Israel Won't Warn U.S. Before Iran Strike

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

AP Source: Israel Won't Warn U.S. Before Iran Strike

Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to convince them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak delivered the message to a series of high-level U.S. visitors to the country, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House national security adviser, the director of national intelligence and top U.S. lawmakers, all trying to close the trust gap between Israel and the U.S. over how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Netanyahu delivered the same message to all the Americans who have traveled to Israel for talks, the U.S. official said.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/28/147552939/ap-source-israel-wont-warn-u-s-before-iran-strike

I guess when the IDF begins the raid by firing on unprotected US surveillance assets, we will know the attack on Iran will soon follow.

[X Factor 1,110]

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack.

Do you buy this as a valid reason?

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Obama's Most Dangerous GOP Opponent: Netanyahu

...

So Israel would, without warning, put US troops and Western civilians at direct risk of terrorist assaults, would likely tip Pakistan into even more outright hostility to any cooperation with the West, and rally the Iranian opposition to its foul regime. It would destroy the global coalition against Iran, increase even further its own global isolation, and only set back Iranian nuclear development for a few years - and make it, or a Third World War based on religion, inevitable. My own fear is that global recruitment for Jihad would boom as well - reversing all the gains of the last three years. The war would also galvanize Islamist parties in the new Arab democracies, giving Israel more ammunition in blocking any rapprochement between the US and the Muslim world. And following this essential blackmail, the Israeli government would doubtless rally much of the US Congress, the entire GOP, its media outlets (like Fox, and the Washington Post), and a key part of the Democratic fundraising machinery to side entirely with Israel against the US president.

I don't think you can understand the Republican strategy for this election without factoring in a key GOP player, Benjamin Netanyahu. He already has core members of the US Congress siding openly with him against the US president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman - like McCain, Lieberman and Butters. Netanyahu's war would be designed to rile up not only his own neo-fascist base, but also encourage American evangelical voters to turn out against Obama, the "anti-Christ", while other Greater Israel fanatics, like Sheldon Adelson, keep bankrolling as many Greater Israel GOP nominees as they can. A global war which polarizes America and the world is exactly what Netanyahu wants. And it is exactly what the GOP needs to cut through Obama's foreign policy advantage in this election. Because it is only through war, crisis and polarization that extremists can mobilize the emotions that keep them in power. They need war to win.

Here's a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/02/obamas-most-dangerous-gop-opponent-netanyahu.html

[Leatherneck 693]

Do you buy this as a valid reason?

Nope, that smells like a pc or political reason. Netanyahu and Israel have been treated with a bit of contempt by Obama.

[MyLittlePony 340]

A good reason so they can control oil.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Netanyahu and Israel have been treated with a bit of contempt by Obama.

More like the opposite, although your comment would absolutely be in line with Likud's assessment. Whether Likud (and its proxy, AIPAC) really represents the views of most American Jews is another question.

This piece goes into the details of the Obama-Netanyahu spat - basically, Netanyahu and his settler-supporters think Israel should take all of the West Bank that it wants, while pushing as many Palestinians as it can manage to push off the land (the same thing the Zionist enterprise planned from the beginning.) The so-called "2-state solution" based on the pre-1967 armistice lines (although it has been the policy of the U.S. and the consensus of the international community as the only way to settle the conflict) is a threat to that end:

The last time Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu shared each other’s company, you could say that the encounter did not go well—if by “not well” you mean abysmally. This was on May 20, the day after Obama gave his big speech on the Arab Spring, in which he unleashed a tsunami of tsuris by endorsing the use of Israel’s 1967 borders “with mutually agreed [land] swaps” as the basis for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Obama and Netanyahu were seated in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be one of those photo ops devoted to roasting rhetorical chestnuts about the solidity of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Instead, while Obama watched silently, looking poleaxed, Netanyahu lectured him—for seven and a half minutes, on live television—about the folly, the sheer absurdity, of suggesting Israel ever return to what he called the “indefensible” 1967 lines.

...

With the Middle East apparently hurtling headlong into crisis, Israel finds itself increasingly isolated, beleaguered, and besieged: its embassy in Cairo invaded by Egyptian protesters, its relations with Turkey in tatters, its continued occupation of (and expansion of settlements within) the Palestinian territories the subject of wide international scorn. How wide? Wide enough that Abbas could credibly claim that 126 of the 193 U.N. member states support his statehood initiative. Yet despite the damage thwarting that bid might do to America’s standing in the region, the Obamans have never wavered in going balls-out for Israel.

