Re: The End of US-Israel Strategic Cooperation?

The End of US-Israel Strategic Cooperation?
---
Israel is a tar-baby.

Those who want to defend Israel should fund their own charities.

That they've been allowed to exploit the USA for their defense and
welfare is a tragedy.


On Sep 11, 7:42 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  The End of US-Israel Strategic Cooperation?****
>
> *by Shoshana Bryen <http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Shoshana+Bryen>
> September 6, 2012 at 4:45 am*****
>
> *http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3328/us-israel-strategic-cooperatio...
>
> Mark 2012, however, as the year the Obama administration took its most
> overt steps yet to tell the Arab and Muslim World the the US was severable
> from Israel. How much of what the US and Israel developed over the years
> was shared with countries overtly hostile to Israel?****
>
> "I don't want to be
> complicit<http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=283316>
> if
> they (Israelis) choose to do it (attack Iran's nuclear program)," said
> Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey.****
>
> News flash, General Dempsey: You are complicit in the way that counts; you
> are trapped: the Iranian leadership does not care what we say -- or what we
> do -- about our military relations with Israel. The Iranian leadership
> needs the U.S. as its adversary and will not allow you deniability. If
> there is a strike on Iran, they will need for it to have been the U.S. –
> will need, General Dempsey, for it to have been you.****
>
> It is unlikely, General, that you spoke on your own hook as you are still
> wearing your stars. The last General who spoke to journalists out of turn
> and out of the country was Stanley McChrystal – and he lasted only as long
> as it took to arrive in the Oval Office. Your Commander in Chief appears to
> have used you to hammer another nail in the coffin of a relationship that
> had, until he got here, been remarkably productive for more than 30 years.**
> **
>
> Since the Reagan administration, US-Israel military relations have
> generally been buffered from US-Israel political relations. They were not
> always smooth, but the military establishments were largely left to
> determine their interests together and separately. The late Caspar
> Weinberger was not enamored of Israel (certainly he was not enamored of the
> late Prime Minister Begin nor of the 1982 war in Lebanon), but the
> designation and early growth of "US-Israel Strategic Cooperation," and the
> designation of Israel for Major Non-NATO Ally status came in those
> years.[1]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> The
> Sixth Fleet came to Israel and the Haifa USO was built then to handle the
> enthusiastic crowds of American sailors and Marines.****
>
> Israel had the first wartime operational drones in 1982. The war that
> Weinberger opposed was a catalyst for U.S. thinking about remotely piloted
> vehicles. I took a small group of retired American military officers
> (including the former head of DIA, the former commander of US Air Forces
> Europe and the former commander of NATO's Southern Command) to Israel in
> September 1982 so they could put their hands on the drones that emerged
> from an Israeli model-airplane-flying club. The officers compared it to the
> US Army's then-unsuccessful drone program and the rest is history. U.S.
> conceived and built drones carry the weight of the Afghan war, but they
> also carry the history of 1982.****
>
> The First Gulf War complicated the relationship when President Bush (41)
> built a broad Arab coalition to rescue Kuwait. Israel withstood Saddam's
> rocket barrage without retaliation because that was what the U.S. wanted,
> setting into motion deterrence difficulties for Israel that played out
> later as its closer neighbors acquired and used rockets and missiles. But
> it also set in motion Israel's rapid quest for missile defense
> capabilities, which became an area of close U.S.-Israel cooperation.****
>
> After 9-11, Americans instinctively understood that we had been hammered by
> something with which the Israelis were familiar. "We Are All Israelis Now"
> was the headline in a major American paper. The Israelis "opened their
> closets" to help the US deal with Islamic terrorism, urban warfare and
> counter-terror operations. Israel taught members of the U.S. Army to train
> bomb-sniffing dogs. While the work was going on, Israel loaned IDF dogs to
> the Americans – Hebrew-commanded dogs were in Baghdad.****
>
> As the U.S. has become more adept in the ways of Middle East ground
> warfare, it is the Americans who have technology, tips and training to
> share with Israel.****
>
> "Complicity" is the wrong word for a relationship between countries that
> was grounded in the most fundamental agreement on democratic governance,
> civil liberties, minority rights, rule of law, and what constituted the
> enemy – at least until now.****
>
> General Dempsey meant Iran, but there is more than a divergence on Iran
> going on here. There has been a determined shift of emphasis in the current
> administration. President Obama has elected to focus on how and where the
> U.S. might find partners in the Arab/Muslim world – not itself a bad thing,
> but dangerous if it means a) eroding the definition of an ally to mean
> anyone with any set of political/religious/strategic beliefs that does not
> involve killing Americans outright; and b) throwing the Jews down the well
> (to channel Borat).****
>
> President Obama's Cairo Speech showed only a superficial understanding of
> the Jewish relationship with the Land of Israel. He called Israel's
> independence a response to the Holocaust and not the establishment of the
> third Jewish Commonwealth after a 1,900-year interregnum. So doing, he fed
> into the Arab complaint that Israel was foisted on the region by guilty
> Europeans rather than as a legitimate and permanent part of the region.****
>
> He dispatched NASA administrator (and retired Marine LTG) Charles Bolden to
> find space exploration partners in the Muslim world (visual evidence of his
> discomfort can be seen here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUNc9bWu_1I>).
> The administration accepted the 2010 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty
> Review that singled out Israel for condemnation – despite public statements
> that it would *never* do that. The U.S. rejoined the UN Human Rights
> Commission and the UN Alliance of Civilizations, an openly anti-Israel body
> that claimed in 2006 that global tensions were driven primarily by the
> Palestinian-Israeli conflict and referred to the September 11th attacks as
