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by hoyasmeg
Something I find consistently baffling about neocon pundits is their unfailing support of policies that have objectively failed. Here’s former Bush speechwriter Jay Nordlinger, explaining why Israel was better off with W. in the White House.
It would be helpful to peace in the Middle East if Israel’s enemies could be absolutely sure that Israel is not going anywhere: that it is here to stay. Remember the old gay slogan? “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”? Israel’s enemies need to know something like that about Israel. But as long as they have the feeling that the world — you know: “the world,” as in the New York Times, the U.N., and Bono — is not really committed to the existence of Israel, they will push for Israel’s destruction. [...]
Under George W. Bush and other presidents, the United States gave the impression that we would back Israel, come what may. That was a quite useful thing for Israel’s enemies to know. It was more important for them to know it than for Israel to know it. The current U.S. administration does not give that impression (is my impression).
I’m not sure how Nordlinger defines “helpful” and “useful” but fatalities in Israel from terrorist attacks increased to unprecedented levels during the Bush administration. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensified from ’01-’09, Hamas won control of the Palestinian legislature in 2006, and that same year, Israel was goaded into a disastrous full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon by Hezbollah, resulting in about 9,000 casualties.
In other words, Israel’s enemies were not terribly impressed by George W. Bush’s “back Israel, come what may” approach.
Now how much of all that can be directly blamed on Bush’s policies is debatable, but these certainly don’t look like results to be crowing about.
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When has that stopped the right wingers from crowing in the past?? I mean damn, tax cuts for the rich has bankrupted our country TWICE now in past 30 years, yet they still crow about the success of that.
The question is a bit irrelevant. As far as I can tell, the USA is under Likud government. You are 50 Israeli provinces. The puppet in the Whitehouse is no more credible than Abbas in the West Bank. Bibi says ‘jump’, Bambi asks ‘how high’?
People keep saying you need a 3rd party in US politics. Perhaps you already have one and just don’t realise it yet?
But…but…cutting taxes actually increases revenue!
[/wingnut]
But that’s not what Jay Nordlinger says. He thinks Bush’s policies are superior to Obama’s and (presumably) Clinton’s. Despite the lots-more-people-including-Israelis-dying thing.
It does increase revenues. Of the rich folks no longer paying those taxes.
Like most reflexive backers of Israel, Nordinger doesn’t seem especially interested in reality.
George Bush the First did a disservice to the nation by not wearing a rubber.
Exactly! Where is Saint Ronnie when we really need him?
That can be said of pretty much any Bush.
Or maybe Israel is simply our proxy and we’re actually the ones calling the shots, and keeping that fact a secret so as to provide plausible deniability?
Of course by we, I don’t mean anybody you could easily identify by name, but you could ask Dick Cheney if he knows who’s really in charge.
Israel is queer?
I don’t see the advantage of “deniability” if we’re just going to reflexively support them no matter what they do.
Israel was in better shape before Ariel Sharon marched his fat ass through the grounds of the al Aqsa mosque accompanied by IDF forces while Bill Clinton was trying a last ditch effort to create a peace deal with Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat.
Bush’s policy of neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian issue allowed the Likud government to consolidate and expand settlements and create a wall around Israeli-claimed territory. The possibility of a two-state solution morphed into that of a three-state solution and now is pretty much heading toward a one-state solution that will make Israel an apartheid state, with all of the instability that apartheid brings.
Bush wasn’t good for Israel; Bush was good for Likud.
At some point, President Obama will have to take some responsibility for what is going on. About 37% of his term has now gone by and everyone seems to be still blaming it all on Bush as if Obama has no ability to accomplish anything.
When the Palestinians actually want peace, and not a “back to 1948″ mentality, it will be available to them. Even a back to 1968 was available to them in 1968. They are like old generals always fighting the last war.
Impressions of impressions are really not news.
Mr Nordlinger should go back to polishing the turd that is W’s legacy and leave the analysis of the current Administration to analysts, not apologists for past war criminals.
What’s aggravating is the pretense, upheld by both conservatives and some progressives (including Blue Texan) is that there’s a difference between Bush and Obama on Israel.
Just announced that Obama has flip-flopped on his previous opposition to the lifting of the ban on commercial whaling for Norway, Iceland and Japan.