And not for the first time, either. Again and again, when Israel has been embroiled in international dustups—over its attack last year on a flotilla filled with activists headed from Turkey to Gaza, to cite but one example—the White House has had Israel’s back. The security relationship between the countries, on everything from intelligence sharing to missile-­defense development to access to top-shelf weapons, has never been more robust. And when the Cairo embassy was seized and Netanyahu called to ask for Obama’s help with rescuing the last six Israelis trapped inside the building, the president not only picked up the phone but leaned hard on the Egyptians to free those within. “It was a decisive moment,” Netanyahu recalled after the six had been freed. “Fateful, I would even say.”

All of which raises an interesting, perplexing, and suddenly quite pressing question: How, exactly, did Obama come to be portrayed, and perceived by many American Jews, as the most ardently anti-Israel president since Jimmy Carter?

...

It was Netanyahu’s coalition partners that provoked the great contretemps of 2010 with the U.S.: the cold-cocking of Joe Biden. Arguably the administration’s staunchest Zionist and a longtime friend of Netanyahu’s—a signed photo of Biden from his Senate days sits on Bibi’s desk—the vice-president arrived in Israel that March to promote the “proximity” peace talks that the sides had just agreed to undertake. There he was ambushed with a surprise announcement by the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by the fundamentalist Shas Party, of the building of new settlement blocs in contested East Jerusalem. Netanyahu was apparently as blindsided as Biden was.

The Obamans were livid at Biden’s flagrant ill-treatment. Hillary Clinton administered a now-famous 43-minute telephonic blistering to Netanyahu, and, according to Jeffrey Goldberg on Bloomberg.com, Bob Gates “told several people that if he had been Biden, he would have returned to Washington immediately and told the prime minister to call Obama when he was serious about negotiations.”

Thirteen days later, Netanyahu traveled to Washington and met with Obama at the White House. The president expressed his anger about the Biden incident. Within days, media outlets around the world were filled with Israeli-sourced stories about Obama’s rudeness to Netanyahu: that there had been no photo op, no joint statement, and that 44 had walked out of their meeting and left Bibi stewing in a West Wing meeting room while the president had dinner with his family. Were the stories true? Obama’s people dispute the details. But the damage to his reputation with many American Jews had already been done; the “snub” to Netanyahu took its place atop the growing list of administration affronts to Israel.

...

With the new Republican Congress having invited Netanyahu to address a full joint session—making him only the fourth foreign leader (along with Yitzhak Rabin, Nelson Mandela, and Winston Churchill) to have been granted the privilege more than once—Obama was planning a major speech on the Middle East ahead of Bibi’s. The question was whether the president should lay out a framework for a two-state solution, including principles on borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. Clinton and Mitchell were in favor of including all four; Ross and Donilon were in favor of including none, and until a few days before the speech, it appeared that they would have their way. But in the end, Obama opted for two: principles on borders and security.

Everyone knew that the language on borders would stir up a hell of a fuss, though in truth there was nothing terribly controversial about what Obama said. The 1967 lines plus land swaps has been for decades the geographic template for any plausible two-state solution, and was employed (almost fruitfully) by Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat in 2000 and (again, almost fruitfully) by Bush, Ehud Olmert, and Abbas in 2008. The trouble was that its explicit embrace by Obama caught Netanyahu by surprise, almost certainly because Dennis Ross had assured him privately that it wouldn’t be in the speech.

Netanyahu threw a nutty. Before he departed Israel for Washington, his office issued a statement saying that the “Prime Minister expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004 … commitments [that] relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines.” The statement was extraordinary on multiple levels: in its sheer presumptuousness (“expects”?); in its willful misreading of Obama’s words (ignoring the part about land swaps); and in its total neglect of the many hard-line pro-Israel positions the president had advanced, including a scornful rejection of the Palestinian statehood bid at the U.N., sharp criticism of Israel-denying Hamas, skeptical questioning of its new alliance with Israel-accepting Fatah, and harsh condemnation of Iran and Syria.

