Obama’s foreign policy: Perhaps cunning, but never wise, never truthful

This writer carries no brief for Israel. All that is written and argued about “Israel’s right to exist” is nonsense. Neither Israel nor the United States nor any other nation has a right to exist. A state’s ability to survive depends solely on its own social cohesion, economic viability, and domestic political, international, and military behavior and actions, not on some non-existent right the Israel-First lobby dreamed-up to use to propagandized the American people into eternally supporting a nation that is completely irrelevant — and, indeed, bloodily counter-productive — to genuine U.S. national security interests.

That said, Israel and all nation-states have an absolute right to defend themselves in the manner they deem mandatory for their survival. In the now-dying Western democracies that defense includes the process of national elections to choose national political leaders. For a foreign nation to interfere in such elections — as the disloyal U.S. citizen Israel-Firsters and Mexican governments routinely do in U.S. elections — is to undermine the intervened-in nation’s absolute right of self-defense. The Obama administration’s State Department apparently identified disloyal Israeli citizens in Israel and transferred to them at least $350,000 for to use in a campaign meant to defeat Mr. Netanyahu in the recent Israeli election. Such intervention is tantamount to an act of war, just as it is criminal negligence for any government to refuse to identify and aggressively prosecute those of its citizens who use foreign money to influence a national election. And this is at least the second time that the Obama administration has deliberately compromised the ability of the Israelis to defend themselves. Recall that it was Obama’s White House, in spring, 2012, which leaked information about a deal that Israel had worked out with Azerbaijan to use Azeri airfields if it decided that its security required an attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. (See, www.non-intervention.com, 2 April 2012)

The Israelis will not attack the United States, of course, but a well-merited retaliation against America is simple enough to execute and probably will be. Netanyahu’s government can cut back on whatever intelligence is shared with the U.S. intelligence community; continue to pass sensitive U.S. technologies to other nations; pick up the pace of recruiting penetrations of the U.S. government’s intelligence and defense communities; and, as always, seek to influence U.S. elections and further corrupt U.S. politics via the money of disloyal Jewish-Americans and their organizations.

What makes matters worse for U.S. security is that this intervention in Israel’s national security affairs is only a part of the campaign that Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton inaugurated to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries in the name of spreading democracy, while actually seeking to establish abroad the kind of liberal-authoritarian government they are trying to build in the United States. And Republican hands are not clean on this funding for counterproductive interventionism unless all of them voted against the State Department appropriations that allowed the democracy crusaders Obama and Clinton to fund the disastrous-for-the-United-States actions that follow.

  • The funding of Iranian oppositions groups, the result of which was scores of dead young Iranians, more Muslim hatred for U.S. interventionism, and less domestic political freedom in Iran.
  • The funding — along with EU funding — of opposition groups in the Ukraine that ultimately led to overthrow of Ukraine’s government; justified Putin’s annexation of the Crimea to protect Russia’s national security interests; started a Ukrainian civil war; and inaugurated a U.S.-led Western effort to economically strangle Russia that has created a European environment in which war between NATO and Russia is again being discussed and warned of.
  • The funding of Egyptian groups opposed to Mubarak’s regime, which resulted in Mubarak’s fall; the election of an Islamist government; a U.S.-EU approved military coup to overthrow the Islamists ,which restored a Mubarak-like dictatorship; and the beginning of the destabilization of the region that has been, quite literally, an Allah-send for the Islamist movement.

U.S. interventionism always ends up costing America lives and money and earning it enduring hatred and war, and never more so than when it is conducted by reality blind and terminally adolescent theorists like Obama and Hillary Clinton.

I have long argued that the United States has no compelling national security concern that requires more than a nominal relationship with Israel, perhaps an exchange of Consul-Generals, at most. Our current bilateral relations with Israel cost American taxpayers untold billions of dollars that could be much better spent — or saved — at home; prompted President Bush’s Israel-First war against Saddam’s non-U.S.-threatening Iraq, the intensely negative repercussions of which have only started to be felt; provides one of the half-dozen major motivations for the anti-U.S. Islamism that has grown from Usama bin Laden’s 40-man al-Qaeda in 1988 to today’s worldwide Islamist movement; and facilitated the opportunity for Israel-First U.S. citizens and their organizations to corrupt both houses of Congress and much of the U.S. political system. For these issues and others, U.S. ties to Israel out to be reduced to the lowest possible level. Preferably they should be cut altogether.

This termination process can and should be done in a publicly forthright, manly, and dignified manner; of course, no one would ascribe such character traits to Obama or any of his senior lieutenants. But the termination of relations must be done solely in the interests of the United States, not in a punitive manner that makes the United States an agent of Israel’s destruction, although constant U.S. intervention in the Muslim world — championed by Obama, Hillary Clinton, McCain, Wolfowitz, Graham, Firth, AIPAC, Cheney, all the Bushes etc. — has already contributed massively to what seems likely to be Israel’s inevitable demise.

In all of this, two facts stand out. First, the United States has no national-security reason to be involved in Israel’s problems or in its protection. Second, Israel has every right and an unquestionable responsibility to defend itself as it sees fit and, in doing so, work out its own destiny. Iran is Israel’s problem and Israel will address it as its leaders and voters deem necessary. The United States should neither play the part of Israel’s Muslim-hating protector, nor should it lift a finger to — as it already has done twice — to make Israel’s ability to defend itself more difficult. Obama would do much better if he and his advisers began to prosecute those disloyal Jewish-Americans and Mexican diplomats who seek with money and media to influence U.S. national elections.

Finally, Obama’s absurd anger over Netanyahu’s comment about the worrying “drove” of Arab-Israelis who went to the polls speaks to all Americans about the depth of incompetence, naiveté, and ignorance that resides in and fairly oozes from Obama and his team of advisers. Does Obama really think that the Israelis believe that their Arab citizens are their equals and that Israelis will someday be ready to be governed by a Muslim majority? Does Obama not recognize that, of all of Israel’s problems, demography — the rapid growth of the country’s Arabs population — is one of the most lethal? Does Obama believe that there is even the most remote chance that two peoples who have been murdering each other for nearly seventy years are simply going to forgive and forget and agree to live amiably together simply because he and fatuous “International Community” believe they should? Can Obama, his party, and the Republicans possibly believe that the two-state solution remains plausible even as it lies dead, mutilated, and rotting in the full glare of the public spotlight? Can Obama conceivably believe that the walking-dead peace process is just between Israelis and Palestinians, rather than between Israel and the entire Islamist movement that his arrogant and amateurish interventionism has motivated and nurtured?

The answer to each of these questions is a resounding yes, and that affirmative goes far to explain the U.S.-produced or -assisted disasters not only in Israel and Palestine, but also in Iran, Ukraine, and Egypt. Obama’s inability to understand the diversity of the world’s peoples, cultures, and faiths; his ignorance of the eternally unchanging nature of human nature; his hatred for all religions that are not what he believes they should be; and his refusal to recognize that hatred and revenge are as much valid and timeless human characteristics as love and forgiveness, and that none of the four can be banned or mandated by a governmental diktat or international agreement, are hardly the traits that make a competent national or international leader. They are, however, the traits of a wholly unqualified national leader who, with arrogance and always simmering hatred for those he believes cross him, may well bumble his nation and perhaps the world into a great war.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.