundry al-Qaida leaders who move freely through his territory. Hanging out with these murderers affords him the opportunity to feel like a real man – a master of the universe who can kill Israelis, Iraqis and Americans and terrorize the Lebanese into submission.

As for his problems at home, Assad imprisons any Syrian engineer with the temerity to point out that by exporting cotton Syria is effectively exporting water. Assad doesn’t fear that his regime will collapse under the weight of five decades of Ba’athist economic imbecility. He is banking on the US and Europe saving him from the consequences of his own incompetence through economic handouts; by turning a blind eye to his continued economic exploitation of Lebanon; and perhaps by coercing Israel into surrendering the Golan Heights.

THE SAME, of course, can be said of the Palestinians. Actually, the case of the Palestinians is even more extraordinary. From 1967 through 1987 – when through their violent uprising they decided to cut their economy off from Israel’s – Palestinian economic growth in Gaza, Judea and Samaria rose by double digits every year. Indeed, while linked to Israel’s, the Palestinian economy was the fourth fastest growing economy in the world. But since 1994, when the PLO took over, although the Palestinians have become the largest per capita foreign aid recipients in recorded history, the Palestinian economy has contracted on a per capita basis.

The one sure-fire path to economic growth and prosperity is for the Palestinians to reintegrate their economy with Israel’s. But to do this, they must first end their involvement in terrorism and open their economy to free market forces and the transparency and rule of law and protection for property rights that form the foundations of those forces. The very notion of doing so, however, is considered so radical that supposedly moderate, pro-peace and free market friendly Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad rejected the economic peace plan put forward by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu out of hand. After all, how can the Palestinians accept free market forces when it means that – horror of horrors – Jews might buy and sell land and other resources?

The Palestinians and the Syrians are not alone. From Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and Indonesia, the Arab and Muslim world has preferred poverty and economic backwardness to the prosperity that would come from engaging Israel. They prefer their staunch rejection of Israel and hatred of Jews and the economic stagnation this involves to the prosperity and political freedom and stability that would come from an acceptance of Israel.

AS AMERICAN economic and technology guru George Gilder puts it in his new book The Israel Test, "The test of a culture is what it accomplishes in advancing the human cause – what it creates rather than what it claims."

Gilder’s book is a unique and necessary contribution to the current international debate about the Middle East. Rather than concentrate solely on Arab claims from Israel as most writers do, Gilder turns his attention to what the nations of the region create. Specifically, he shows that only Israel creates wealth through creativity and innovation and that today Israel is contributing more to the human cause through its scientific, technological and financial advances than any other country in the world except the US.

The Israel Test describes in riveting detail both the massive contributions of mainly Diaspora Jews to the US victories in World War II and the Cold War and to the scientific revolutions of the 20th century that set the foundations for the computer age, and the massive contributions of Israeli Jews to the digital revolution that defines and shapes our economic realities today.

But before Gilder begins to describe these great Jewish contributions to the global economy and the general well-being of people around the world, he asserts that the future of the world will be determined by its treatment of Israel. As he puts it, "The central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies, is the tiny state of Israel."

In his view, "Israel defines a line of demarcation," between those who pass and those who fail what he refers to as "the Israel test."

Gilder poses the test to his readers by asking them a few questions: "What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishment? Do you aspire to their excellence, or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?"

By his telling, the future of civilization will be determined by how the nations of the world – and particularly, how the American people – answer these questions.

Gilder’s book is valuable on its own accord. I personally learned an enormous amount about Israel’s pioneering role in the information economy. Beyond that, it provides a stunning rebuttal to the central arguments of the other major book that has been written about Israel and the Arabs in the US in recent years.

Steve Walt and John Mearshimer’s The Israel Lobby has two central arguments. First, they argue that Israel has little value as an ally to the US. Second, they assert that given Israel’s worthlessness to the US, the only reasonable explanation of why Americans overwhelmingly support Israel is that they have been manipulated by a conspiracy of Jewish organizations and Jewish-owned and controlled media and financial outlets. In their view, the nefarious Jewish-controlled forces have bamboozled the American people into believing that Israel is important to them and even a kindred nation to the US.

