PrintFebruary 15, 2009
Can Israel make it alone?
In 1938 the West abandoned Czechoslovakia and Poland to Nazi aggression, signaling so much weakness that Hitler immediately grasped that he could now send his tanks against France and the rest of Europe. At Yalta, in 1945, the United States and Britain abandoned Eastern Europe and half of Germany to Stalin's armies. China was left to Mao Zedong, who ended up killing an estimated 40 million of his own people in various utopian massacres. In 1975 we left Vietnam and Cambodia to the tender mercies of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh, poster kids of the American Left. Several million dead people later, in 1979, Jimmy Carter abandoned Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini and his torturers, one of whom is now President of Iran. Later this year Iran may explode its first bomb. The Obama administration will stand by and smile.
Now the US and our allies cannot control everything in the world, not by any stretch of the imagination. We were able to defeat Soviet imperialism with a true bipartisan consensus, from Truman to Reagan. But that took half a century. It also took tens of millions of clear-thinking Americans, Europeans and Asians, who were willing to recognize evil and stand up to it. Still, our record of standing by besieged allies is decidedly mixed, especially when Democrats take power. Barack Obama is no Harry S Truman.
Israel's planners have to be thinking that with Obama and his crowd in power, the United States may simply pull out the rug from the democratic and modern state of Israel.
Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has listed some of the moves that have already been made by America-hating regimes -- just in the first weeks of the Obama Presidency.
She writes,
Since coming into office, Obama has repeatedly tried to build an alliance with the "newly emboldened" Russian bear. A week after entering office, he announced that he hoped to negotiate a nuclear disarmament agreement with Russia that would reduce the US's nuclear stockpiles by 80 percent. ... Responding to these American signals, the Russians proceeded to humiliate Washington. Last week President Dmitry Medvedev hosted Kyrgyzstan's President ... in Moscow. After their meeting the two announced that ...Kyrgyzstan will close the US Air Force base at Manas which serves American forces in Afghanistan.
Clear enough, right? But not to our media, who just haven't bothered to notice, choosing instead to stage the most butt-kissing display of presidential worship in history.
Last Friday, the Pakistanis tested Obama. The Supreme Court freed Pakistan's Dr. Strangelove -- A.Q. Khan -- from the house arrest he had been under since his nuclear proliferation racket was exposed by the Libyans in 2004. ... Khan's release casts a dark shadow on Obama's plan to dismantle much of America's nuclear arsenal, because with him free, the prospect that Pakistan is back in the proliferation business becomes quite real. ...Pakistan's open contempt for the US and its weakness in the face of the Taliban's takeover of the country has direct consequences for the US's mission in Afghanistan ..... This week the Taliban bombed a bridge on the Khyber Pass along the Pakistani border with Afghanistan that served as a supply line to US forces in Afghanistan.
You probably didn't hear that on ABC News Tonight.
How about Iran?
Obama came into office waving an enormous olive branch in Teheran's direction... (But) the regime has become more outspoken in its hostility toward the US. ... . It has announced it will only agree to direct talks with Washington if it pulls US forces out of the Middle East, abandons Israel and does nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. ... In all of its actions, Iran has gone out of its way to embarrass Obama and humiliate America. And Obama, for his part, has continued to embrace Teheran as his most sought-after negotiating partner.
Apparently if somebody spits right in your face and you pretend not to notice, it's just as if it never happened. That's not true in Southside Chicago, and it's not true in the Middle East. It only works that way in the liberal imagination.
Just look at the world. Putin is arm-twisting the Ukraine. He has cut off natural gas supplies to Germany and its neighbors in the middle of a bad winter. He is now in control of all the pipelines that supply Germany --- which is constantly sabotaged by its own Greens, who refuse to develop nuclear power plants.
And the US? Obama doesn't want to know. Neither does Hillary, who just flew off to Asia. Nor does Joe Biden, who now competes with Hillary and the National Security Council for control over foreign policy. The President is busy trying to peddle a trillion dollar payoff to Democrat Machines all over the country. Americans seem to be in a daze.
We are being tested by the bullies in the world. We are failing all their tests so far. Bullies keep testing and testing until they meet resistance, and there is no hard muscle in this flabby administration. It goes against their most cherished beliefs.
If you look at the world the way Israel must be doing, the question is, can you survive with a flabby America, or even with an America that turns against you?
