Lack of a policy on Iran and Syria is pushing Israel into a corner.

This is an excellent summary about what Obama is not doing, even though it is what he does best; nothing. Nothing except apologize, appease and grovel. The Mullah Obamaham has tried to reach out to Syria and this will work as well as it has with Iran, it won't. Syria just recently helped Hezbollah, which now has Scud missles in it's possesion. Yet Obama is still stupid enough to try and engage this Islamonazi state. Obama is pushing not just Israel but the United States into a position of vulnerability. The BIG difference is the Jewish state at some point will take action to make sure Israel survives and flourishes as it always has done since 1948. We could be so fortunate to have a Netanyahu type in the White House. Instead we are sinking with the Mullah Obamaham and his outreach and appeasement to the Islamic world. Pathetic is all I can say, politely.

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US Iran Nuclear Strategy paints a bulls eye on Israel’s back
Iconclast/New English Review

The New York Times published an article about an alleged secret memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent in January to Obama White House National security Adviser Gen. James Jones, saying we have no policy to counter Iran’s nuclear threat. Witness this comment from the Huffington Post:

Gates wrote the three-page memo in January and it set off efforts in the Pentagon, White House and intelligence agencies to come up with new options, including the use of the military, The New York Times said in its Sunday editions, quoting unnamed government officials. White House officials Saturday night strongly disagreed with the comments that the memo caused a reconsideration of the administration's approach to Iran.

"It is absolutely false that any memo touched off a reassessment of our options," National Security Council spokesman Benjamin Rhodes told The Associated Press. "This administration has been planning for all contingencies regarding Iran for many months."

One senior official described the memo as "a wake-up call," the paper reported. But the recipient of the document, Gen. James Jones, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, told the newspaper in an interview that the administration has a plan that "anticipates the full range of contingencies."

Sen. John McCain said: "I didn't need a secret memo to know we didn't have a coherent policy," McCain told Fox News's Chris Wallace. "That's pretty obvious."McCain called for serious and meaningful sanctions against Iran. The Arizona Republican spoke on "Fox News Sunday."

The reality is that the Obama Administration may have effectively given up on a coherent strategy including contingency plans for possible military action. Instead, it is pushing for toothless UN Security Council sanctions and propounding the mistaken view that cold war era Mutual Assured Deterrence will work with irrational Mullahs in Tehran. It won't. Remember the thousands of Iranian teenagers the mullahs sent to their deaths in minefields during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s paying salaries to their surviving parents?

Secretary Gates has long ties to an influential coterie which includes James Baker, III, Brent Scowcroft, and Lee Hamilton, Middle East policy advisers, with an appeasement track record. The trio was prominent as leading members of the Congressional chartered bi-partisan Iraq Study Group that issued a report during the Bush Administration. Then there is another Obama Adviser, Zbig Brzezinski, who as you may recall said the US should consider shooting down IAF aircraft on their way across Iraqi airspace to hit nuclear facilities in Iran. Under President Carter he also bolstered what became the decade long Secret War in Afghanistan the in the late 1970's. Brzezinski cut a deal with the Saudis to dislodge Soviet influence during the secret war in Afghanistan that ultimately spawned Bin Laden and al Qaeda.

The Obama Administration appears to be bailing from the troubled Middle East and South Asia. Witness the withdrawals from Iraq this summer and the likelihood of quitting Afghanistan in 2011. It is no secret that Obama is pushing the Saudi peace plan on Israel to save American lives in the region.

Two names left out of the New York Times account of this secret memo are Ambassador Dennis Ross on the NSC staff and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. They clearly have been side-tracked and left out of the loop. Ross was originally going to be the Special Envoy to deal with Iran. Instead Ross was retained as a senior Middle East peace process adviser on the NSC staff. We have heard precious little from these two on the Obama versus Netanyahu contretemps resulting in isolation of Israel and derogation of the long standing special relationship between the two countries.

Israel is alone. It cannot trust its ally America under Obama to come up with a coherent policy to deal with nuclear Iran under the Mullahs. Obama does not want to consider fostering a civil opposition in Iran to overthrow the Mullahs and President Ahmadinejad. The Obama Administration does not want to enact tough sanctions already passed by Congress.

Israel is faced with a dilemma. In order to disable or destroy nuclear weapons assembly facilities in Iran, it must first destroy the rocket and missile caches of Iran's proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as launching facilities in Syria. That is a complicated set of actions to successfully coordinate. The Jennifer Rubin account in Commentary's Contention blog alleges that the Obama Administration stifled an IDF assault on Syrian Scud deliveries to Hezbollah. That Israeli action would have interfered with Obama’s engagement with the Bashir Assad regime in Damascus. The Obama Administration’s outreach to Syria clearly failed to avert the Scud shipments to Hezbollah.

The issue is what can Israel do under these difficult and contentious relations with the Obama Administration? Israel's military planners and covert operations teams must have scenarios for disrupting 'breakout' and targeting facilities in Iran tagged for nuclear weapons assembly. Some suspect that perhaps renegade Russian engineers and scientists engaged in Iran’s nuclear weapons developments may be in the pay of Israel's strategic intelligence service. Thus, Israeli technical intelligence could have sufficient information with which to develop scenarios and contingency plans to disrupt and possibly destroy nuclear weapons assembly. At issue is whether those assembly facilities are above ground, as in the case of the Syria’s al-Kibar nuclear facility destroyed by the IAF in September, 2007, or like the North Korean ones are scattered in underground facilities. The IAF attack on the nuclear weapons assembly facility in Syria proved effective. While the Pentagon confirmed that action, Israel didn't. The implication being that Israel was sending a message to Syria and its Iranian 'partners' that Israel knew what was going on and could destroy comparable facilities in Iran. The Syrian nuclear assembly facility was within range of a conventional IAF attack. Iran’s comparable nuclear assembly facilities may require non-conventional means available in Israel’s high technology arsenal. The consequences of such a unilateral military action by Israel have been viewed as being “unacceptable and having “catastrophic consequences” by Russia’s President Medvedev and US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen. However, Israel must be prepared to act to preserve its existence.

This is a dangerous time for Israel and America. Israel was able to make a convincing case replete with on the ground intelligence about destroying the Syrian nuclear facility. There is no such prospect under Obama who clearly doesn't want Israel to undertake a unilateral pre-emptive attack that would disrupt the Administration's Muslim outreach and nuclear strategy. A nuclear strategy that was unveiled in Washington last week.

These revelations in today's New York Times deepen the impression that as a result of the US not having a coherent strategy to contend with a nuclear Iran, Israel is now a target with a bulls eye painted on its back. Israeli PM Netanyahu knows better than to succumb to this threat. He will act with dispatch to preserve Israel.

From Iconclast/New English Review