Israel

Important Reading

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Ralph Peters on some of the foreign policy and national security issues at stake in this election.

Those planning to cast their votes based primarily on economic issues should consider: there is a strong link between national security and the economy. If we have multiple terror attacks of the 9/11 scale (or higher), the economy will be in shreds. If the Iranians close the Straits of Hormuz, gasoline prices will soar. If the Russians bully Western Europe with sustained natural gas shortages, the result could be an actual global depression.

(via Maggie’s Farm)

Random Thoughts

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The big war (not the Iraq campaign) isn’t over. We have continuing problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but we’ve suppressed our enemies for a while in most places. However, eventually we are going to have to fight large battles again, because our enemies will eventually attack us in a way that we can’t ignore. I suspect that we are now in a situation like that of Israel, which has never been allowed or willing to defeat its enemies decisively and so has to fight a major campaign every decade or so. We will probably have to keep fighting until we develop the political will to win decisively. This is going to be true no matter who is President or which party is in charge in Washington.

One counterexample to my speculations is Korea, where we have been in a mostly peaceful stalemate for more than fifty years. And there are always conflicts simmering around the world that rarely do us harm. But North Korea is an isolated regime that seems likely to fall apart eventually. Radical Islam is a much more distributed, dynamic, ambitious and aggressive enemy that does not seem likely to stop fighting unless it is defeated. Remember the anecdotes that suggest that the Syrians and Iranian mullahs and Hamas want Obama to win? The usual assumption by Obama critics is that Hamas et al favor Obama because they think he’s one of them. I suggest that they are favoring him because they think he’ll pursue policies that will make it easier for them to defeat us.

In the old days America could walk away from wars, because most of the costs of our walking away would be borne by non-Americans. Technology has removed this security and we should update our sense of security accordingly. Most of us haven’t, or have become complacent, because 9/11 now feels like distant history. But the metaphor of distance is misleading here. We are not physically more distant from threats; advances in technology and in the technological sophistication of our enemies may even make us more vulnerable. Like it or not we are probably going to be at war for many more years, even if it doesn’t feel like war most of the time.

Obama, the Democrats, and Israel

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Speaking in France, Jesse Jackson expanded on the ways in which American foreign policy will change in an Obama administration:

Prepare for a new America: That’s the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at this French lakeside resort last week.

He promised “fundamental changes” in US foreign policy – saying America must “heal wounds” it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the “arrogance of the Bush administration.”

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.

Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

While predicting that the Obama administration will implement drastic changes in domestic policy as well, Jackson declined to be specific about what might be done. He was more willing to be concrete with regard to foreign policy, specifically the Middle East:

Jackson is especially critical of President Bush’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss,” Jackson says. “Barack will change that,” because, as long as the Palestinians haven’t seen justice, the Middle East will “remain a source of danger to us all.”

More at Power Line.

Jackson doesn’t have authority to speak for Obama, of course. But the attitudes he expresses here are disturbingly common in the higher reaches of the Democratic Party.

Anyone who cares about the survival and well-being of Israel needs to consider very carefully before voting for any Democratic candidate. Because American diplomatic and military support for Israel has a clear inverse relationship with the power and influence of the Democratic Party as it stands today.

And Israel’s safety is something all Americans should care about, for the same reasons Europeans and Americans should have been concerned about the safety of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

UPDATE: See this analysis, which was published yesterday in the Israeli internet publication ynet.

J’accuse—**updated**

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Here is the speech that Governor Sarah Palin was going to give at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally in NYC. It’s a good speech, and deserves your attention. Excerpt:

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.

He must be stopped.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.

Note that I referred to a speech that Sarah Palin was going to give. She was not allowed to give it, because she was disinvited from the rally.

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McCain Bad for Jews/Israel?

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Ron Coleman disagrees and provides an alternative hypothesis:

Like a good Zionist, Goldberg looks everywhere for Israel’s disastrous state but the most obvious place: Israel. The vast majority of its awful policy decisions, whether in terms of defense, international relations, tactics, economics and domestic policy, are not in any way decided or even on the radar on Pennsylvania Avenue. They are the result of a string of breathtakingly incompetent governments purporting to run a depressingly corrupt kleptocracy to please an obsolescing and self-loathing elite that lacks the will to even purport to lead a confused and mainly unmotivated populace that obsesses on a slim minority of practitioners of its own religion in its midst as the bogeyman that explains its existential hopelessness. A preposterously irrational and self-destructive foreign policy is almost besides the point and is hardly a surprise — but a secular Zionist can hardly be expected to wrestle with this honestly when there are Republicans to blame and election in the air.

I don’t share Ron’s disdain for secular Zionists, not all of whom are leftists and not all of whom are unwilling to blame Israel for its own mistakes. However, I agree that Israel’s current problems are largely of its own making, the consequence of years of bad leadership. Bush II has been, until recently, the most pro-Israel US president since Truman, and I see no reason to think McCain would be much worse. (I do think there’s reason to expect Obama to be worse, a la Jimmy Carter.) Goldberg ignores the fact that Israel’s leaders have made numerous bad decisions (empowering Arafat, withdrawing precipitately from Lebanon and Gaza, not attacking Syria or destroying Hezbollah in 2006, etc.), and have always had the option of saying no to ill-conceived US proposals. Israel’s central problem is its corrupt political culture — largely the result of socialism, a poorly designed electoral system that makes leaders unaccountable, and an addiction to US subsidies. I don’t know what the remedy for Israel’s fundamental problems is, or if there is a remedy, but blaming Bush or McCain seems way off the mark.