Gilder blows both arguments out of the water without even directly engaging them or noting Israel’s singular contributions to US intelligence and military prowess. Instead, he demonstrates that Israel is an indispensable motor for the US economy, which in turn is the principal driver of US power globally. Much of Silicon Valley’s economic prowess is founded on technologies made in Israel. Everything from the microchip to the cellphone has either been made in Israel or by Israelis in Silicon Valley.

It is Gilder’s own admiration for Israel’s exceptional achievements that puts paid Walt and Mearshimer’s second argument. There is something distinctively American in his enthusiasm for Israel’s innovative genius. From America’s earliest beginnings, the American character has been imbued with an admiration for achievement. As a nation, Americans have always passed Gilder’s Israel test.

Taken together with the other reasons for American support for Israel – particularly religious affinity for the people of the Bible – Gilder’s book shows that the American and Israeli people are indeed natural friends and allies bound together by their exceptionalism that motivates them to strive for excellence and progress to the benefit of all mankind.

Today Americans commemorate the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Those attacks were the greatest confrontation to date between American exceptionalism and Islamist nihilism. On this day, Gilder’s book serves as a reminder of what makes the US and its exceptional ally Israel worth defending at all costs. The Israel Test also teaches us that so long as we keep faith with ourselves, we will not be alone in our fight against barbarism and hatred, and inevitably, we will emerge the victors in this bitter fight.

Putin’s ‘do-over’

Twenty-six years ago this Fall, a titanic struggle played out in Europe.  The main protagonists were Ronald Reagan and the Western alliance he led on the one hand and Yuri Andropov’s KGB-led Soviet Union on the other.  It proved to be the beginning of the end of what Mr. Reagan properly called the "Evil Empire."  Today, one of Andropov’s agents, Vladimir Putin, is striving for a "do-over" – one which may have no-less-far-reaching implications.

In 1983, the issue was whether the NATO alliance would proceed with its agreed plan to deploy hundreds of Pershing II ballistic missiles and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles in five Western European nations (collectively known as Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces or INF).  The allies had decided such deployments were necessary in the face of the Soviets’ massive deployment of their own INF missiles, which the West called SS-20s – formidable weapons armed with three nuclear warheads intended to intimidate and dominate Western Europe.

By 1983, the Kremlin had made the defeat of this plan its top priority.  The KGB mobilized massive demonstrations aimed at preventing the basing counties from proceeding with the associated construction and ultimately with the installation of the missiles.  The Soviets employed both carrots and sticks – seductive arms control negotiations and threats of Armaggedon – to divide the United States from its allies. 

That gambit was made both more urgent and much more difficult for the USSR’s leader Andropov, who had long headed his nation’s feared intelligence service and secret police, because of a decisive Reagan victory in the course of the previous year.  The American president had adamantly opposed the construction of a massive new Siberian gas pipeline on the grounds that it would clearly have made Western Europe dependent upon Soviet energy – and, therefore, susceptible to Moscow’s blackmail.  Despite the determination of European leaders (including his friend Margaret Thatcher) to provide the funding and technology for the so-called "second strand" pipeline, Mr. Reagan ultimately prevailed.

Strong U.S. presidential leadership and the steadiness of the Defense Department (in which I was privileged to serve at the time) under the leadership of Mr. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stymied Soviet attempts to divide and conquer.  Even though the American State Department and its counterparts in the basing countries frantically sought an arms control deal that would prevent the INF deployment while leaving in place some number of SS-20s, President Reagan insisted on "the Zero Option":  Unless the Soviets agreed verifiably to eliminate all of the latter, NATO would proceed to put in place its off-setting deterrent forces.

