A Simple Government (24 page)

Terrorists like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and state sponsors of terror like Iran, aren’t just against the Jews. They are against everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their own narrow, extremist version of Islam—Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, even all other Muslims. The Muslim world must deal with its repressive, corrupt regimes; its failed states that can’t provide the most basic services to their people; its systemic culture of poverty, illiteracy, and injustice; and all its tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries. Israel has nothing to do with any of this.

If Israel didn’t exist, would India and Pakistan suddenly be friends? Would the Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in Afghanistan get along? Would the Sunni Arab states not feel threatened by the non-Arab Persian Shiites of Iran; would the Salafi and Zaydi sects in Yemen suddenly agree on religious doctrine? Would all the ancient and endless Hatfield-and-McCoy tribal disputes that define that part of the world end? Of course not. Osama bin Laden would still want to destroy us and our way of life, would still want to establish a worldwide caliphate taking us back to the “good old days” of 1,400 years ago.

President Obama has declared that achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a vital national-security interest of the United States. I believe we best pursue our national security by staying out of it, other than to provide Israel all the moral and military support she needs and deserves. Quite frankly, until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist, renounces violence, and accepts previous agreements, there’s really nothing that can be done and no point in pressuring Israel to do it anyway.

Our national-security interest lies in standing with our friends in the fight against Islamic terror. Distancing ourselves from Israel contradicts that interest, emboldening our mutual enemies, making Israel feel even more threatened and isolated, and causing our other friends to wonder who will be thrown under the bus next. To the Arab/Muslim world, such distancing is a sign of American weakness and Israeli vulnerability that only encourages them to double down on their genocidal plans for Israel.

Both European and Muslim countries look to us to see how far they can take their Israel bashing. President Obama has sent out signals—very dangerous signals—that say, “Go ahead and bash Israel all you want, literally and figuratively, fine with us.”

As a candidate, President Obama never told the American people that he would order a draconian freeze on all Israeli settlement activity, with no exceptions. He never told us that he would repudiate the understanding by Presidents Clinton and Bush that Israel would never give up all settlements but would keep some close to the 1949 armistice line by swapping land. In fact, his call for a complete freeze contradicted the policy of all U. S. presidents since Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. How absurd is it for the U.S. government to tell an Israeli family that they can’t add a nursery to their home to welcome a new baby or tell an Israeli village that they can’t add a classroom to their schoolhouse?

But after his first meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2009, President Obama announced, “Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward.” With whom were the Israelis supposed to move forward? With the Hamas terrorists of the Gaza Strip? With Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, who barely controls the sidewalk in front of his office in the West Bank? Yet Obama took the ball out of the Palestinians’ court and said that it wasn’t their wanton
destruction
of life and property that was holding back the peace process. No, it was Israeli
construction
.

Moreover, when President Obama announced his new settlement policy, he coupled it with an implied threat that unless the Israelis capitulated, he might retaliate by not doing as much as he could to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He sounded ominously like Tony Soprano.

President Obama used identical “blame the victim” language in both his Cairo address of June 2009 and his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2009, saying that the United States “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”
Legitimacy
was an odd choice of words, considering how few people in his audience even accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

In March 2010, while Vice President Biden was visiting Israel, President Obama found the flimsy pretext he had been looking for to show the world how tough he could be on Israel without any justification or provocation by the Israelis other than doing what any sovereign country could be expected to do.

What was the terrible outrage that occurred during that visit? Brace yourself. A midlevel bureaucrat moved along the approval process for some apartments in an existing Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem. It obviously had nothing to do with Israel’s honoring of its construction freeze in the West Bank and was in keeping with Israeli policies under every prime minister since the reunification of Jerusalem after Israel’s neighbors attacked her in 1967. Those policies had not deterred the Egyptians and Jordanians from signing peace treaties with Israel.

But later that month, President Obama inflated that incident into an excuse to humiliate Prime Minister Netanyahu on his visit to the White House, refusing to be photographed with him or hold a joint press conference or issue a joint statement. Obama even scheduled the meeting to run until dinnertime and then ostentatiously announced he was going to eat without inviting his guest to join him. No soup for you!

Skip forward to May 2010: At the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) conference, the United States for the first time caved in to an Arab demand that Israel be singled out for not signing the NPT. The whole world knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, so this posturing was pure political theater. The final resolution didn’t mention either Pakistan or India, which also have nuclear weapons and haven’t signed the NPT, or Iran, which has signed but whose nuclear program is in defiance of the treaty.

Preventing specific mention of Israel had been official U.S. policy since 1969. In fact, it had been President Obama’s policy in his September 2009 address to the UN General Assembly, where he said regarding the NPT, “Let me be clear, this is not about singling out individual nations.” So he didn’t just go back on the word of previous American presidents; he went back on his own word given before the whole world.

Having signed this document, the Obama administration then issued a statement that it “deplores the decision to single out Israel.” Why on earth would we
ever
sign a document that we deplore? What sort of amateur, incoherent policy is this?

On May 31, 2010, a flotilla of troublemakers with terrorist links set out from Turkey to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. The blockade is entirely legal and enforceable under international law. Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas has fired over four thousand rockets at Israeli civilians. Allowing weapons deliveries to Hamas via ship would make mass murder as convenient as buying DVDs on
Amazon.com
. This is why Israel was completely justified in taking action to stop the deliberate violation of the blockade.