> resulting from "a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression
> stemming from the West."****
>
> The US declined to
> support<http://www.jinsa.org/jinsa-reports/failing-canada-we-failed-ourselves...>
> Canada's
> traditional, once-a-decade bid for a Security Council seat. Canada, an
> outspoken supporter of Israel, lost to Portugal, a stalwart representative
> of EU ambivalence. The U.S. voted against the infamous "Goldstone Report,"
> but declined to use its influence to encourage others to do the same.
> Israel's housing policy was debated by some of Israel's fiercest critics in
> the Security Council before the US exercised its veto, and the U.S. drove a
> Security Council "compromise" that allowed Israel to be
> criticized<http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/3161/obama-administration-stabs-isr...>along
> with Syria. The administration heaped emergency
> aid<http://www.jinsa.org/jinsa-reports/throwing-money-gaza#.UEOBxsFlRfE>
> on
> Gaza – an allocation of $27 million in its earliest days in office and
> another $400 million in 2010 – aside from the $100 million+ given to the
> Palestinian Authority, including $115 million this year over the
> protestations of Congress.****
>
> Despite the demand for a "total settlement freeze" that forced the
> Palestinian Authority to harden its negotiating position, a vision for a
> "two-state solution" beginning with the 1967 lines and working backward,
> and a nasty comment about Prime Minister Netanyahu that was supposed to be
> off-camera, the Obama administration continues to proclaim itself Israel's
> friend and ally – citing increases in military
> assistance;[2]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> the
> X-Band Radar;[3]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> Israel's
> "qualitative military
> edge";[4]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> and
> missile defense.[5]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> ****
>
> Mark 2012, however, as the year the Obama administration took its most
> overt steps yet to tell the Arab and Muslim world that the US was severable
> from Israel. The NATO-related air rescue operation Anatolian
> Eagle<http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-11/world/turkey.israel.nato.drill_1_n...>was
> canceled because Turkey would not let Israel participate. The
> administration then touted the bilateral missile defense exercise Austere
> Challenge as bigger and better -- and more meaningful -- until they
> canceled it <http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=253691>in April,
> with more than a suggestion that it might give Iran the idea that the U.S.
> and Israel could use it as cover for an attack (an early sign of the
> "complicity" argument to follow). In May, the Administration went ahead
> with Eager Lion
> 2012<http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/3048/why-is-the-us-doing-special-op...>,
> a Special Operations exercise with 19 Arab and Muslim countries, including
> Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan. The tactics and training of Special Operations
> is an important component of Israel's "qualitative military edge." How much
> of what the U.S. and Israel developed over the years was shared with
> countries overtly hostile to Israel? Israel was not invited to the May NATO
> confab<http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/3142/the-incredible-shrinking-us-is...>,
> although 13 NATO "partner nations" were invited to discuss terrorism. Two
> other US-organized and led multilateralcounterterrorism
> confabs<http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/3142/the-incredible-shrinking-us-is...>
> excluded
> Israel as well. When Turkey objected to the
> sharing<http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=no-intel-s...>
> of
> intelligence information with Israel, Secretary of Defense Panetta said no
> NATO radar intelligence would be shared "outside of NATO." NATO Secretary
> General Rasmussen rushed to assure the Turks of the same thing.****
>
> Finally, the administration announced that Austere Challenge would be
> reconstituted as the biggest and best missile defense exercise yet. Until
> this week, when it announced that the exercise would be scaled
> back<http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-31/news/sns-rt-us-usa-isra...>
> –
> way, way back – so Iran would not think it was cover for a US-Israel attack.
> ****
>
> This is where General Dempsey comes in – he is the President's emissary to
> reassure the Iranians that the US will have nothing to do with an attack on
> them; that they are safe from us. And he is the President's emissary to
> tell the Arab and Muslim world that the relationship with Israel is
> expendable. Too bad he doesn't understand that we are not safe from the
> Iranians and that dumping Israel will not make Islamist and
> Islamist-leaning countries -- from Turkey to Egypt to Pakistan to Saudi
> Arabia to Afghanistan -- our friends.****
>
> The United States is trading a long-standing, mutually beneficial security
> relationship for relations that will be less solid (is anything less solid
> than the US-Egypt relationship AFTER we've spend $1.5 billion on it
> annually since the early 1980s and welcomed its Muslim Brotherhood
> revolution?); less technologically advantageous to the U.S. (the technology
> relationship with the Arab/Muslim world flows only one way); and less
> protective of minority and civil rights (as the Egyptians discover we have
> no leverage).****
>
> General Dempsey is the fall guy for an administration that increasingly
> holds Israel in contempt before Arab and Muslim countries -- which
> increasingly hold us in contempt.****
>
> *Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. She was
> previously Senior Director for Security Policy at JINSA and author of JINSA
> Reports form 1995-2011.*****
>
> [1]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> When
> Major Non-NATO Ally status meant something; now it's been applied to
> Afghanistan – laughably suggesting that the Afghan military has something
> to contribute to the security of NATO.
> [2]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> Actually
> negotiated by the Bush administration in a 10-year deal.
> [3]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> Negotiated
> during the Bush administration by now-Senator Mark Kirk.
> [4]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> A
> tricky concept when the US is selling billions of dollars worth of
> equipment to countries at war with Israel.
> [5]<https://mail.google.com/mail/html/compose/static_files/blank_quirks.h...>
> See
> "Austere Challenge" below.****

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