By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch
"....There were those who said sadly, “Joe just isn’t Joe any more.”
They were wrong.
Appropriately, it was on the topic of Israel that, as vice president, Biden first tossed aside unmanly prudence. Even given the zeal of almost every member of the US Congress to satisfy the Israel lobby, Biden has always been conspicuous for his slavish posture towards the Holy State. Accepting Obama’s offer of the vice presidential nomination last summer, he announced emphatically that he would not have considered accepting the invitation if he had entertained the slightest suspicion that Obama was not one hundred per cent in Israel’s corner. In fact the Israel lobby did entertain these unworthy suspicions, which is why it pushed strongly for Biden as veep.
It wasn’t far into Obama’s first months in the White House that the Lobby began to feel that even though Obama’s chief of staff is Rahm Emanuel, their suspicions were justified. The president dared to mention in public the right of Palestinians to some form of state. He said the settlements on the West Bank had to stop. (True, he didn’t say anything categorical about actually existing illegal settlements.) He seemed too eager to parley with Iran, too demure on the topic of its nuclear program.
On July 5 George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden in Baghdad for his Sunday morning talk show on the ABC network and promptly put the question: “if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat,[and] they have to take out the nuclear program militarily, the United States will not stand in the way?”
Biden lunged for the driver’s wheel and swerved US government policy in a whole new direction: “We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.”
The White House spent the next two days categorically denying that it was giving – via Biden - Israel the go-ahead to make a unilateral attack on Iran. The United States is "absolutely not" flashing Israel a green light to attack Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama told CNN in Moscow on July 7. "We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East.”...."
CounterPunch
"....There were those who said sadly, “Joe just isn’t Joe any more.”
They were wrong.
Appropriately, it was on the topic of Israel that, as vice president, Biden first tossed aside unmanly prudence. Even given the zeal of almost every member of the US Congress to satisfy the Israel lobby, Biden has always been conspicuous for his slavish posture towards the Holy State. Accepting Obama’s offer of the vice presidential nomination last summer, he announced emphatically that he would not have considered accepting the invitation if he had entertained the slightest suspicion that Obama was not one hundred per cent in Israel’s corner. In fact the Israel lobby did entertain these unworthy suspicions, which is why it pushed strongly for Biden as veep.
It wasn’t far into Obama’s first months in the White House that the Lobby began to feel that even though Obama’s chief of staff is Rahm Emanuel, their suspicions were justified. The president dared to mention in public the right of Palestinians to some form of state. He said the settlements on the West Bank had to stop. (True, he didn’t say anything categorical about actually existing illegal settlements.) He seemed too eager to parley with Iran, too demure on the topic of its nuclear program.
On July 5 George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden in Baghdad for his Sunday morning talk show on the ABC network and promptly put the question: “if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat,[and] they have to take out the nuclear program militarily, the United States will not stand in the way?”
Biden lunged for the driver’s wheel and swerved US government policy in a whole new direction: “We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.”
The White House spent the next two days categorically denying that it was giving – via Biden - Israel the go-ahead to make a unilateral attack on Iran. The United States is "absolutely not" flashing Israel a green light to attack Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama told CNN in Moscow on July 7. "We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East.”...."
No comments:
Post a Comment