By Alan
Caruba
The
Israelis will destroy several Iranian nuclear facilities and my educated guess
is that they will do so before the end of this year.
Israel has
no margin of error when it comes to nuclear reactors in nations
that threaten its existence. While President Obama does everything in his
power to enable Iran to create its own nuclear weapons, it is a good idea to
recall that in June 1981 the Israelis destroyed a reactor in Iraq. It was the
first air strike against such a facility. In September 2007, the Israelis
destroyed a Syrian reactor. There was no reprisal in either case.
From
Wednesday, April 22 to Friday April 24 the Israelis struck Hizbollah and Syrian
military targets in the Walamoun Mountains on the Syrian-Lebanese border. The
calculations were that the location, a site for long-range missiles, would be
safer from the Israelis. They were wrong.
In
September 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United
Nations General Assembly warning “don’t be fooled by Iran’s manipulative charm
offensive. It’s designed for one purpose and for one purpose only. To lift the
sanctions and remove the obstacles to Iran’s path to the bomb.”
“Once Iran
produces atomic bombs, all the charm and all the smiles will suddenly
disappear. They’ll just vanish. It’s then that the ayatollahs will show their
true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.” He offered a comparable message to a joint
meeting of Congress in March of this year.
Is anyone
listening? Not President Obama. On April 25, writing in The Wall Street
Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman and editor in chief of the U.S. News
and World Report, said “President Obama has been chasing a rainbow in his negotiations
with Iran. He has forsaken decades of pledges to the civilized world from
presidents of both parties. He has misled the American people in repeatedly
affirming that the U.S. would never allow revolutionary Iran to acquire nuclear
weapons.”
It’s bad
enough when you can’t trust your nation’s enemies, but when you cannot trust
your own President you have a very big problem because Iran is not just a
threat to America and Israel, but to the entire world.
Obama’s
anti-Semitism is obvious to anyone paying the least attention. He particularly
loathes Israel. In early April the White House let its unhappiness be known
that Netanyahu had, in its words, failed to tone down “hostile and aggressive
language” of the Passover religious service. What were those words? “Next year
in Jerusalem.”
This is an
ancient Jewish prayer that sustained generations of Jews over the course of two
millennia, expressing their hope to return to their homeland. To the White
House, however, it was “affront to the Palestinians, not to mention a slap in
the face to President Obama himself who has worked tirelessly for peace despite
Israeli intransigence.” The Jews returned to Israel, declared its independence
in 1948, and have had the support of every President since…until Obama.
The
Israelis know this. Since their independence the Israelis have fought seven
recognized wars, two Palestinian intifadas, and a series of armed conflicts in
the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Most recently they put down Hamas in the
Gaza once again for its repeated rocketing.
Despite or
because of this, the Israelis have sought to demonstrate good will toward their
Arab neighbors. There is an untold story of the December 2014 meeting of six
Gulf Cooperation Council rulers in the Qatari capital of Doha to discuss steps
to respond to challenges that include Iranian aggression and clamping down on
the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sources
close to event report that Netanyahu has achieved close coordination with the
most important Arab leaders that include Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates. Other members of the Council include Kuwait, Bahrain,
Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
The
Israelis have no choice, nor do I anticipate that Iran will do much, if
anything, to respond in the wake of the ashes of those facilities. No other
nation will come to their aid.
© Alan
Caruba, 2015
Good reading.
ReplyDeleteYuval from Israel.