Bibi Netanyahu, Ingrate

Bibi Netanyahu, Ingrate
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/02/22/bibi-netanyahu-ingrate/
His appeal to Israeli anti-Americanism is contemptible

by Justin Raimondo, February 23, 2015
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With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tanking in the polls, and the election fast approaching, he and his right-wing Likud party are taking desperate measures to shore up their flagging support.

Their campaign is imperiled by Bibi’s underhanded tactics in inveigling an invitation to speak to the US Congress on the eve of the Obama administration’s delicate negotiations with Iran – an event sure to turn into a heavy-handed denunciation of the peace talks and a direct appeal to the Republican-controlled Congress to sabotage them. The whole arrangement was done behind the President’s back, and it has sunk US-Israeli relations to a new low. Meanwhile, in Israel, alarm rather than support for Netanyahu is the dominant reaction: the fear is that Bibi’s willfulness is endangering the "special relationship" with the US, which has been a vital lifeline for the Jewish state lo these many years.

Bibi, it seems to many Israelis, is the one who needs a "Bibi-sitter."

The opposition is scoring points and making gains – but the intransigent Netanyahu, characteristically, is digging in, and even going on the offensive. His campaign has released a new ad showing an image of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister, and text that reads:

"In 1948, Ben-Gurion stood before a fateful moment: The creation of the State of Israel. The U.S. secretary of state firmly objected [to the establishment of Israel]. Ben-Gurion – contrary to the State Department’s position – announced the establishment of the state… Would we be here today had Ben-Gurion not done the right thing?"

The ad ends with this exhortation: "Only Likud. Only Netanyahu" – and, I might add, only lies.

Aside from being a blatant appeal to growing Israeli anti-Americanism – a disturbing trend I pointed out long ago – the ad represents a considerable distortion of the historical record.

It is true that, in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, then US Secretary of State George C. Marshall was opposed to US recognition of the Jewish state. He wanted to delay it until the United Nations General Assembly could deal with the matter. Virtually the entire US foreign policy Establishment of the time – the so-called "Wise Men" who ushered the US into the postwar world – supported this view, which was summed up by then Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal, who told Clark Clifford: "There are thirty million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other. Why don’t you face up to the realities?"

What Netanyahu leaves out of this narrative, however, is the countervailing role played by President Harry Truman, who supported recognizing Israel against the advice of nearly all his advisors. Truman encouraged the Jewish Agency, the predecessor to the Israeli state, to declare independence when the British mandate ended, and promised his support. When the US representative to the United Nations voted to refer the Palestine question to a commission, the President was enraged, writing in a note:

"The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. The first I know about it is what I read in the newspapers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and double-crosser. I’ve never felt so low in my life."

Truman took considerable political risks in opposing Marshall, who was presciently convinced recognition of Israel would be nothing but trouble for the US. General Marshall, former US chief of staff, enjoyed enormous prestige, and if he had resigned over this, or split with the President publicly, the political consequences for the increasingly unpopular Truman would have been costly. Yet Truman took on the State Department for two reasons, neither of which fit neatly into the Netanyahu narrative of American treachery on the eve of Israel’s birth.

One reason was moral: the horrors of the Holocaust were just being revealed in all their grisly details. Truman felt that the Jewish people not only deserved a homeland but were owed one: whatever one’s view of that stance, it stands in stark contrast to the portrait of American obstructionism painted by Likud’s historical revisionism.

The other reason was political. Truman was facing a challenge from the left-wing of his party, represented by the candidacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace, who was running under the banner of the Progressive party. Backed by the Communists, who were still a significant if waning force in American politics, Wallace closely followed the Kremlin line on the Palestine question, which was at that time militantly pro-Israel. Indeed, as the US administration was debating whether or not to recognize the Jewish state, Soviet envoy Andrei Gromyko was declaring in the UN his fulsome support for Israeli independence. Zionism was a pet left-wing cause at the time: it was the conservatives in both parties who opposed it.

Fearful of losing the largely left-wing Jewish vote to Wallace, Truman made a blatantly political move in coming out for Israel. After listening to the objections of his foreign policy advisors, Truman bluntly stated: "I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."

This doesn’t fit into Netanyahu’s narrative either, which is yet another reason why the Likud ad focuses on Marshall and completely erases Truman, the decisive figure in this history. According to Bibi, Ben Gurion’s unilateralism was undertaken in total defiance of the United States, which was intent on sabotaging Israel from the very beginning. However, the truth is that Truman had promised his support early on, and took considerable risks in following through. Indeed, without US support, it is highly doubtful the nascent Israeli state would have survived. The US was the very first government to recognize Israel, and this was followed up with substantial loans on favorable terms.