The Soviets ultimately agreed to the Zero Option – but only after the allies demonstrated that they would not be dissuaded, divided or defeated.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Mikhail Gorbachev came to power unable to counter or contend with the Reagan strategy for destroying the USSR (laid out in several presidential decision documents).  Gorbachev proceeded to try to make adjustments, both at home and abroad, to keep the USSR a going concern.  Fortunately, in the end, the Evil Empire and even the Soviet Union itself came a-cropper.

Flash forward to today.  The NATO allies have again agreed to provide for their collective defense, this time by deploying not hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles but a radar and ten unarmed anti-missile interceptors in the Czech Republic and Poland, respectively.  This initiative has been made necessary and is sized minimally to contend with the emerging Iranian missile threat to Europe and the United States.

This time around, however, Andropov’s successor as the de facto master of the Kremlin, former KGB thug-turned president/prime minister of Russia Vladimir Putin, thinks he will be able to prevail over the Atlantic Alliance where his former boss did not.

And with good reason.  The United States is now led by a president who is– to put it charitably– no Ronald Reagan.  Barack Obama and his administration have been determined to "reset" relations with Moscow.  Toward that end, they have (among numerous other concessions) signaled a willingness to cashier the deployment in Eastern Europe of missile defenses that the Russians claim, preposterously, to find threatening.

In fact, the New York Times reported on Saturday that Team Obama is poised to look at alternatives – sea-based missile defenses or putting those or other anti-missile systems ashore someplace other than Poland and the Czech Republic.  Among the candidates said to be under consideration are Turkey, the Balkans or Israel.  Never mind that these alternatives pose their own problems, including security, stability and geographic appropriateness given the trajectories of missiles Iran might launch.

The Polish and Czech governments are understandably horrified at this transparent bid to accede to the Kremlin’s efforts to reestablish a sphere of influence in Europe.  Other Europeans (notably, the Germans) now heavily dependent on Russian-supplied natural gas – another dramatic reversal of Reagan’s time-tested policies – and therefore subject to oft-practiced Moscow’s energy blackmail, are happy to join Washington in appeasing Putin.

Should the United States indeed go that route, it will amount to much more than a strategically costly "do-over" of the INF fight.  It will make plain to all the emerging "Obama Doctrine" with its three ominous characteristics: abandoning our allies, emboldening our enemies and diminishing our country.  The upshot, in sharp contrast to the Reagan legacy of pursuing peace through strength, will assuredly be a far more dangerous world.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and the host of the nationally syndicated program Secure Freedom Radio heard in Washington on WTNT 570 at 9 p.m.

Supporters of ‘dialogue’ with the Iranian Mullahs help keep the US from ‘meddling’ on behalf of freedom

The Obama administration’s failure to stand firmly with the forces of opposition to the mullahs’ regime in Tehran is drawing criticism at home and around the world. Even as many thousands of young Iranians take to the streets, furious at brazen election-rigging and fed up with corrupt clerics and their thuggish enforcers, the United States, erstwhile leader of the free world, has maintained a strict official policy of neutrality.

The question is, how did America  fall from the soaring rhetoric of President George W. Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address – when he said: "And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you" – to a position on the sidelines, passively watching Iranian security forces club and shoot unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Tehran?

The apparent answer is that advocates of a policy of accommodation that is more in sync with the priorities of the Tehran regime than with U.S. national security interests now wield influence from inside the Obama administration.

To be sure, President Barack Obama issued a belated and weakly-worded statement on Saturday, 20 June 2009: "The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights." [1] Still, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the United States’ official, hands-off policy the day after Iran’s elections, when during a trip to Canada, she said: "We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran. We, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide. The U.S. has refrained from commenting on the election in Iran. We obviously hope that the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people." [2]

Given that Iran’s democratic processes are but a façade for a constitutional system that endows an unelected Shi’a clergy with essentially all power in the country, and where both polling places and ballot boxes are under the physical control of the Interior Ministry, Clinton’s statement must be characterized as disingenuous, at best. As late as 18 June 2009, Clinton still hewed to the Obama administration’s policy of non-involvement, saying, "It is for the Iranians to determine how they resolve this internal protest concerning the outcome of the recent election." [3]

