Obama foreign policy

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak to Congress tomorrow to discuss the threat a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to Israel, the region and the world. But in a different historical timeline, he might not have been, putting his energies into military cleanup actions closer to home instead.

From the Zionist Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva:

Report: Obama Threatened to Shoot Down IAF Iran Strike

The Bethlehem-based news agency Ma’an has cited a Kuwaiti newspaper report Saturday, that US President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

Following Obama's threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reportedly forced to abort the planned Iran attack.

According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel's back.

The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister who has good ties with the US administration revealed the attack plan to Secretary of State John Kerry, and that Obama then threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

I obviously can't confirm or document what Obama actually did or didn't tell Netanyahu, but the paper goes on to cite Zbigniew Brzezinski as the original source of the option, based on an interview he gave The Daily Beast back in 2009:

Former US diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who enthusiastically campaigned for Obama in 2008, called on him to shoot down Israeli planes if they attack Iran. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” said the former national security advisor to former President Jimmy Carter in an interview with the Daily Beast.

“We have to be serious about denying them that right,” he said. “If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a 'Liberty' in reverse.’"

Denying America's oldest ally in the Middle East the opportunity to preemptively defend itself against an existential nuclear threat not only to its own survival but but also to setting off a region-wide nuclear arms race, on the pain of physically shooting down its Air Force (and who would prevail there?) seems to me an awfully high price to pay for some watery thin porridge of Obama's personal legacy deal with Iran as currently constituted.

But a true national leader - unlike what we have - does what he has to do, so tomorrow Netanyahu will be in Washington, hat in hand, trying to convince Congress simply to strengthen sanctions against Iran rather than giving them the nuclear store.

In case you missed Mark Shea's comments

I blogged a few days back on Joe Hippolito's FPM piece entitled A Catholic Writer’s Propaganda For Iran. The Catholic writer mentioned is Mark Shea who must have read both Joe's article and my blog post because he showed up in my comment box to exercise his 1st amendment rights which are universally respected here.

In fact, I want to make sure no one missed these comments, so I've reprinted them here. Here's the first one:

And EWTN/NCR has the bulging file of deranged rants from Joe [Hippolito], screaming at them about how the Church is damned by God, JPII is in hell, everybody Joe hates needs to be put to death with extreme prejudice and go to hell, nuking Muslims and Japanese is the will of God, Jesus loves capital punishment and pre-emptive war, the bishops are all going to hell, as well as many of NCR's writes (especially Yr Obdt Svt) and all his other helpful contributions to Catholic political thought over the years. I'm sure they will be on the edge of their seats listening to your appeal that they heed his wisdom. :)

Note the smiley at the end. Kind of a nice touch.

Second: Um, Joe has never had a blog. He parasitically lives off the blogs of others. If, by "doing things to people" you mean "not allowing rude wahoos on my blog" that's true. If you mean I never allow disagreements on my blog, you are either illiterate, stupid, or a liar, Jonathan.

On the other hand, I've never suggested that people who disagree with me should be murdered or prayed for their death and damnation. Joe's done that multiple times with me. Enjoy your bedfellow.

"Enjoy your bedfellow." Should we laugh at this remark? I did when I read it. Even if Mr. Shea does have some claim against Mr. Hippolito we can note something instructive here. He fills his cup of scorn and derision so abundantly that it overflows and we are all invited to take a swig.

Third: I'm not a paragon of virtue. I commit the same sins as you, Kathleen (whose writing is, after all, suffused with mockery, humiliation of others, and epithets). My point is not that I am a paragon of virtue. It is that Joe's hatred of both the Church and me is legendary throughout St. Blog's and that the editors at NCR are not unaware of it, since he has subjected them to it for years. So failure to acknowledge that little detail as Pauli makes the preposterous case for the sobriety of Joe's libel is a non-starter.

OK, I have to respond seriously to the charge that I made a "preposterous case for the sobriety of Joe's libel". Words mean something, words like sobriety and libel, and if Mark doesn't think Joe's article is accurate then he can explain why, providing examples. In fact, I'm sure he has done that on his blog, but I'll let someone else verify that. Nevertheless, libel denotes deliberate untruthfulness, or at least some type of vicious deviation from the facts, neither of which can be seen in Joe's article.

For example, referring to Rick Santorum as a "Murderer for Jesus" or referring to Santorum and Romney as "aspiring war criminals" can both be called vile attacks and distortions by just about anyone in the mainstream of America. Lines describing conservatives as possessing "deathless neoconservative faith in the Immaculate Conception of the State of Israel and its preservation from all sin, both original and actual" can easily be used as evidence for Joe's position that Mark Shea is at best a "curmudgeon who shoots from the hip and fails to understand the implications of his ideas" and at worst a "bigoted fanatic".

Now as far as sobriety goes, that's a judgement call, and I see nothing about the article which resembles a drunken rant. If Joe ranted at another time and another place without sobriety that is not relevant to my point and the point of Joe's article. It's normal and likely that past heated rhetoric may weaken his perceived reliability. But it's also a good idea to take someone's reasoned criticism presented thoughtfully according to its own merits. The only people who belabor every past lapse of an individual would be "rigorism maximumists". Wow, I just came up with that phrase! Am I clever or what?

