Kathianne
04-11-2015, 08:13 AM
Easier when the liberal is in Israel:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-loving-obama-and-worry-about-the-bomb/?utm_content=buffere7681&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
How I learned to stop loving Obama and worry about the bomb
Sometime in the fall of 2008 I sat down at my desk and banged out an impassioned letter to my sister. She was on the fence, I knew, about the young senator from Illinois who was running for president. There was some talk in the family that perhaps, on at least one occasion, during the Bush years, she had voted Republican
...
And so I took to the computer. In an email entitled “Politics” — which I reread this week for the first time in the wake of the nuclear framework (http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-iran-nuke-deal-parameters-as-set-out-by-state-department/)deal agreed upon in Lausanne, a deal that has left me with the clammy feeling of anticipated betrayal — I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ‘shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights. I even told her to read Frederick Douglass.
...
As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony: The nation that had lived under persecution for two thousand years because of its statelessness had, in a sublime moment, carved out a state in its ancient homeland and revived its wizened language only to sacrifice that historic achievement on the altar of — of all things! — territorial expansion.
A deal with the Palestinians, pushed forward by American muscle, was in Israel’s interest, I said. Without a two-state solution, guided by someone like Barack Obama, “Palestinians will outnumber us and will no longer consider 1967 a relevant date. The battle will be for all of Israel and they will win. Everyone will be yelling ‘Apartheid.’ Within two generations we’ll see the destruction of the Third Temple.”
Moreover, I noted, Bush, with his love of Zion, had been a disaster, inadvertently empowering Iran. Obama, with his cool detachment, was just what we needed.
Lastly, I encouraged her to vote Democrat, now, before her Alex P. Keaton-like eldest got the right to vote and cancelled her out.
And she did (I think, maybe). She even wrote to me about the beauty of that cold January day in 2009 when he was sworn into office.
...
Then, in June 2013, millions of Egyptians came back to Tahrir Square and other public spots across Egypt; Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the head of the Egyptian armed forces at the time, rose to power. Obama, who had not cancelled military aid during Morsi’s year in power, shut down the aid to el-Sissi’s Egypt, halting the arrival of Apache attack helicopters and doling out the money piecemeal as a reward for good behavior. Never mind that el-Sissi, for the first time in years, had launched a true war on the mini-Afghanistan that had developed in the high desert of the Sinai Peninsula; never mind that he viewed Hamas as an enemy of the state and that he, for the first time in years, shut down the Hamas tunnels into and out of Rafah, cutting the Islamist organization’s military supply route. Nonetheless, the White House urged him “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government,” knowing full well what that meant. Obama, I began to fear during that first year of his second term, viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as the authentic will of the people in the region, and, therefore, as part of “the long arc of the moral universe,” which, his hero Martin Luther King Jr. said, “bends toward justice.”
I like the quote. I love the sentiment. It seems wholly American to me. Filled with a wonderful optimism. And noble, especially, when spoken by a man who represented people so unjustly treated. But as a member of a people who managed to found a state after a very long and depressing arc of history, which only took an abrupt bend away from injustice after the dark years of genocide, I did not subscribe to the this-too-is-for-the-best attitude. It seemed a risky gamble, coolly, nonchalantly, unsentimentally taken by the leader of a distant country, who, I would soon learn, was in the process of balancing out the powers in the Middle East and departing the region.
Finally the Iran deal began to take shape. And with it several truths started to poke through the soil: The US did not view Iran’s Islamic revolution as a disaster that needed to be curtailed and combated globally, tirelessly, like communism. It saw Iran, under the regime of the ayatollahs, as a legitimate actor in the region, despite its annihilationist rhetoric. It did not believe former Israeli Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin when he said that a US strike against Iran would be, on the spectrum between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1981 strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor, far more similar to the latter. “It’s one night’s work,” Yadlin said on several occasions, noting that the regime would not risk all-out war with the US, imperiling its very survival. Instead the Obama administration viewed the military option as a disaster; one it had no fortitude to pursue.
And so, after the sanctions brought the regime to the table, the lack of a credible military option brought the world the framework deal reached last week in Lausanne. From an isolationist American perspective, the deal makes a great deal of sense. This week, President Obama explained his rationale (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-obama-doctrine-and-iran-interview.html?_r=0) to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman. He said that America’s size and strength enabled it to take chances, to engage with Castro’s Cuba and Khamenei’s Iran. “We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk,” he said. Iran’s military spending is $30 billion; the US’s is $600 billion. “Iran understands that they cannot fight us.”
...
This is not to say that there should have been no withdrawal from Lebanon or, later, from Gaza. Nor is it to say that any deal with Iran is, by definition, mistaken. But simply that it rests too firmly on optimism, is rooted too deeply in a sort of defeatism vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not backed up with muscle and a demonstrable willingness to use it.
The framework agreement with Iran, like Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, is transparently devoid of that willingness. Moreover, it comes after the public belittling (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-officially-here/382031/) of Israel’s [problematic, but that’s another story] prime minister, who has read the winds of change with distressing accuracy, and his subsequent handcuffing in terms of military action. Nor does it come with a credible guarantee from the president that he will be willing, or Israel will be welcome, to use military action in the event of a transgression. Instead, Obama told Friedman, “what I’m willing to do is to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them.”
And do what? Nurse us back to health from our nuclear-induced wounds?