After that deadly incident, the United States approved a statement by the president of the UN Security Council that, predictably, criticized Israel for defending herself. Such a statement must be unanimous, so the United States could have easily stopped it but didn’t. Yet if it weren’t for President Obama’s policy reversals, which encouraged the provocateurs to challenge the blockade, the incident probably never would have happened.

Elliott Abrams, who held senior foreign-policy positions under Presidents Reagan and Bush 43, wrote that President Obama “abandoned Israel in the U.N. and in the NPT conference in the course of one week. . . . The White House does not wish to stand with Israel against the mob because it does not have a policy of solidarity with Israel. Rather, its policy is one of distancing and pressure.”

The United States and Israel are fighting the same bad guys—Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran. To tie this complicated bundle of issues into one simple question, how does turning against our friend, and siding with our common enemies, strengthen national security and help us win the war on terror?

President Obama clearly understands the gift of time. After all, he has said that he sent more troops to Afghanistan “to provide the time and the space for the Afghan government to build up its security capacities.” It makes sense to give the gift of time to our ally, but why do the same for our enemy? Obama has repeatedly given Iran the gift it most wants and needs from us: the gift of time to produce nuclear weapons.

The president spent months negotiating sanctions, weakening what we originally wanted by making major concessions to Russia and China, until he got another round through the Security Council on June 9, 2010. As of this writing, we’re up to round four and counting (didn’t Einstein define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?). Russia and China didn’t agree to anything they’re not certain Iran can weasel around, just as it has all the previous sanctions, or to anything that threatens their own interests. We did not impose any restrictions on China’s growing investments in Iran’s oil and natural-gas sectors.

Russia can still sell its S-300 antiaircraft missiles, which would make it more dangerous for the United States or Israel to attack Iranian nuclear installations. We also agreed to abandon existing sanctions against Russian companies that worked on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and made illegal arms sales to Syria.

John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s UN ambassador, said that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov “sensed desperation in the Obama administration on this Iran resolution and probably extracted all that the traffic would bear.” And David Kramer, who ran Russian policy at the State Department in the Bush administration, commented, “Let’s not forget that Russia supported three previous resolutions [under President Bush] and didn’t get ‘rewarded’ for those votes.”

The bottom line, after all that effort and spending of diplomatic capital? Asked about the latest sanctions, CIA director Leon Panetta replied, “Will it deter [Iran] from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability? Probably not.” He also said that Iran now has enough material for two nuclear bombs. The immediate threat isn’t a nuclear weapon on a missile, although Iran will get to that point soon enough, but one placed on a truck for its terrorist friends, Hamas or Hezbollah.

President Obama has been so anxious to negotiate with an Iranian government that has no interest in dealing with him and did not respond with affection to his two love letters that he shamefully held his tongue when Green Movement prodemocracy forces protested the rigged election in June 2009. This is the man who told the graduating class at West Point in May 2010, “America will always seek a world that extends these rights, so that when an individual is being silenced, we aim to be her voice.” But he provided barely a whisper of support to protesters who were risking their lives to make their own voices heard. Iranians who believed in the exceptionalism of American-style freedom, like the martyred protester Neda Agha-Soltan, were beaten and murdered, while the tyrants in Tehran once again thumbed their noses at Washington.

How did the respect America engendered in its allies and the fear it inspired in its enemies crumble away so quickly? At the risk of being labeled simplistic, I would suggest that it was nuked by nuance. A vacillating foreign policy convinced our allies that we couldn’t be trusted and our enemies that we need not be feared. An administration besotted with its own moral and intellectual superiority believed that a willingness to criticize America’s friends and see the viewpoint of its enemies was a sign of their own advanced intellectual flexibility, their “smart diplomacy.” Their egos couldn’t let them accept that perhaps their unenlightened predecessors had been right all along and that the simplest maxims really are correct: Freedom is better than oppression. Democracy is morally superior to dictatorships. You don’t stab your friends in the back. Bullies aren’t impressed by weakness. And oftentimes, the only way to prevent war is to convince your enemies that you are ready, willing, and able to fight one.

 

 

 

 

I
was born and raised in Hope, Arkansas, but to me that name means more than just my hometown; it embodies the attitude I have about America today. I’ve spent most of this book discussing a lot of big, important, and urgent issues (which I think is appropriate for a book about government). But in this last chapter I want to share some intensely personal observations and also give you a glimpse of things I’ve been doing since my last book.

Despite the numerous problems and challenges I’ve talked about here, I believe that far too many people are guilty of hand-wringing, worry, and despair over the future of America. That’s not my theme. Some people have seen the rise of the Tea Party movement as an indication that our country is dangerously lost . . . that our time as a strong, unified nation will soon be over.

I think it’s just the opposite: To me, the uprising of ordinary citizens in this movement is in fact an affirmation of everything that is wonderful and positive about America. This country was brilliantly designed by its founders to be a kind of giant self-cleaning oven. When things gunk up the parts and dirty up the works, it’s time to turn on the self-cleaning function. What happens then, as you probably know, is that the heat is raised to a level above any temperature ever used for cooking. All of the dross of leftover food and debris is turned into charred ashes. The oven door is opened; that which remains is easily wiped clean.