The basic answer is "Yes," but at a stiff price. Israel is a fairly advanced nuclear power, and no such power has ever been overthrown by any other. The risk is just too great. Nuke-armed Pakistan is always on the edge of crumbling, and it is now believed that its intelligence service helped Islamic terrorists who gunned down hundreds of civilians in Mumbai a few months ago. India may threaten to retaliate, but it can't do much in the face of Pakistan's missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan is therefore using its nuclear power to create a safe haven for Islamic terror assaults on the Hindu nation next door.
After 9/11 the Pakistan government was sufficiently afraid of George W. Bush to allow American strikes against Al Qaida on its territory. But Pakistan has pulled back since General Musharraf was driven from power -- in good part by American pressure, along with outrageous and ignorant public insults from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So Musharraf is gone, and the Pakistan military and terror-support apparatus is now free to keep attacking majority-Hindu India. It may be their way of keeping their own militants under control. Or maybe they just believe in sticking it to the infidels, wherever they may be.
This is not, as the Obama administration would like to believe, just a quarrel about the Kashmir. It's all part of the worldwide jihad -- like communism and Nazism, Islam is inherently imperialistic.
When Iran gets its bomb, the Mullahs will feel free to sponsor terrorism in Saudi Arabia, as Ayatollah Khomeini did, or wherever they can stir up trouble in the Arab world. Iran's proxies have been launching missiles at civilians in Israel for years. They came close to hitting the nuclear power plant at Dimona in this last round, as much of a red line for Israel as anything imaginable. Next time they could easily hit that plant. What would Obama do?
The death of Israel is only a part of what the Mullahs want; they really crave control over Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities in Islam. The Saudis have ruled Arabia for only a hundred years, a fleeting moment in time by the millennial reckoning of fanatics. Why should the Arabian Peninsula be dominated by the despised Sunni Arabs, when seventy million Shiites in Iran are only fifty miles across the Gulf, and will soon be armed with nukes? The Persian Empire never stopped at the Gulf. Why should the new Shiite Caliphate stop there?
That's why the Saudis are looking to make peace between the Arabs and Israel. It is also why they financed Pakistan's nuclear program, and why they will do the same for Egypt when the time comes. They see a deadly threat to their survival, even if the American government doesn't.
So Iran's nuclear weapons will be used to create impregnable havens for terror groups. If Obama allows Iran to dominate the Gulf to "satisfy its ambitions to become a regional power," as the Left likes to say, you can fully expect the Mullahs to take the logical next step.
Nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests -- like survival. If the United States abandons the Jewish State, Jerusalem will have to seek new alliances. It may feel driven to conduct an open nuclear test if Iran does. That's what happened with India and Pakistan ten years ago. Israel is working with India -- and so far, the US -- on advanced antimissile defenses. India has a natural affinity with the Israelis, as a majority-Hindu state that has been fighting jihadi terror since 1948. Historically, India experienced constant aggression from Muslim powers. China and Russia have a long horror of Islamic invasion. If survival is at stake, expect Israel to make whatever alliances it can.
Other nations that rely on us --Taiwan, Singapore, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic States -- will also see the handwriting on the wall. Not all of them will collapse.
Western Europe may be crumble to domestic Muslims, as the Geert Wilders case suggests. But Russia has a thousand years of fighting Islamic aggression, and has just carried out a vicious war against jihadi rebels in Chechnya. China also fears Muslim invaders and rebels. Even Australia is showing real spirit in the fight against this very ancient fascist ideology.
In a decade or so civilized nations will have adequate anti-missile defenses, and better protection against smuggled dirty bombs. Bio-identification will make it easier to pinpoint dangerous people trying to enter the country. But we may have to pay a big price in individual freedom.
These calculations are surely going through the minds of politicians and strategists around the world. If the Obama administration walks away from democratic allies, we will see a fast reshuffling of the alliances we've seen since World War I.
Obama is the most radical leftist ever to occupy the White House. He will teach us many lessons, but he is not likely to sway American culture for very long -- including our admiration for small and besieged democracies. If anything, he will end up reminding a new generation why the United States fought the Cold War. There will come a time for another Ronald Reagan, a president who combines our deepest values with a coherent national strategy.
But that's over the long term. In the next four to eight years Israel will have to think very hard about how to survive without the United States.