What motivated this policy might be found in Secretary Clinton’s  comment of the previous day to reportersthat "The Obama administration will pursue talks with Iran on nuclear and other issues regardless of who emerges as president in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed election. We are obviously waiting to see the outcome of the internal Iranian processes, but our intent is to pursue whatever opportunities might exist in the future with Iran [to discuss those issues]." [4]

And indeed, on 21 June 2009, even as the details on the dead and injured from the previous day’s street clashes were still filtering in, the home page of the Department of State’s website showed nothing about Iran at all. There were stories about India, Iraq, Turkey, World Refugee Day, Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, and Secretary Clinton’s elbow surgery – but not so much as a link to anything about the momentous events taking place in Iran. [5]

On election day, Iran’s English TV news outlet, Press TV, quoted the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Amb. Susan Rice, speaking to the same point about this administration’s unshakeable determination to conduct negotiations with Iran, no matter the regime in power: "American policy with respect to Iran and its nuclear program is not dependent on which administration is governing Iran," Rice told reporters. [6]

 

The People Behind Obama’s Iran Policy

Unfortunately, the present U.S. policy towards Iran was set long before the rigged presidential election there began spinning out of control. That policy is the product of an Obama administration populated with figures, like Rice, who have a record of advocacy in support of a policy of rapprochement with Tehran’s clerical regime. Prior to her ambassadorial appointment to the UN, for instance, Rice served on the board of directors of an organization called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) [7] and also as a Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy and Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. CNAS produced two reports in September 2008 called "Iran: Assessing U.S. Strategic Options," and "The Case for Game-Changing Diplomacy with Iran."  Both papers advocated engagement, diplomacy and negotiations with Tehran and advised strongly against the use of forceful pressure – exactly the sort of policy the mullahs themselves would encourage. [8] Among the co-authors of "Iran: Assessing U.S. Strategic Options," was Dr. Vali Nasr, now senior advisor to President Obama’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Nasr, who served as a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher Schooland  formerly taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, was born in Iran and raised in Scotland and the U.S.  He is the author of The Shia Revival, a 2006 book about the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry.

A frequent commentator and briefer to Congress and the White House, Nasr consistently has advocated a policy of accommodation with the mullahs’ regime, even as a nuclear weapons state. Tehran signaled its apparent approval of Dr. Nasr’s positions when one of its online news outlets, Baztab, carried a glowing profile of him in October 2006 written by Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). [9]

More recently, Nasr’s appointment in the Obama administration garnered warm congratulations from the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which carried an announcement on its website on 29 January 2009. [10] NIAC and its Iranian-born founder-president, Trita Parsi, have been active over the last several years organizing and supporting a network of individuals and groups that recommend a policy of accommodation with the Iranian regime.  The Iranian media outlet Aftab News called NIAC the Tehran regime’s "Iranian Lobby in the United States." [11]

NIAC issued a statement on 16 June 2009 about events in Iran, asserting that the U.S. government "shouldn’t interfere" as its "involvement would be counterproductive." While the organization allowed that the U.S. should "voice its support for the demonstrators," [12] Parsi took issue with a strong statement of support for the young Iranian freedom fighters issued by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn).  Sen. Lieberman urged the Obama administration to "speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support." [13] Claiming that in the past such support has "been detrimental" to Iranian opposition figures, Parsi asserted that, "The administration is doing exactly the right thing. They’re not rushing in and they’re not playing favorites." [14]

Another co-author of the CNAS report, "Iran: Assessing U.S. Policy Options" is Dennis Ross, the Middle East expert who was appointed Special Advisor to Secretary of State Clinton for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia in early 2009.  He was reportedly abruptly reassigned in June 2009 as the senior Iran official on the National Security Council at the White House, a post that would afford him close proximity to, and presumably considerable influence with, President Obama. [15]

Amb. Ross’ contribution to the CNAS paper comes down on the side of an Iran policy he calls "The Hybrid Approach – Engagement Without Preconditions, but with Pressures. [16] The essential premise of his approach is that Iran’s leadership is rational and would be responsive to traditional diplomatic solutions that include a multilateral approach, Western concessions and what he calls trying "to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion." [17]

