Friday, August 28, 2009

Obama’s Road to War


It's not just Afghanistan …

By Justin Raimondo

"Obama is keeping his eye on the prize – the Nobel Prize, that is, as a reward for brokering a Middle East "peace" deal. Unfortunately, he’s doing it on the backs of the Palestinian people – and the rest of us, as well.

The news out of the negotiations with the Israelis is that Bibi gets everything, and Obama gets to make an announcement that the perpetually stalled talks with the Palestinians will resume. By "everything," I mean to include what the Guardian describes as "a partial freeze" on settlement construction – an oxymoron that could only exist in the context of an agreement between Israel and the US.

But isn’t that what the "special relationship" is all about? Love, as Ayn Rand put it, is exception-making – and I certainly can’t imagine the US capitulating so quickly and completely as it has in this instance.

Quite aside from the settlements, however, the Obama-ites really gave away the store when they agreed to "adopt a much tougher line with Iran over its alleged nuclear program." What this means, more precisely, is that the bar for judging whether Iran is building useable nukes is going to be considerably lowered: get ready for a slew of "intelligence" reports claiming they’re on the verge of nuking Tel Aviv. With Congress getting ready to impose strict economic sanctions on Iranian energy exports, the stage is set for a military strike..........

In any case, Blankley’s conception of Obama facing a momentous decision needs to be put in its full context: the President isn’t deciding between war and peace. He and his foreign policy advisors are merely debating which war to fight first, with the more pro-Israel faction voting for a strike against Iran, and the more pragmatic types wanting to finish the job in Kabul and environs before tackling Tehran.

This is a repetition of rather recent history, when the neocons in the Bush administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz, argued that an invasion of Iraq had to be our first response to 9/11, while others argued for taking on the Taliban. I suspect the latter types will win out, just as they did during the Bush years......."

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