It appears Helen Thomas is leaving the White House Press Corp. as a result of her “controversial remarks about Jews.” She is retiring.
You’re not reading deeply enough into what I’m saying.
Which by the way is not a criticism just an observation.
What I mean is that what you describe as reflexively supporting them no matter what they do, could be alternately described as;
Making believe we reflexively support them no matter what they do, when they are really doing what they’ve been told to do by the same people who tell Obama what to do.
IOW I think Obama and Netanyahu share the same boss/bosses, and the whole show is meant to disguise that fact.
See my reply to Margaret above.
Israel is the bad cop while the UK and USA get to play good cops.
Yep, agreed. Great post. The only thing you left out was the fact that Obama is continuing along the same lines of W and so therefore Obama is good for Likud as well.
So it seems at some point it just becomes the POTUS is good for Likud.
George W. Bush was good for all evil things. Do the math.
Maybe Hamas as a third party?
Excellent point.
Well, since it sure looks like Mr O has no ability to get anything done – except when it helps corporations – and otherwise his policies seem to be the same as Bush43′s, yeah, we’re going to look like we’re blaming Bush43….
Back to 48″ u mean 1848 right when Palestine then just a part of Syria which itself was a Ottoman Turkish province was Jew free, right?
Amen. There is no difference between the two. “We regret the actions that led to this tragic event…” (or whatever he said).
No difference, not interested in changing squat. Obama will talk a nice game, but nothing is going to change. Can’t wait for 2016 when Hillary will run again and tout her foreign policy experience and what a wonderful job she did on the Israeli/Palestinian issue. I’m certain she’ll get some nice donations from the Israelis.
What evidence do you have to support your claim? Israel and Obama/US the victims of an evil conspiracy!!! They are forced to do what the evil overseers tell them to do! Israel is far too small of a player to be dancing to the same tune as the US.
I agree with US is controlled by corporate interests, but I do not believe the same is true for Israel. Israel is controlled by a zealotry unseen elsewhere in the Western world. The fact that we give them safe harbor no matter what horrible thing they do has spoiled them.
We need to change course and let them fail. Unfortunately, the powers that be won’t let that happen (not that I think Obama wants to).
This guy was a speechwriter? It is no wonder the chimp spoke in garbled sentences.
Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany?
The Israelis are stuck with the President we’ve got, I don’t hear them complaining, just some shill for Bush, looking to make a buck and encourage Obama to respond by moving further to the “other” side. Frankly I’ve not seen the need of much encouragement, that being a general tendency among the Democrats, to do the destructive “thing”. I have little doubt that you will disagree with me.
But let me ask you something.
Are you surprised? (In the current “atmosphere” of hyperbolic Bush-Cheney braggadocio, especially)
And, is “this” really “news” or “new”?
DW
What I posit, is that Israel, in exchange for being the proxy of the UK and USA, gets a license to behave as you have witnessed.
I explain my perspective in more detail here.
We’re not victims of an evil conspiracy, we’re the authors of that conspiracy, and can’t admit it to ourselves because we’re too caught up in our exceptionalism.
We control Israel, to a certain extent through our support, but they serve the purpose of being our proxy and a trip-wire no matter how they behave towards Palestinians.
David Dayen has a fresh cross-post up: FinReg Conference Comes Down to Three Key Provisions
Was Bush good for Israel? If you ask Israelis, I’m sure the answer is yes…He never made them clean up their bedroom, never made them mow the lawn, never made them take out the trash…He never looked through their sock drawer for pot, and never monitored their internet activities. He never asked a single solitary thing from them. He was the perfect parent.
As far as Israel is concerned…that’s a good foreign policy.
That’s strange. Likud doesn’t seem to feel that way. Obama is publicly for the existence of Israel. I don’t know what has gone on in the private talks with Bibi that have gotten the Likud in America organizations angry at Obama’s policy. Unless Likud and the GOP are in a formal alliance.
At the very least, Obama might have mentioned the US deficit and the fact that the US might have to decide where to cut its foreign aid budget. Or he might have said No to immediate action against Iran. Or maybe anyone whose middle name is Hussein gets Likud representatives squirmy.
But something has got Netanyahu and Likud bent out of shape.
Blue Texan:
The wishful thinking of this kind of post exasperates me. It’s typical of liberals who want to have their cake and eat it, too — they want to criticize Israeli behavior and claim that such criticism is “good for Israel”, to boot.