The next day, Netanyahu delivered his on-camera lecture to Obama. What enraged the president and his team wasn’t the impudence on display; they could live with that. It was the dishonesty at the heart of the thing. “I’ve been in more than one meeting with Bibi where he used the same language to describe the outlines of a deal,” one official says. “It’s outrageous—attacking the president for something he didn’t say, claiming he was putting Israel’s security at risk for stating out loud a position Bibi himself holds privately.”

...

The next day came his speech to Congress, in which he spelled out demands that were maximal by any measure: recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for negotiations, a refusal to talk if Hamas is part of the Palestinian side, an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and absolutely no right of return for Palestinian refugees. Taken as a whole, his whirlwind Washington visit provided a strong dose of clarity: With Barak having moved his newly formed Independence Party into Netanyahu’s governing coalition, its new stability has reduced to near zero the incentives for him to take the risks required for peace.

In the eyes of some observers, Netanyahu’s performance over those days suggested something else: that he was taking sides in the 2012 race. As Time’s Joe Klein sharply noted, Netanyahu “has now, overtly, tossed his support to the Republicans.” With cover from Bibi, Mitt Romney pronounced that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus.” Michele Bachmann tweeted that his “call for 1967 borders will cause chaos, division & more aggression in Middle East and put Israel at further risk.” Tim Pawlenty (remember him?) called Obama’s policy “a disaster waiting to happen.”

...

http://nymag.com/news/politics/israel-2011-9/

[^_^ 5,021]

My (liberal, Democratic voting) Jewish friends all compare Bibi to a terrorist.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

My (liberal, Democratic voting) Jewish friends all compare Bibi to a terrorist.

When they start throwing around money like AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson, maybe someone will be interested in their opinions.

Meanwhile, look who's on the ticket for AIPAC's big powwow next week:

Obama to address AIPAC, meet with Netanyahu

Romney, Gingrich and Santorum to address AIPAC

Who'll kiss the most shiney hiney ? Tough to call...

Nutty will be there, watching the performances in person.

Netanyahu to address AIPAC

[mawilson 2,133]

My (liberal, Democratic voting) Jewish friends all compare Bibi to a terrorist.

Takes a Jewish terrorist to defeat a Muslim terrorist. Jewish terrorists didn't attack us on 9/11.

[luckytxn 2,263]

Takes a Jewish terrorist to defeat a Muslim terrorist. Jewish terrorists didn't attack us on 9/11.

Jewish terrorists has attacked America before. They also attacked British assets when it suited them. When innocent Palestinians get bombed and die by IDF punishment raids, that is terrorism. Why are we even supporting these thugs. Does the hatred against Muslims because of the actions of a few really warrant this much backing of Israel?

[luckytxn 2,263]

I guess when the IDF begins the raid by firing on unprotected US surveillance assets, we will know the attack on Iran will soon follow.

Wouldn't surprise me at all. I am sure that they are going after Iran's facilities if we don't and I can't figure out how they will do it except to go through the U.S.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

So in addition to the mega-lobby AIPAC trying to influence/manipulate the U.S. presidential elections in order to further and facilitate Israeli government objectives, we have the sitting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu using his close friend Sheldon Adelson to further manipulate the political process by underwriting Gingrich's candidacy.

Curiously, Gingrich was not formerly considered an extremist on the Israel-Palestine issue - he made rather moderate statements, and personally welcomed Yasser Arafat to Washington during the Oslo days.

But then he met Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson, in case anyone didn't know, is an American billionaire casino baron who is also an adherent of the "Greater Israel" ideology ("Israel from the river to the sea" - no Palestinian state in the West Bank.) He is a major Likud supporter, a major donor to many Zionist organizations, and he owns an Israeli newspaper called Israel Hayom. This newspaper basically exists as a mouthpiece and cheerleader for Netanyahu and his policies (Israelis call it the "Bibiton.") He is also thinks Iran needs to be attacked, like real soon. And he's willing to put a considerable pile of dough behind someone he thinks will lead the U.S. into facilitating this agenda.

Gingrich is his guy.

Aren't SuperPACs a great idea ?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Wouldn't surprise me at all. I am sure that they are going after Iran's facilities if we don't and I can't figure out how they will do it except to go through the U.S.

And, no doubt, point the finger at Iran, or Syria, or Turkey.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Takes a Jewish terrorist to defeat a Muslim terrorist. Jewish terrorists didn't attack us on 9/11.

Nor did Muslims

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Takes a Jewish terrorist to defeat a Muslim terrorist. Jewish terrorists didn't attack us on 9/11.