Obama thinks we’re children
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Phil Weiss was bugged by the same Obama fib I was: why couldn’t he say anything remotely like the truth in answer to Helen Thomas’s question? Thomas’s query was “Do you know any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?” Though Obama said he didn’t want to “speculate”, everyone knows the answer, and the underlying and quite important issue is to what extent does Israel’s considerable nuclear arsenal make other countries feel compelled pursue nukes themselves for deterrence purposes.
President Kennedy worried deeply that Israel’s Dimona reactor would set off a Middle East nuclear proliferation race, and a good deal of his diplomatic intereaction with Israel involved trying to impose an international inspection regime on the program. Israel successfully resisted Kennedy’s efforts (“We are the experts in argumentation” boasted one Israeli official involved in the Israeli-American talks on the issue. “We know how to turn people around and around until they despair.”)
After Kennedy’s assassination, America pushed the issue less. Forty years later clearly Iranian diplomats seem to be trying to emulate the Israeli talk-the-issue-to-death strategy, all the while creating a weapons program under the guise of research.
But the question is, why does Obama have to pretend that he doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to speculate, about Israeli nukes? Israeli hawks actually talk openly about Israel’s various nuclear first strike options in the American press. So why does Obama play dumb?
Filed under: Foreign policy, Uncategorized
Maybe he was afraid that if he named them all he might get the answer wrong?
Or maybe the comment in Weiss’s blog is right:
“By not declaring itself to be nuclear-armed, Israel skirts a U.S. ban on funding countries that proliferate weapons of mass destruction. It can thus enjoy some $3 billion in annual military aid from Washington.
SOURCE – http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/02/04/israel-sees-no-pressure-on-nuclear-ambiguity-policy/ “
“everyone knows the answer” That’s precisely right – so why did she ask the question? Well, we know the answer to that, too: The question was too clever by half, designed to get him to take a public position on the issue at a very difficult time in the Middle East less than three weeks into his administration. He was absolutely right to avoid it. She could have asked the question more directly, not tried to outsmart him, and forced a direct reply: “Mr. President, everyone knows that Israel has the bomb. On what basis can we argue that Iran shouldn’t develop a bomb of its own?” But then you might have not liked the answer he would have given to that question either – something about Iran’s foreign policy goals, and the effect an Iranian bomb would have on other Arab countries in the region.
Scott McConnell wrote:
“Forty years later clearly Iranian diplomats seem to be trying to emulate the Israeli talk-the-issue-to-death strategy, all the while creating a weapons program under the guise of research.”
Wait a minute: Wasn’t it just last year that our Intell community formally said via an NIE that Iran had suspended its nuke weapons program?
If so it’s funny how after all the mainstream media talk about Iran since then not mentioning same the mind (including McConnell’s it seems) just somehow defaults to the idea that of course Iran is lying and of course it’s working on nuke weapons.
Not blaming him, my eye just skipped over that sentence too at first. Or maybe that NIE has been changed and I just didn’t notice?
Cheers,
Scott,
You may be right that Iran is using the “guise of research” to develop nuclear weapons, but that’s not the view of the U.S. intelligence community, which asserted with “high confidence” in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had abandoned any weapons program it may have had more than five years ago. More importantly — and noticeably different than was/is the case with Israel — Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear facilities are actively monitored and inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In its most recent IAEA report released in November, the agency does say Iran has failed to answer some questions about its past alleged weapons research, but states unequivocally that there is no evidence Iran has diverted its declared nuclear material to a weapons program.
While there may be legitimate questions about Iran’s ultimate intentions, it’s far from clear its leadership is following the Israeli model. Indeed, the evidence suggests the opposite is the case. That said, Israel pointing a couple dozen nuclear weapons at Tehran, coupled with the U.S.’s unofficial policy of only invading countries that don’t currently have nukes, does not appear to be the most effective means of ensuring non-proliferation in the region over the long-term.
Has I said before. I honestly don’t understand why Israel having nuclear weapons when they are surrounded by numerically superior enemies who want to drink their blood is a blot on humanity. While the Iranians, who finance terrorism, engage in terrorism, and engage in genocidal threats. This is a country that having the bomb would be the greatest thing in the world. Soembody explain that to me. BTW. I thought once the “black messiah” got in. And Bush/Hitler was out. Stuff lke this owuldn’t be a problem.