We need to get our priorities straight and start with the criticism fo the behavior itself; I’m skeptical that the Israelis are mistaken in their strategic aims of expanding Israel — in any case, I’m American and under no obligation to err on the side of Israelis at the expense of their victims. Let’s start with what’s indisputable: Israeli behavior is increasingly more intransigent and aggressive. Every year ago we have some kind of massacre or lopsided war that erodes some previous imagined civilized norm: Jenin 2002, Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2009, now this massacre of an as yet undetermined amount of flotilla participants.
But Israel is winning — each year that secure more land through settlement and ethnic cleansing, each year their walls become less porous to infiltration, each year they get closer to getting their attack on their remaining designated enemy, Iran. Netanyahu and his ilk are rational, albeit criminal, in pursuing that ethnic cleansing. Time, perhaps a generation, will tell whether their project of incorporating the whole West Bank — with or without its Arab population — will have been successful.
The pleas that Israel’s massacres and expropriation of land are not “in Israel’s best interest” ring hollow. To take an analogy, we didn’t criticize the invasion of Iraq merely because it was a “strategic blunder”; we criticized it because it was an lawless act of agression and mass murder.
Begging for a pat on the head and an acklowledgment of what a good friend of Israel’s you are is pitiful at this point. There is no one to listen to you over there any more. The remaining “liberals” making apologies for Israel in the U.S., meanwhile, are just a humanistic veneer over a country of Netanyahus and Liebermans, that is, fascists, and your protestions of friendship are just a cover for them. In this regard, I highly recommend Peter Beinart’s (yes, that Peter Beinart’s!) NYRB about the demographic changes among those in the U.S. supporters of Israel; it’s clear-eyed and pessimistic.
LOL. By analogy to Lebanon 2000 I was just waiting to see who the Mel Gibson would be this time.
So THAT’S why they called it the Camp David Accords.
“Let them fail”. Now that’s a real change in policy because the U.S. has consistently stepped in and ordered the Israelis to stand down each and every time that the Israelis have been on the verge of military success. Now the Israelis will often drag their collective feet for a few days, but they ultimately give in, and leave their antagonists strong enough to come at them once again, knowing that the U.S. and the world will step in to save their bacon if the Israelis start to get the upper hand.
I support the existence of Israel as a law-abiding state committed to peace. Not as a war-crime-committing rogue nation. Their choice what to be. I had no idea all Israelis were gay.
This is an interesting eye-witness account of what happened on the Mavi Marmara. I don’t get the August 23, 2010 date in the 4th paragraph though. Is he creating a fictional success in the future?
The sad thing is that from 2001 through 2009, our foreign policy and Israel’s were both being dictated by the same PNAC Platoon/Likudnik types as exemplified by John Bolton and Doug Feith, and they had all fallen for Ahmad Chalabi’s “flowers and candy” nonsense — nonsense that didn’t help Iraq, the US, Israel, or anyone outside of his old friends in Iran. Funny how that works.
GW was a big success for the right wing…..he raised the price of oil to record levels, he got us building permanent bases in the Middle East, he created the faith based initiative which gives US tax dollars to churches with no questions asked, he gutted countless agencies which policed corporations and the government, etc. etc.
PS how could I forgot the war against non chrisitans.
Is this self parody? Did you read anything about Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006? You’re quite the sabra warrior at the keyboard there.
This is the wishful thinking I’m talking about. Having an American army in Iran (and Afghanistan) doesn’t “help” the Israelis encircle Iran? The threat of an American army athwart Iran is the necessary predicate for a war against them. It took a long time, about twelve years, to gin up the invasion of Iraq. We’re only seven years into the bigger project of Iran.
That was not the intent of this post.
No.
Any more questions?
You can always find someone who will tell you what you want to hear, that does not mean that they are your friend.
Likewise, those who tell us the ugly truth may not necessarily be our enemies.
No, the argument was the unconvincing one that Bush wasn’t “good” for Israel.
Israel vastly advanced its hegemony both in the region, and within the American government, under Bush.
That’s one way of looking at it.
Another way to look at it is that Israel took thousands of casualties, suffered record numbers of terrorist attacks, grew more diplomatically isolated, fought a major war it didn’t win, saw their enemies emboldened, and lost a ton of soft power globally.