Nowhere in the Ross chapter is there any recognition that this is an ideologically-motivated regime that has: been at war with the United States for 30 years;kidnapped, killed, held hostage and tortured American citizens; staged assassinations and suicide bombings around the world; supported terrorist organizations from Hamas and Hezbollah to al-Qa’eda; and pursues nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles with which to exercise the genocide it regularly threatens to inflict on Israel, a key U.S. ally and fellow member of the UN.  Regrettably, Dennis Ross’ conclusion that "It is time to try a serious approach to diplomacy" with Iran fits well with an Obama administration policy that refuses to take seriously Tehran’s visceral enmity towards the United States.

Finally, there is Ray Takeyh, the newly-appointed Assistant to the U.S. Special Advisor for the Gulf and Southwest Asia (the post formerly held by Dennis Ross). Takeyh is a former Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an Iran expert, and author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic and Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs.

Takeyh has long advocated a U.S. policy based on engagement and rapprochement with Iran. A December 2008 report produced by the Brooking Institution’s Saban Center was entitled, "Restoring the Balance – a Middle East Strategy for the Next President. [18] Its Iran chapter was written by Ray Takeyh and his wife, Susan Maloney (also at the CFR), and urges a soft diplomatic approach to the Tehran regime. A Washington Post opinion piece by Takeyh that same month looked hopefully to the prospect of "direct dialogue" with the mullahs and implausibly suggested that "As Tehran gains power and influence in the Gulf, it may prove moderate on more distant terrain. [19]

 

The End of the Line for the ‘Engagers’?

While there are certainly  analysts who sincerely believe that a forthright U.S. position in support of Iran’s democracy movement might create a nationalistic backlash against outside interference or somehow taint the movement’s legitimacy in the eyes of other Iranians, those who advance such arguments ill-advisedly serve – whether wittingly or not – to shield the Iranian regime from U.S. and Western condemnation.

The one thing the mullahs’ regime fears is the outrage of a world community unified in resolve to hold them to account. Even though Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s "State of the Union" program on 21 June 2009 that "I don’t think candidly that our intelligence [on Iran] is that good," modern technology leaves no excuse for not knowing what is going on in Iran these days. [20] Now, smart phones with cameras, tech-savvy bloggers who know how to get around the regime’s censors and Twitter are allowing the outside world to witness in real time the brutality of the Iranian security services, as they club, stab, and shoot unarmed young demonstrators on the streets.

The students are not the ones asking the U.S. to remain on the sidelines.  To the contrary, students who were imprisoned for their parts in a1999 uprising say that they found the courage to remain strong in jail when word reached them that not only did the outside world know of their plight, but was speaking out forcefully on their behalf .

Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that the controversial engagement policy towards Tehran promoted by President Obama and his key subordinates is insupportable. With luck, when all is said and done, the mullahocracy may no longer be around.  

At the very least, even if the regime manages to maintain a blood-soaked grip on power for the time being, a government headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei  and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be unable to claim legitimacy in the international arena. The sort of appeasement strategy towards such a regime fancied by Team Obama should be effectively foreclosed by the dozens of YouTube postings showing the vicious, unprovoked savagery of Iranian security forces (and proxy paramilitary units supplied by Hezbollah and Hamas) attacking, beating and killing young protestors.

In the absence of fundamental changes in policy and behavior towards the people of Iran, even a regime with the current chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as Supreme Leader or with challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi as president would be no better for the Iranians, or for us.

Whether they mean to or not, those who advocate a U.S. policy of passivity in the face of a repressive Iranian government (either today’s or tomorrow’s) play into the hands of such a regime by supporting a course of action that supports its agenda – not ours. Both national security priorities and the moral high ground demand such a regime be confronted, not accommodated.

