It’s a relief to know that President Obama’s “preferred” solution to dealing with disagreements with Iran is diplomacy, as he said yesterday in an interview on NBC TV, but at the same time, it’s profoundly disturbing that he is simultaneously saying that, as an AP report on the interview put it: he would “not take options off the table to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
Equally disturbing are the president’s mutually contradictory statements that, on the one hand, he feels that “Any kind of additional military activity inside the Gulf is disruptive and has a big effect on us,” and that on the other, he will “make sure that we work in lockstep” with Israel in dealing with Iran and its nuclear program.
Lockstep? With Israel?
Didn’t the US just send Gen.Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Israel to tell that country’s leaders that the US does not want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And wasn’t Israel also told that the US would not support it in any attack on Iran, at least if the US was not warned well in advance? Israel, of course, is continuing to threaten to attack Iran -- using the very planes and bombs that the US provides it with. So how exactly is opposing an attack by Israel and having Israel continuously threatening to attack in any way to be construed as working in “lockstep”?
And anyhow, what kind of a country moves in “lockstep” with any other country, except for a puppet regime?
The US does not have a treaty with Israel requiring the US to go to war when Israel goes to war. It doesn’t even have a treaty to go to Israel’s defense if Israel is attacked. There is a treaty like that with Taiwan, but not with Israel. US interests are clearly not congruent with Israeli interests, especially where Iran is concerned (just ask any veteran of the USS Liberty about how congruent US and Israeli policy really is).
