President Barack Obama was bound to oppose Mr. Netanyahu’s
entirely predictable speech before the US Congress. And Mr. Obama, an advocate
of extreme campaigning, as usual pulled out all the stops on his rhetorical
organ.
It may be best to get some housekeeping details out of the
way.
Nothing said by Mr. Netanyahu will be fresh. He will tell
the Congress what he has been shouting from the rooftops for decades: that the
sly mullahs in Iran are determined to produce a nuclear weapon; that Iran, as a
repository of nuclear weapons, will present a threat to the existence of Israel,
as well as other states in The Middle East not friendly to Iran; that Iran, by
shipping munitions to al-Qaida and its affiliates, is directly responsible for
the deaths of US soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan; that Islamic
hardliners in Iran will not be bound by
paper arrangements; that the dismantling of sanctions on Iran will simply
embolden the enemies of the West; that Iran is an exporter and enable of Hamas,
a terrorist organization, and so on and so on. The Obama administration has
weathered such observations for years. Nothing new here.
More than a year ago, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported,
“The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about
the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State
Department the most. ‘The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,’ this
official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by
his nickname.”
Asked by Mr. Goldberg to expand on his comment, the Obama
official said, “The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch
wars. The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an
accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only
thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not
[Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin.
He’s got no guts."
Asked at a press conference whether Mr. Obama agreed with
the assessment, Josh Earnest, unreeled the usual non-apologetic script. No, the
president did not agree with the assessment of the high government official: “There
is a very close relationship between the United States and Israel. But that
close relationship does not mean that we paper over our differences.”
It is true that the “United States and Israel” have in the
past had a close relationship, but the relationship between current President
Barack Obama and current Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu is frosty,
the differences between them often being papered over by slick presidential communications
directors such as Mr. Ernest, who did not say whether Mr. Obama would fire the
top official in the Obama administration for calling Bibi a chickens**t.
While nothing said by Mr. Netanyahu to Congress will endanger
pending presidential or Congressional elections -- thank God they are over – it
seems apparent that Mr. Obama is not disinterested in Israeli elections. “A top
appointee in President Barack Obama’s 2012 election campaign,” The Daily Caller has reported, “is now working to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu in the upcoming March election.”
Comments
The real Barack Obama is not in disagreement with Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, but he knows that for the time being the American electorate can't quite stomach revolution based in self-hatred. The real Barack Obama is pro-Palestinian, but knows the electorate is pro-Israel. The real Barack Obama agrees with Noam Chomsky that the United States and Israel have threatened and abused Iran. The point is not that the Left is mistaken; big time, as Dick Cheney might say. It's that we have a President who is operating on Leftist premises he intentionally conceals. That is the source of the confusion with the "procedure" involved in Netanyahu's speech. And, it is the cause of the complete and utter collapse of American hegemony with the attendant dissolution political order, as in Libya. When he was running in 2012 Obama leaned quietly in towards the oppressed World Community of his imagination, and whispered that after the election he may be more "flexible."
----------------
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, what’s the crucial fact about Iran, which we should begin with, is that for the past 60 years, not a day has passed in which the U.S. has not been torturing Iranians. That’s 60 years, right now. Began with a military coup, which overthrew the parliamentary regime in 1953, installed the Shah, a brutal dictator. Amnesty International described him as one of the worst, most extreme torturers in the world, year after year. When he was overthrown in 1979, the U.S. almost immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein in an assault against Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, used extensive use of chemical weapons.
-------------
Rudy Giuliani is right to admire Netanyahu. He was right about Obama, too, although our Presidente may not be completely void of patriotic passion.
--------------
Socialist patriotism refers to a form of civic patriotism promoted by Marxist–Leninist movements.[1] Socialist patriotism promotes people living within Marxist-Leninist countries to adopt a "boundless love for the socialist homeland, a commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society [and] the cause of communism".[2] Socialist patriotism is not connected with nationalism, as Marxists and Marxist-Leninists denounce nationalism as a bourgeois ideology developed under capitalism that sets workers against each other.[3
--------
The Case Against Arms Control
11.01.84 - 12:00 AM | by Seymour Weiss
Share on print Print PDF
In one sense the case against arms control is not difficult to make. One might simply ask just what evidence exists that recent nuclear-arms-limitations agreements with the USSR have actually contributed to U.S. security. Yet in spite of the fact that no such evidence can be found, emotional attachment to the hoped-for benefits, together with the presumption that arms control is politically attractive, has created what Albert Wohlstetter has sardonically described as the mad momentum of arms control. It is this emotional attachment that makes the task of rational assessment more difficult. There is an undeniable and understandable yearning among our people, reflected in Congress and certainly echoed by our allies, for a cessation of the tensions that have accompanied the years of confrontation with the USSR.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-case-against-arms-control/
-----------------------
On the core issue of preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons, Mr. Obama said, “the prime minister didn’t offer any viable alternatives.”
------------
Chris Murphy ✔ @ChrisMurphyCT
Follow
Netanyahu's criticism of talks were strong, but I didn't hear a plausible alternative.