The Netanyahu narrative also elides Truman’s key role because the political considerations underlying Truman’s actions underscore the classic methodology of Israel’s supporters in the US, which is today being played out in the drama around Bibi’s upcoming speech. Their strategy has always been to mobilize their supporters to exert maximum pressure on Washington, to manipulate both public opinion and the politicians, regardless of the harm done to American interests. The Israel lobby puts Israel’s interests first, and America’s last – if they come in for consideration at all.

After nearly 70 years of faithful American support – financial, diplomatic, and military – to the state of Israel, this is how the Israeli Prime Minister repays us – with naked appeals to anti-Americanism in a desperate bid to rescue his failing reelection campaign. Ingrate is far too mild a term to apply to the faithless Bibi, but since this is a family-friendly web site, I shall refrain from choosing a more fitting epithet.

The backlash in response to Netanyahu’s machinations is well underway, and not just in Washington’s Democratic precincts. Recent polls show the American people are shifting away from their traditional pro-Israel stance: a majority now want the US government to take a more evenhanded stance in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A more radical rejection of Israeli policies is underway among younger people: the Boycott and Divest movement is making considerable progress on the nation’s campuses, much to the consternation of the Israel lobby, and young people in general are increasingly repulsed by the ruthlessness and intransigence of the current regime in Tel Aviv.

The US relationship with Israel has changed, in part, because Israel has changed – and not for the better. The growth of ultra-nationalist extremism, the openly racist policies toward Palestinians and African immigrants, the ruthlessness of Israeli military policy with its brazen disregard for innocent civilians, and the braying posturing arrogance of Netanyahu himself have all contributed to the growing unease with which Americans view their longtime ally-turned-frenemy.

What this means is that the pressure for the US to intervene on Israel’s behalf – a major motivating factor in the War Party’s success – is considerably weakened. And that is good news for those of us who are working for a more peaceful and more rational foreign policy.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

Read more by Justin Raimondo
‘Holy Schnikes,’ It’s Jeb Bush! – February 19th, 2015
Happy Kosovo Independence Day? – February 17th, 2015
Must Europe Be An American Colony? – February 15th, 2015
Just Say ‘No’ to the AUMF! – February 12th, 2015
Free Ruslan Kotsaba! – February 10th, 2015

http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2015/02/22/how-us-diplomatic-strategy-gave-netanyahu-leverage/

The latest public spat between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government centers on Israeli leaks of details of the U.S. negotiating position in the Iran nuclear talks and the U.S. consequently reducing its consultation with Israel on the talks.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius divulged some of the details of the quarrel this week. It involves the alleged leak to an Israeli journalist of an Obama administration proposal that would “allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal,” according to Ignatius.

The immediate issue was White House anger over Netanyahu’s taking advantage of the information on the U.S. negotiating stance to interfere – again – in U.S. domestic politics. But the Ignatius account also provides further evidence that the Obama administration still feels it necessary to clear every significant diplomatic move on Iran with Netanyahu, whose openly declared aim is to prevent any agreement from being reached.

The real reason for Obama’s continued appeasement of Netanyahu on the talks is that the White House believes Israel’s minions in Congress pose a serious threat to the administration’s diplomatic strategy on Iran.

To understand the politics surrounding the latest proposal it is necessary to go back to the basic facts about Iran’s enrichment capacity and the negotiations on that issue. The first basic fact is that Iran’s installed capacity is nearly 20,000 centrifuges, of which half have never actually gone into operation. So when Iran proposes a total of 9,400 centrifuges, as Zarif did last July in an interview with the New York Times, it represented a 50 percent cut in that total enrichment capacity.

But U.S. and European officials have studiously avoided any reference to the nearly 10,000 installed centrifuges that have not been operating. Their statements to the press insisting that Iran has not shown political will have pretended that those centrifuges don’t exist. Thus they have referred to the proposed Iranian reduction to 9,400 as merely maintaining “the status quo”, as the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez reported last August.

The Obama administration has justified its demands for much deeper cuts in the number of centrifuges by citing the need to provide a sufficiently lengthy “breakout” timeline. That arbitrary metric has nothing to do with the reality of nuclear policy, since it posits a scenario that even the former WMD adviser to Obama, Gary Samore, admits is completely implausible.

