Obama’s Red Line

War with Iran has just gotten more likely

by Justin Raimondo, March 05, 2012

"“We’ve got Israel’s back” – that is the message President Obama sent out ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US for a crucial summit at the White House, and he did it in an interview granted to one of the leading pro-Israel voices in the media, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli prison guard and IDF soldier, now a columnist for The Atlantic. In that interview, Obama basically telegraphed his capitulation to the Israelis, who are demanding the establishment of “red lines” Iran may not cross without provoking an attack:

“[O]ur assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”

Here is the “red line” the Israelis have been demanding: not the act of building a nuclear weapon but evidence “they are making that attempt.” That is, evidence of their intent to do so, without any corroborating evidence they’ve actually succeeded. The catch is that such an “assessment” based on fresh intelligence would be just as impossible to check as it was in the run-up to the Iraq war, when US officials assured us Saddam was making the Bomb – and citing all sorts of completely invented “intelligence” to back it up. In short, we won’t find out if we were lied into war until well after the war has started – devastating the region, the world economy, and all hopes for peace......"