All Republicans know that President Obama is an anti-Semitic Islamist Marxist who wants to throw Israel into the sea; after all, Bill Kristol has been saying so for years. So it is quite amazing that the Wall Street Journal reported this the other day, concerning Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. The Bush Administration rejected the system as impracticable, but
Iron Dome got a significant boost soon after President Obama came to office in 2009. Mr. Obama visited Sderot as a presidential candidate and told his aides to find a way to help boost Israel’s defenses from the makeshift rockets, his aides said, although defense officials at the time still doubted Iron Dome was the way.
As president, Mr. Obama tapped Colin Kahl to run the Pentagon office overseeing U.S. military policy in the Middle East. Mr. Kahl found the Iron Dome request on his desk, decided to take another look and had what he later described as a light-bulb moment. “Ding, ding, ding. It just made sense,” Mr. Kahl said.
At the direction of a White House working group headed by then-National Security Council senior director Dan Shapiro (who today is the U.S. ambassador to Israel), the Pentagon sent a team of missile-defense experts to Israel in September 2009 to re-evaluate Iron Dome. The decision raised eyebrows in some Pentagon circles. Iron Dome was still seen as a rival to the Phalanx system, and previous assessment teams had deemed Iron Dome inferior.
….
In its final report, presented to the White House in October, the team declared Iron Dome a success, and in many respects, superior to Phalanx. Tests showed it was hitting 80% of the targets, up from the low teens in the earlier U.S. assessment. “They came in and basically said, ‘This looks much more promising…than our system,’ ” said Dennis Ross, who at the time was one of Mr. Obama’s top Middle East advisers.
Now, of course this could not possibly have happened, because we all know that Obama is an anti-Semite. More recently, the Administration made the (terribly wrong) decision to oppose Palestine’s move for state observer status at the United Nations. But of course that did not happen either, because Obama hates Israel.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Author: Jonathan Zasloff
Jonathan Zasloff teaches Torts, Land Use, Environmental Law, Comparative Urban Planning Law, Legal History, and Public Policy Clinic - Land Use, the Environment and Local Government. He grew up and still lives in the San Fernando Valley, about which he remains immensely proud (to the mystification of his friends and colleagues). After graduating from Yale Law School, and while clerking for a federal appeals court judge in Boston, he decided to return to Los Angeles shortly after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, reasoning that he would gladly risk tremors in order to avoid the average New England wind chill temperature of negative 55 degrees.
Professor Zasloff has a keen interest in world politics; he holds a PhD in the history of American foreign policy from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University. Much of his recent work concerns the influence of lawyers and legalism in US external relations, and has published articles on these subjects in the New York University Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More generally, his recent interests focus on the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses.
Professor Zasloff has long been active in state and local politics and policy. He recently co-authored an article discussing the relationship of Proposition 13 (California's landmark tax limitation initiative) and school finance reform, and served for several years as a senior policy advisor to the Speaker of California Assembly. His practice background reflects these interests: for two years, he represented welfare recipients attempting to obtain child care benefits and microbusinesses in low income areas. He then practiced for two more years at one of Los Angeles' leading public interest environmental and land use firms, challenging poorly planned development and working to expand the network of the city's urban park system. He currently serves as a member of the boards of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a state agency charged with purchasing and protecting open space), the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (the leading legal service firm for low-income clients in east Los Angeles), and Friends of Israel's Environment. Professor Zasloff's other major activity consists in explaining the Triangle Offense to his very patient wife, Kathy.
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According to Josh Marshall (“Troubling, Par for the Course”), The Israelis don’t seem all that grateful.
That says a great deal about Netanyahu and Lieberman, but nothing about Obama.
Well, it does seem that Netanyahu has learned that there is only one world leader who can reliably get away with making a monkey out of the President of the United States, and he is that leader. He did it with this president and with his two predecessors, always with the settlements. Like a Fox News neocon pundit who never has to worry about any consequences of being wrong, he never has to worry about real consequences of slapping any US administration in the face; he knows that forces he can call on in the US will always have his back and can jam the White House switchboard with irate calls at a moment’s notice. This says nothing about Obama personally that is not equally applicable to other occupants of the Oval Office.
Bibi’s fee-fees are hurt because that antisemite in the White House doesn’t want him to bomb hell out of Iran.
Remember, that’s how it started in Germany…
Does this make Israel more secure?
In the sense that day to day, like the Wall, it clearly does.
But in the long run, it allows Israeli intransigence about things like the West Bank Settlements to become more entrenched. Thus making a Two State Solution impossible, and therefore driving towards a One State Solution.
Which puts Israel in an impossible position. A One State Solution could not be Zionist- Jews would no longer be the majority. The alternative is to somehow drive the Palestinians out, which would turn Israel into a sort of Bosnian Serb Republic. That ethnic cleansing would set the stage for the next 100 years of warfare in the Middle East.
Can the Israelis, with their Wall, their Iron Dome and their natural gas deposits, really rely on military superiority against all comers for the next 100+ years? Hasn’t Israel then just become another Crusader state of Outremer, waiting for its Saladin?
This is one of the best nutshells in which I have ever seen the situation described. People who actually care about Israel take note.