http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3439651/payback-time.thtml Payback time
Friday, 13th March 2009
Charles W Freeman’s outburst after he was prised out of his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, in which he blamed the ‘Israel lobby’ for his ousting, has provoked a number of others who appear to share his unhinged view of the World Jewish Conspiracy to crawl out from underneath a stone.
The New York Times along with a bunch of commentator faithfully echoed the Freeman ‘Jewish power’ calumny. They simply dismissed the fact that it was Freeman’s financial connections to Saudi Arabia and China, his support for the Chinese crackdown in the Tiananmen Square massacre and his suggestion that America had got what it deserved on 9/11, which had been his undoing. Instead, they claimed opposition to him was all about Israel and it was the ‘Israel lobby’ that had finished him. But most of the pro-Israel big guns actually chose to sit this one out. It was others who hit the roof over Freeman’s advocacy for China and Saudi Arabia – notably Nancy Pelosi, who was reported to have viewed as indefensible his characterisation of Tibetan resistance as ‘a race riot’. In this selectively false analysis which singles out the Jews, the New York Times et al revealed by contrast that it is they who are obsessed by Israel -- and Jewish power -- and regard this as the only issue that matters.
These people, though, however repellent, are small beer. The real alarm should be over the man who appointed Freeman to such a post – the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair (pictured). What does this debacle say about his own judgment and priorities? And what does it say about the judgment and priorities of the man who appointed Blair, Barack Obama?
Given the pro-appeasement predilection of most of Obama’s foreign policy and intelligence appointments, it would appear that his administration screwed up big time by appointing Freeman, not because of his hostility towards Israel and the Jews – shared, after all, by a number of others within in the administration -- but because his outrageous vested interests in Saudi Arabia and China blew wide open the treasonous unsuitability of an appointment which would have offered up America to its enemies: a fact that would have otherwise remained concealed behind the anti-Israel prejudice which is, alas, all too acceptable in Washington DC.
This is also the mindset that says Israel is the key to resolving the threat to America. Solve ‘Israel-Palestine’ and Islamist violence will go away. As John Bolton writes today, the resulting pressure upon Israel from this approach, now being actively pursued by Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, will inevitably weaken it – and thus in turn weaken America, Israel’s strategic ally. So why should Obama want to put at such risk Israel’s intelligence-sharing, military co-operation and other security assets to the US? Bolton answers bleakly:
The only understandable answer is that the Obama administration believes that Israel is as much or more of a problem as it is an ally, at least until Israel’s disagreements with its neighbors are resolved. Instead of seeing Israel as a national-security asset, the administration likely sees a relationship complicating its broader policy of diplomatic ‘outreach.’ No one will say so publicly, but this is the root cause of Obama’s ‘Arab-Israeli issues first’ approach to the region.
This approach is exactly backward. All the other regional problems would still exist even if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got his fondest wish and Israel disappeared from the map: Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, its role as the world's central banker for terrorism, the Sunni-Shiite conflict within Islam, Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and other regional ethnic, national and political animosities would continue as threats and risks for decades to come. Instead, the US focus should be on Iran and the manifold threats it poses to Israel, to Arab states friendly to Washington and to the United States itself - but that is not to be.
The fact that it is indeed not to be was demonstrated in the last few days by a chilling sequence of comments.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, warned that Iran is now at the point where it can develop nuclear weapons. Within a few hours, however, Mullen was contradicted by Defence Secretary Robert Gates who said Iran was in fact not close to having a nuclear weapon:
‘They're not close to a stockpile, they're not close to a weapon at this point, and so there is some time,’ Gates said on NBC television’s ‘Meet The Press.’
Last Tuesday, Dennis Blair told Congress that Iran does not have any highly enriched uranium:
National Intelligence director Dennis Blair told US senators that Tehran had only low-enriched uranium, which would need processing to be used for weapons. He said Iran had ‘not yet made that decision to convert it.
Gates and Blair contradicted not just Mullen but also Israel’s top intelligence official Maj.-Gen.Amos Yadlin, who said a few days ago that Iran had now ‘crossed the technological threshold’ and was now capable of making a nuclear weapon:
‘Arrival at military nuclear capability is a matter of strategy,’ Yadlin said. ‘Iran is accumulating hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium at a low level and hopes to utilize the dialogue with the West in order to gain time, which is required in order to achieve the capability to manufacture a nuclear bomb.’
Defence Intelligence Agency director Lt Gen Michael Maples, also testifying before Congress, said Israel and the US had the same information but had come to different conclusions.
Now why would that be?
This is what Gates said on Wednesday:
When asked about the Bush administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the defense secretary told the U.S. public television station PBS that the lesson drawn in Washington was that the rationale for any future American offensive will have to meet stricter criteria. ‘I think one of the biggest lessons learned in this is, if you are going to contemplate pre-empting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have,’ Gates told PBS.
‘I think that the lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence.’ Gates said that any future strike will first and foremost be predicated on the threat level to the continental U.S. ‘[All future presidents are] going to ask a lot of very hard questions, and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was 6 or 7 years ago,’ Gates told PBS.
All is now horribly clear. It’s finally pay-back time for Iraq by the intelligence and diplomatic community, which failed so conspicuously to pay sufficient attention to the Islamist war upon the west – and Saddam’s role within that --until it was too late. Having briefed and leaked against and undermined George W Bush for the best part of two administrations, thus rewriting history to create the belief that the threat from Saddam was confected from dodgy intelligence and so there had been no threat at all, that same intelligence and diplomatic community is now to use the ‘dodgy intelligence’ claim to raise the bar for military action against Iran to the point where it becomes too late.
Thus the Obama administration is preparing the ground to throw Israel to the wolves of Iran. The dominant faction in DC has decided that a nuclear Iran is something America will have to live with; to live with it, America must do a deal with it; that deal will consist of Israel delivered to it bound and gagged, in exchange for which Iran will leave the US alone.
Except that of course it would not leave the US alone. On the contrary, an incinerated Israel would be the galvanic impetus for a nuclear Iran to seek to finish off both America and Europe. The criminal stupidity of this approach is therefore beyond comprehension. But then, ever since 9/11 important and influential people -- on both sides of the Atlantic – have been consumed by the belief that the root of the whole damned problem is Israel.
Such irrationality has its roots in unconscionable prejudice. Chas W Freeman was but a patch of froth floating on the surface of the sewage.
Topic: Naggarlitte boy obama and his choices (Read 686 times)