Mossad on the Move

There has been much brouhaha in the media of late about an Israel vs. United States sparring contest. Following Vice President Biden’s recent contentious visit to Israel, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times went apoplectic in his March 14th column, “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem.” He accused Israel of making it “look like America’s most dependent ally can push” us around. Then Robert Kagan got into the act with a contrarian viewpoint that not only empathized with Israel but also was more scathing in his judgment of President Obama’s overall foreign policy. In his March 17th column in the Washington Post, “Allies everywhere feeling snubbed by President Obama,” Mr. Kagan suggested that “Israelis shouldn't feel that they have been singled out.”

On the same day, John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spouted his usual hawkish tone in the Wall Street Journal. In “Israel and The Crisis With Obama,” Mr. Bolton pointed out that “Israel has sought to accommodate Mr. Obama on two critical issues: negotiations with Palestinians and Iranian nuclear weapons.” After glossing over the distraction of the Israeli settlements, Mr. Bolton reiterated his long-held position that “Americans must realize that allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is empowering an existential threat to the Israeli state, to Arab governments in the region that are friendly to the U.S., and to long-term global peace and security.”

I suspect that a lot of Americans already recognize that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to world peace given some of the vile pronouncements of its holocaust-denying leaders. So let me expand on a conspiracy theory that I believe is playing out right now in the Middle East. First, it is almost impossible to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was blindsided by his own Interior ministry during Vice President Biden’s recent visit. Second, the Israelis are too smart to expect anyone to believe as much. Thus, per their master plan, Israel’s Mossad began by intentionally blindsiding the British government with their infamous Dubai operation in January – assassinating a prominent Hamas leader using British identities – and is now making it appear like they can push the United States around as well.

This “modern-day David taking on two western Goliaths back-to-back" is a staged precursor to an imminent Israeli action aimed at taking out relevant Iranian nuclear facilities – without giving Iran any reason to suspect any involvement of the traditional Anglo-American alliance. If the Israeli airstrikes are successful, they will simultaneously achieve both of Mr. Bolton’s stated objectives and additionally contribute to a more favorable outcome in Iraq. It seems to me that Mossad is on the move – setting the stage for what Mr. Bolton has been propagating for a long time, which is “a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear program.” Israel recognizes that such action is the only way to achieve a lasting Middle East peace because it will:

1. Neutralize the Iranian threat and its ascendancy much to the satisfaction of the Arab nations and leadership in the Middle East.
2. Force the Palestinian leadership to jettison “proximity talks” in favor of “direct talks” with them towards a permanent peace settlement.
3. Ensure that Iran will no longer influence the formation of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq following recently concluded parliamentary elections there.

Americans can only hope that Israel gets it right this time just as it did with its pre-emptive strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility back in 1981. Two decades later, we were unable to find WMD in Iraq in large part due to that prescient action. If the United Nations cannot convince Iran to abandon its pursuit of WMD, maybe the mighty arm of the Mossad will?

Fear Leader

The Bush Administration currently has foreign policy crises of gargantuan proportions on its hands: a worsening Iraqi sectarian war, a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a defiant Iran in pursuit of nuclear weapons, belligerent North Korea launching missiles, and an Israeli-Lebanon war provoked by Iran and Syria. This sordid mess is both, direct and indirect fallout from a doctrine of unintended consequences – which is, nothing else but a catastrophic failure in the execution of the Bush Doctrine. All manner of pundits are seeing this preemption strategy for what it is now, but in the immediate aftermath of our glorious, albeit incomplete, triumph in Afghanistan it was largely praise when President Bush first outlined his provocative “axis of evil” policy. In an article, “State of the World”, written immediately after his 2002 State of the Union speech, I had made the following observations:

Buoyed by stratospheric approval ratings in his execution of the war on terrorism, President Bush now appears to be milking the “terror cow” for what it’s worth! At least one got that impression after listening to the President touch briefly on a few domestic issues in the middle of his speech, while devoting most of his attention to the “state of the world”!

One would like to give kudos to the President’s speechwriters for coming up with a quotable gem like “axis of evil”. However, one must wonder if the President and his advisors have really considered all the implications of engaging such a disparate axis in protracted, simultaneous, and geographically dispersed wars, if it became necessary? Are we ready to walk that talk?

More than fours years later, it has become quite apparent that we are in the midst of the very situation that I had warned about and President Bush’s responses thus far have more or less proven that he is unable to “walk that talk”. The whole world has had a good laugh at the expense of the despot, Kim Jong Il who insists on being referred to as “Dear Leader” by his people. Ironically, it is “we the people” of the United States who elected our very own “Fear Leader” – he, who intended to strike fear among the hearts of all the world’s evil dictators with his post-9/11 policies, but in reality has managed to largely scare his own citizenry with conveniently-timed reminders of how these evil dictators are out to harm America.

Not surprisingly the domestic fear-mongering is wearing thin and even neo-conservatives who fashioned the original Bush Doctrine are beginning to wonder, in the light of the current crises, whether the President has the will to see it through. Already former Speaker and 2008 presidential contender, Newt Gingrich is talking about “World War III” and other pundits have compared the current turmoil similar to the one that sparked World War I. Given these dire pronouncements, it might be time for President Bush to stop, not only leading with fear but also fearing to lead – his presidency, his legacy, and most importantly our status as the world’s only remaining superpower is at stake.