Fourth: Jonathan (and Pauli):

You are welcome to post. However, you have to obey the rules. You're in my comboxes on my suffrage as guests. Disagreement is fine (as even a cursory read of my comboxes shows). Just be polite and honest.

I wonder what my wife is making for dinner tonight... Dang! tonight's PSR, too... And that flooring guy left a message, hope it's a low quote. Oh, that totally reminds me of something else....

Again, here's a link to his blog.

Fifth: This is Kathleen *R------*, correct?

And you seriously assert that nothing you've had to say about Rod Dreher is mocking, or aimed to humiliate, or chock full of epithets? Not to mention suffused with naked contempt for the guy?

Reeeeeeally?

Well, I suppose we'll just have to disagree about that.

No argument that I'm a terrible witness to the faith. But I'm all I've got and Jesus says to bear witness to him, so I try. Are you saying I shouldn't try? Or are you merely saying that it's worse that I do a bad job of witnessing to the faith than that Joe is actively trying to destroy the Church while urging mass murder.

Curious priorities.

"Joe is actively trying to destroy the Church while urging mass murder." Gee, didn't realize that. Maybe we should rethink our bedfellowship with Joe. I mean that has got to be worse than actively trying to destroy the Church while advocating a local, organic diet.

I'm not going to take a lot of time defending Kathleen because she can do so pretty adequately. I imagine her reading this blog on her smartphone in the checkout line and commenting with her right thumb while the left hand packs the groceries. I do think that she is a fairly normal woman in that if you once called her a "witch queen" she might not have an entirely warm attitude toward you.

I know I mentioned the 1st amendment earlier, so I should add that 2nd amendment rights are also respected on my blog. I'll let people shoot themselves in the foot whenever they are moved to do so. And as many times.

Joseph Hippolito compares Mark Shea and Ezra Pound

Joe and I have argued on the web before, and one thing I think everyone can agree on is that the man brings a lot of passion to all the subjects on which he writes. That's why it is impressive to me that he can be so thoughtful and measured in his FrontPageMag critique of Mark Shea, a man who has baited him and made fun of him for years. Here's an excerpt:

In “6 B.S. Myths You Probably Believe About America’s ‘Enemies,’” Cracked.com’s Mark Hill wrote that 1) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comment about obliterating Israel was mistranslated and taken out of context 2) Iran has a smaller military budget than either Greece or Australia and 3) Ahmadinejad can be overruled by his superiors and has no significant power.

“It’s sad when the writers of Cracked,” Shea wrote, “know more about the Imminent Threat that is not Iran than the warmongers of the Right and the combox cowards who…defend their rhetoric in favor of cold-blooded murder of innocent human beings.”

Shea ended by asserting that “all the panic about Ahmadinejad with his finger on the button is pure provincial ignorance…using his stupid blather as a justification for praising cold-blooded murder of civilians as ‘wonderful’ is both ignorant and evil.”

However, the German newspaper Die Welt reported in May 2011 that Iran was building bases in Venezuela for intermediate-range missiles, complete with anti-aircraft batteries and commando facilities. Engineers from a firm owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard visited the site three months earlier.

The purpose, reported Die Welt, was to attack Iranian enemies — likely the United States — if Iran itself was attacked.

Since Shea’s post, the Washington Post reported on Jan. 31 that “Iran is prepared to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States,” according to intelligence officials testifying before Congress. On Feb. 24, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Iran’s accelerated production of enriched uranium that could be converted easily into weapons-grade stock.

The Revolutionary Guard’s own news service published an article on Feb. 4 by Alireza Forghani, a strategic analyst who advises Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Forghani called Israel “this corrupting material” and stated that “it is a ‘jurisprudential justification’ to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

It is sort of amazing that Mark Shea gets a paycheck from EWTN for his uninformed rants. You can email them at viewer@ewtn.com, or use this page to tell NC Register what you think.

Ralph Peters: "It isn't you, Barack. It's just business"

Here's a devastating bit by Ralph Peters on the naive lack of strategy on the part of the Obama Administration vis-à-vis the soon-to-be-nuclear-if-it-isn't-already Iran and a Russia which can only benefit from non-interference. Conclusion:

It's no accident that a strategic triangle has emerged between Moscow, Tehran and Caracas -- home of the great Latin mischief-lover, Hugo Chavez, who thrives on his own nation's petro-wealth.

For us, the Iran crisis is about peace. For Putin, it's about power. Yet the self-deluding Obama administration really believes that Moscow's going to support us. After our president gave away our only serious bargaining chip, the missile-defense system promised to our European allies.

Putin thinks in 10-year-plans. We can't think past the next congressional roll-call vote.

The Obama administration's primary legacy to the world is going to be a nuclear-armed Iran.

Joan Baez sings We Shall Overcome for people of Iran

First English, then in Farsi.



She is 68 and has still "got it", IMHO.

McCain on Obama's declining poll numbers

John McCain blinks too much and he can't pronounce Czechoslovakia, but I think he would have made a better president than the "clunker" we have now.