The deal is not yet signed. Obama’s legacy could still include the defanging of the regime in Tehran, if, in fact, his soft power approach prevails before the regime pushes toward the bomb. But come October 2016, one thing my dear sister and her kind husband can count on, unless they start leaning toward Rand Paul, is that they shan’t be receiving any more imploring mail from me.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-loving-obama-and-worry-about-the-bomb/?utm_content=buffere7681&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
How I learned to stop loving Obama and worry about the bomb
Sometime in the fall of 2008 I sat down at my desk and banged out an impassioned letter to my sister. She was on the fence, I knew, about the young senator from Illinois who was running for president. There was some talk in the family that perhaps, on at least one occasion, during the Bush years, she had voted Republican
...
And so I took to the computer. In an email entitled “Politics” — which I reread this week for the first time in the wake of the nuclear framework (http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-iran-nuke-deal-parameters-as-set-out-by-state-department/)deal agreed upon in Lausanne, a deal that has left me with the clammy feeling of anticipated betrayal — I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ‘shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights. I even told her to read Frederick Douglass.
...
As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony: The nation that had lived under persecution for two thousand years because of its statelessness had, in a sublime moment, carved out a state in its ancient homeland and revived its wizened language only to sacrifice that historic achievement on the altar of — of all things! — territorial expansion.
A deal with the Palestinians, pushed forward by American muscle, was in Israel’s interest, I said. Without a two-state solution, guided by someone like Barack Obama, “Palestinians will outnumber us and will no longer consider 1967 a relevant date. The battle will be for all of Israel and they will win. Everyone will be yelling ‘Apartheid.’ Within two generations we’ll see the destruction of the Third Temple.”
Moreover, I noted, Bush, with his love of Zion, had been a disaster, inadvertently empowering Iran. Obama, with his cool detachment, was just what we needed.
Lastly, I encouraged her to vote Democrat, now, before her Alex P. Keaton-like eldest got the right to vote and cancelled her out.
And she did (I think, maybe). She even wrote to me about the beauty of that cold January day in 2009 when he was sworn into office.
...
Then, in June 2013, millions of Egyptians came back to Tahrir Square and other public spots across Egypt; Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the head of the Egyptian armed forces at the time, rose to power. Obama, who had not cancelled military aid during Morsi’s year in power, shut down the aid to el-Sissi’s Egypt, halting the arrival of Apache attack helicopters and doling out the money piecemeal as a reward for good behavior. Never mind that el-Sissi, for the first time in years, had launched a true war on the mini-Afghanistan that had developed in the high desert of the Sinai Peninsula; never mind that he viewed Hamas as an enemy of the state and that he, for the first time in years, shut down the Hamas tunnels into and out of Rafah, cutting the Islamist organization’s military supply route. Nonetheless, the White House urged him “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government,” knowing full well what that meant. Obama, I began to fear during that first year of his second term, viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as the authentic will of the people in the region, and, therefore, as part of “the long arc of the moral universe,” which, his hero Martin Luther King Jr. said, “bends toward justice.”
I like the quote. I love the sentiment. It seems wholly American to me. Filled with a wonderful optimism. And noble, especially, when spoken by a man who represented people so unjustly treated. But as a member of a people who managed to found a state after a very long and depressing arc of history, which only took an abrupt bend away from injustice after the dark years of genocide, I did not subscribe to the this-too-is-for-the-best attitude. It seemed a risky gamble, coolly, nonchalantly, unsentimentally taken by the leader of a distant country, who, I would soon learn, was in the process of balancing out the powers in the Middle East and departing the region.
Finally the Iran deal began to take shape. And with it several truths started to poke through the soil: The US did not view Iran’s Islamic revolution as a disaster that needed to be curtailed and combated globally, tirelessly, like communism. It saw Iran, under the regime of the ayatollahs, as a legitimate actor in the region, despite its annihilationist rhetoric. It did not believe former Israeli Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin when he said that a US strike against Iran would be, on the spectrum between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1981 strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor, far more similar to the latter. “It’s one night’s work,” Yadlin said on several occasions, noting that the regime would not risk all-out war with the US, imperiling its very survival. Instead the Obama administration viewed the military option as a disaster; one it had no fortitude to pursue.
And so, after the sanctions brought the regime to the table, the lack of a credible military option brought the world the framework deal reached last week in Lausanne. From an isolationist American perspective, the deal makes a great deal of sense. This week, President Obama explained his rationale (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-obama-doctrine-and-iran-interview.html?_r=0) to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman. He said that America’s size and strength enabled it to take chances, to engage with Castro’s Cuba and Khamenei’s Iran. “We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk,” he said. Iran’s military spending is $30 billion; the US’s is $600 billion. “Iran understands that they cannot fight us.”
...
This is not to say that there should have been no withdrawal from Lebanon or, later, from Gaza. Nor is it to say that any deal with Iran is, by definition, mistaken. But simply that it rests too firmly on optimism, is rooted too deeply in a sort of defeatism vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not backed up with muscle and a demonstrable willingness to use it.
The framework agreement with Iran, like Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, is transparently devoid of that willingness. Moreover, it comes after the public belittling (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-officially-here/382031/) of Israel’s [problematic, but that’s another story] prime minister, who has read the winds of change with distressing accuracy, and his subsequent handcuffing in terms of military action. Nor does it come with a credible guarantee from the president that he will be willing, or Israel will be welcome, to use military action in the event of a transgression. Instead, Obama told Friedman, “what I’m willing to do is to make the kinds of commitments that would give everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them.”
And do what? Nurse us back to health from our nuclear-induced wounds?
The deal is not yet signed. Obama’s legacy could still include the defanging of the regime in Tehran, if, in fact, his soft power approach prevails before the regime pushes toward the bomb. But come October 2016, one thing my dear sister and her kind husband can count on, unless they start leaning toward Rand Paul, is that they shan’t be receiving any more imploring mail from me.