The Obama administration claims that it needs a year or more in case of an Iranian decision to enrich uranium at weapons-grade levels in this “breakout” scenario so the president has enough time to fashion a response. But the idea that the President of the United States needs a year to decide what to do about an open violation of the agreement by Iran is so far-fetched as to suggest that the supposed need for a one-year “breakout timeline” is actually a cover for the real strategy underlying the U.S. negotiating position.

The reality is that the 9,400 level Iran is proposing would give Obama plenty of time to make a decision. Two graphs accompanying an article by David Albright and Olli Heinonen, the former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) deputy director-general for safeguards, last June shows that fact very clearly. Assuming no stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium, and a reduction of the Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile to zero, according to those graphs, the breakout time for 10,000 IR-1 centrifuges would be about nine or 10 months.

Iran had already agreed to get rid of its stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium and agreed last autumn to reduce its LEU stockpile to a low level by shipping it to Russia to be converted into fuel assemblies for Bushehr, provided that other elements of the agreement were acceptable.

Those graphs provide perspective on the proposals the United States has been making since the start of the negotiations and the political considerations that have been shaping the U.S. approach.

In the initial May 2014 draft agreement, the P5+1 demanded that Iran agree to a cap of 1,500 centrifuges, representing a reduction of 92 percent from the existing Iranian enrichment capacity. But diplomats apparently suggested privately to Vaez that they might ultimately settle for a 6,500 cap.

In July, U.S. and European officials in Vienna succeeded in convincing Vaez of the ICG that their “margin of maneuver” had been reduced during the spring and summer, and that the 6,500 centrifuges the ICG had proposed in May was no longer possible. Capping the number of centrifuges at about 4,000, Vaez wrote, was “a political imperative” for the United States and its European allies. A glance at the graph shows that a reduction to 4,000 would increase the breakout time to somewhere between 21 and 28 months.

A semiofficial Iranian source revealed in early November that the Obama administration had just offered 6,000 as the total to be allowed in the comprehensive agreement – a total that would be equivalent to 12 to 15 months on the graph. Now we know from the story of the Israeli leak that the Obama administration was ready to offer 6,500 in January.

That 6,500 may not be the final U.S. offer. The Obama administration has never adopted a firm final numerical demand for the cap on centrifuges numbers going into the negotiations, according to a U.S. source who has been briefed on its negotiating calculus. But the administration has not had any incentive to be more forthcoming on centrifuge numbers, as discussed earlier in this space, because the status quo gives the U.S. what it needs most. And Washington is convinced that Iran is playing a weak negotiating hand, because the sanctions and the steep plunge in the price of oil have put intense pressure on the Rouhani government to reach an agreement.

That same perception has also led to a U.S. position on lifting sanctions that would allow it to hold on to leverage over Iran through sanctions until late in the implementation of the agreement, even though Iran would be expected to cut the number of centrifuges immediately.

But the Obama administration has yet another reason for making no real effort to accommodate Iran’s political problems, which brings us back to the significance of the latest Obama-Netanyahu spat. It is the fear that proposing anything less than a one-year breakout timeline would cause Congress to vote to reject the agreement. According to the well-informed U.S. source, the administration is worried that if Congress rejects a final deal it will be perceived by the rest of the world as an indication that the U.S. was responsible for the failure of the talks.

That fear – and the determination of the Obama administration to avoid having to bear the onus for diplomatic failure – gives the extremist opposition in Congress and its Israeli sponsors a veto power over the administration’s negotiating stance. And that explains why the administration approached Netanyahu, hat in hand, in January to seek his blessing for its most recent offer to Iran.

The irony in this situation, therefore, is that Obama’s own diplomatic gamesmanship, aimed at gaining the upper hand over Iran, has in the end handed Netanyahu, whose demands on Iran he rejected decisively in 2012, a new and powerful form of leverage on U.S. Iran policy.
Read more by Gareth Porter
The Real Problem of ‘Getting to Yes’ With Iran – February 13th, 2015
The Nisman Murder and the AMIA Terror Bombing: A Tangled Thread – February 6th, 2015
Netanyahu’s Speech and the Politics of Iran Policy – February 2nd, 2015
‘Operation Merlin': Another Self-Serving CIA Project – January 23rd, 2015
Local Syria Ceasefires: The Way Out of a US Policy Dead End? – January 18th, 2015