That’s not the way the Israeli public look at it, judging by the past several election results in Israel.
And the Israeli leadership judges that limited Israeli casualties (and they’re very limited) are an acceptable price to pay for incorporating the occupied territories. Without a doubt they correctly judge the Israeli public accepts this calculus.
There’s no room any more for “friends” of Israel who are at the same time friends of peace. The honest choice is to be either a full-throated advocate and apologist for whatever they do (any “liberal” Israeli or American making excuses for this latest, the flotilla massacre, is a concern troll) or an opponent (which is not the same thing as an enemy).
Since Israel looks to be traveling downhill on a roller-coaster to nowhere, it’s unlikely that anyone is actually helping helping it.
Chomsky and Finkelstein, perhaps.
And…?
If Israel is depending on the American army in Iraq and Afghanistan to encircle Iran, their foreign policy team is loonier than I thought. Have they not noticed that the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan are way overextended?
The worst thing that Iran can do to undermine Israel is to take away their enemy. When Israel has no one external to fight, the focus returns to their internal problems. One of which is the tension between secular Jews and religiously conservative Jews. Another is the tension between the settlers and the rest of Israel. And then there is the apartheid question. Is Israel a Jewish state or a democratic state? What rights do native non-Jews have in a Jewish Israel? If a democratic Israel, what happens when non-Jews become the majority in the government? These fundamental contradictions do not go away if you take away Israel’s enemies.
Neo-con success breeds the dissolution of Israel. That is why the destruction of Iran would mean the self-destruction of Israel. That is why they were idiots about Iraq.
Afghanistan is a different issue that is related to Israel only because al Quaeda made it so and headquartered itself in Afghanistan. While a convenient base in confronting Iran, Afghanistan is not really in a good strategic location to actually do anything. Afghanistan (really the parts that are currently Taliban strongholds) are adjacent to the North Khorasan, Rasavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan provinces of Iran. There is not much population nor are there significant military targets in this part of Iran. This is not a good launching pad, like Kuwait was for Iraq.
So if the US military is seriously considering attacking Iran from Afghanistan, they are more idiotic than the neo-cons.
Just looking at maps can be deceiving. Hitler argued that Czechoslovakia was a knife in the heart of Germany; Arab countries once argued that Israel was a dagger in the Middle East. Both of those occurred and both were a propagandistic reading of the mere shape and location of a country. The fact of US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan says little about US intentions relative to Iran. In fact, Iran to a great degree influences what happens in Iraq through its agent, Ahmed Chalabi, the hero of the neo-cons.
“goaded”? The war was planned well in advance — the ‘Two’ soldiers were an excuse.
Two captured Israeli soliders resulting in the deaths of about 1,200 Lebanese mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
Olmert braces for Lebanon probe
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6606479.stm
Israel planned for Lebanon war months in advance, PM says
· Olmert’s leaked testimony contradicts earlier remarks
· Criticism from inquiry may force resignation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/syria.israelandthepalestinians
The Republicans plan is basically to say to hell with the peace process — let Israel take the whole damn lot… Please read the latest from the Republican Jewish outreach member of the Israel Allies Caucus:
* [Rep Eliot Engel — the ‘We must Free Jonathan Pollard’, also on the US Foreign Affairs Committee is the Democrat representative.
There you go… republican logic — swing a sledge hammer at the situation and all will be well.
GOP Congressman calls for permanent occupation
Ali Gharib
http://www.lobelog.com/gop-congressman-calls-for-permanent-occupation/
Israel Allies Caucus
Rep Eliot L. Engel
* Co-Chair of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus with sister co-working outfit over in Israel:
“The Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus”
* Chairman of the United States Subcommittee on “The Western Hemisphere”
No conflict of interest there… /snark
correction — Frank is a from the Christian outreach — Engel is Jewish.
Why not? The Poles and Germans have announced they are willing to let bygones be bygones. /s
It’s rude to remember that history./s
Fourth para, sayd August 23, 2007. Talking about a different event.
I read it, and got the strong overall impression that the man is a few slices short of a full loaf. But, if his facts are accurate, the wounded and captured Israelis were being held “inside” and surrounded by at least “100 men.”
Hardly a scenario to justify criticizing the uncaptured Israelis for coming on strong, is that? Not in my universe.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. /s /s /s
(The dreaded triple-snark.)