There should be no dialogue with a theocratic dictatorship that stays in power through sheer brute force, defies the international community by developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (and the means to deliver them) and exports  terrorist operatives to undermine Iran’s neighbors and kill our countrymen and women  in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  That such a regime  has succeeded in persuading an American administration to adopt as U.S. foreign policy so much of the mullahs’ preferred agenda is testament to the sophistication of its operational expertise and its success in placing its sympathizers inside our government.

Now, it is time for President Obama to reject the counsel of such agents of influence and demonstrate a U.S. resolve to match the courage of Iran’s freedom fighters.

 

Clare M. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence & Security Studies. She is the author of Rise of the Iran Lobby, a Center Occasional Paper.

 NOTES

[1] The White House website posted the president’s statement on July 20, 2009. Accessed online on 21 June 2009 at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/The-Presidents-Statement-on-Iran/

[2] NECN/CTV film clip of Secretary Clinton’s statement on Canadian TV, 13 June 2009. Accessed online on 21 June 2009 at: http://multimedia.boston.com/m/22499652/clinton-canada-s-cannon-react-to-iranian-election-reports.htm?pageid=20 

[3] TV Washington, "Clinton defends U.S. efforts over Iran election," 18 June 2009. Accessed online on 21 June 2009 at  http://televisionwashington.com/floater_article1.aspx?lang=en&t=3&id=11365  

[4] "Clinton: U.S. Intent on Direct Talks with Iran," Associated Press, 17 June 2009. Accessed online 21 June 2009 at http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=statesmanjournal&sParam=35381852.story.

[5] The Department of State home page was accessed on 21 June 20098 at http://www.state.gov/

[6] "Rice: Iran policy not bound by elections," Press TV, 12 June 2009. Accessed online 21 June 2009 at http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97957&sectionid=3510203

[7] See "The Iran Lobby," a Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper by Clare Lopez.  Accessed on 21 June at http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p17907.xml

[8] Center for a New American Security, Publications page. Accessed on 21 June 2009 at http://www.cnas.org/publications?page=3

[9] Baztab, October 27, 2006. The English language homepage is at http://en/baztab.com, accessed on 30 December 2006.

[10] "NIAC welcomes appointment of Iranian American Vali Nasr to Obama Administration," 29 January 2009. Accessed at http://www.niacouncil.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1323&Itemid=2 on 21 June 2009.

[11] "Iran Lobby in the U.S. Becoming Active?" Aftab News, 7 December 2007.

[12] "Iran Election Violence: What Should the US Do?", NIAC statement, 16 June 2009. Accessed on 21 June 2009 at  http://www.niacouncil.org/

[13] Ackerman, Spencer, "Obama’s Iran Policy to Focus on Human Rights, Not Election," The Washington Independent, 15 June 2009. Accessed 21 June 2009 at http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97957&sectionid=3510203

[14] Ibid.

[15] Harnden, Toby, "US envoy to Iran removed amid divisions over policy, "Telegraph," 16 June 2009. Accessed on 21 June 2009 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/5552485/US-envoy-to-Iran-removed-amid-divisions-over-policy.html 

[16] Iran: Assessing U.S. Strategic Options," CNAS, September 2008. Accessed 21 June 2009 at http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/MillerParthemoreCampbell_Iran%20Assessing%20US%20Strategy_Sept08.pdf. Ross is author of Chapter II, "Diplomatic Strategies for Dealing with Iran," pgs. 33-54. 

[17] Ibid, pg. 51.

[18] Brookings Institute, Saban Center, "Restoring the Balance in the Middle East," December 2, 2008. Accessed on 21 June 2009 at http://www.brookings.edu/interviews/2008/1202_middle_east_indyk.aspx 

[19] Takeyh, Ray, "What Iran Wants," Washington Post, 29 December 2008. Accessed on 21 June 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content /article/2008/12/28/AR2008122801273.html 

[20] Top Intelligence Democrat: No Interference in Iran," Associated Press, 21 June 2009. Viewed by the author on CNN TV and available online at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jrMPfLa7wHBXn8XwHZfyDJjgtxCgD98V3HG81