Losing our way?

Is the US losing its way in the war against terrorist nutballs? Is the US about to abandon Israel as the first Pres. Bush did? There have been some bad signs: (1) an unnamed Bush staffer saying that a second Bush Administration would take a hard line against Ariel Sharon; (2) the Administration pitched a fit over Sharon's plans to increase housing at a long-standing Israeli settlement in the West Bank that had been contemplated (since the Clinton Administration) as part of the land Israel would retain in a final agreement because it now stood as a sizeable Israeli city (compensation to be determined); (3) the US fiddling around while the EU plays footsie with the Iranian theocrats whilst the Iranians keep working towards going nuclear.

Caroline Glick, one of the best writers on Israel's relationship with its neighbors and with the US, fears that the US will abandon Israel just as it abandoned Ahmed Chalabi and the Kurds in order to curry favor with the French, Germans and UN. See the link in the title for her whole article, but here's an excerpt:

The US actions in Iraq should be disturbing to Israel. Not only has Chalabi, the US's staunchest Shi'ite ally, been discarded in favor of forces that oppose the Bush administration's aim to bring democracy to Iraq. In the administration's haste to win UN approval of the Allawi government, it agreed that the UN resolution on the transfer of governing authority would make no mention of the temporary constitution (negotiated by Chalabi) that gave the Kurds veto power to ensure their freedom.

The Kurds viewed this as a betrayal of their friendship by Washington. As one Kurdish fighter explained last month in The Los Angeles Times, "After the incident with the UN resolution, the [Kurds] became impatient because their concerns were not answered Kurds took part effectively in the liberation war, but what we got back was not as much as we put in." We see here that in order to appease institutions like the UN as well as the French, and the now overtly hostile Turks, the US has sidelined and indeed harmed its best friends.

What this bodes for Israel was alluded to by a story published in the Sunday New York Times about US disenchantment with diplomatic attempts to stem the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Times reported that given the failure of Western diplomacy aimed at thwarting Iran's nuclear weapons program, the US is now pushing for the issue to be transferred to the UN Security Council for management.

According to the Times, the Bush administration's increased urgency on the matter is driven in part "by increasingly strong private statements by Israeli officials that they will not tolerate the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and may be forced to consider military action if Tehran is judged to be on the verge of deploying a weapon." So, at least in part, what is driving the US to action in Iran is the fear that Israel, the US's inconvenient yet staunchest and most loyal ally in the war on terror, may actually deal with the largest threat looming from the global terror nexus: its physical destruction by a terrorist regime in possession of nuclear weapons.

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. . . what we see is that Israel is liable to be treated like a Chalabi. While the US is pushing Britain, France and Germany . . . to move the issue from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the UN Security Council, it is far from clear that any of these countries support such a move. And it is even less clear whether, in the event that the US succeeds in moving the issue to the UN Security Council, these countries would sign on to any US resolution calling for effective (i.e., military) steps to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Still less clear is whether the other two member of the UN Security Council – Russia, which built Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, and China, which has supplied it with nuclear technology – could be swayed by the US.

More likely is a scenario in which Israel becomes a scapegoat in a US attempt to forge a coalition of states that share none of the US's interests vis-a-vis Iran. Iran this week demanded a guarantee of protection from Britain, France and Germany against an Israeli nuclear strike . . . The US could well find itself in a position of being alone in demanding action against Iran and being either blackballed or forced to accept an equation of Israel with Iran in order to avert yet another head-on collision with its purported allies on the Security Council. And in the meantime, unless Israel acts on its own, months will have passed with no effective action against the Iranian nuclear program.

The situation is all the more distressing when we take into consideration the fact that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is even worse than the terribly confused Bush administration. Following the issuance of the spurious arrest warrants, Kerry called for an investigation into how the US ever had a relationship with Ahmed Chalabi to begin with. Last week, James Rubin, one of Kerry's senior foreign policy advisers, told Newsweek that a Kerry administration would seek to engage Iran and "call its bluff" by offering the fanatical theocracy nuclear fuel in exchange for a pledge not to develop nuclear weapons.

This means we are stuck with hoping for a Bush victory even as the administration itself has forgotten the fundamentals of statecraft and morality: In war and in peace, be good to your friends and bad to your enemies. We can only hope that it regains its bearings soon.