Obama’s Fateful Decision:
Israel Stands Alone*
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
1979 was the year of the Iranian Revolution, perhaps the most significant revolution in history. It brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and a serious Islamic regime to power. Islam cannot be true to itself without pursuing global supremacy.
Iran is on the threshold of developing nuclear weapons. Iran could then control the Middle East’s enormous oil resources on which America’s and Europe’s economy depend. It is no longer scare-mongering to say the Iranian Revolution is the most serious threat ever faced by Western civilization. This is implied in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s maledictions “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
1979 was also the year of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. In the previous year I wrote Sadat’s Strategy. Let me read from the book’s seventh Appendix:
During the March 6, 1978 hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Robert Dixon, chief of the U.S. Air Force Tactical Air Command, answered with a flat “no” when asked whether American air power could succeed against the rapidly improving Soviet Air Force.
Military analysts are beginning to wonder whether the United States will be able to defend its own homeland, much less any of its friends or allies. A recent study submitted to the Defense Nuclear Agency on the comparative strategic force effectiveness of the U.S. and the USSR shows that the Soviet Union is superior to the United States in 33 of 41 categories, including ICBM launchers … as well as range of submarine launched ballistic missiles .…
Despite these threatening developments, the Carter Administration (1) failed to provide for the protection of America’s ICBM system, which is now vulnerable to a Soviet first strike; … (2) delayed the development of the long-range cruise missile which could help restore the nuclear balance; and (3) shelved the production of the neutron bomb, a tactical weapon that could deter a dreaded Soviet-led tank attack on Western Europe …
In view of these considerations [I continued], it is reasonable to conclude that the United States would not come to Israel’s support against Soviet intervention in a Middle East conflict …
But for the U.S. to stand idly by and allow Israel to be overrun by Arab and Soviet forces would have catastrophic consequences…. It would reveal the military inferiority of the United States. America’s allies in Europe and Japan would desert the Western alliance and make the best deal they could with Moscow. The Soviets would become the masters of the globe….
So much for what I said in 1978. Now I must add that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, it would be naïve to think that Russia, well-supplied with energy resources and still possessed of overkill nuclear weaponry, has given up its global ambitions. Indeed, the renewal of the Cold War has become topical.
Nevertheless, despite the resurgence of an imperialistic Russia, and despite the resurgence of imperialist Islam, the Barak Obama administration has decided to follow the path of the Carter administration: military retrenchment and a see-no- evil, hear-no-evil, and speak-no-evil foreign policy.
To clarify Obama’s policy, I will recapitulate a report published two days ago by Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe. Rahe extracts the key points of an extensive essay written by Charles Krauthammer in the Weekly Standard. So important is that essay that the editors made it available online before the journal was published. I’ll merely inject some clarifying remarks.
The title of the essay is “Decline is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy.”
Krauthammer’s point is simple and unassailable. There is, he argues, an intimate connection between the foreign policy of the Obama administration and his domestic policy. The work undertaken in the domestic sphere will put a stop to the pattern of dynamic economic growth that made it possible for the United States to defeat Japan, contribute decisively to the defeat of Nazi Germany, contain communism, and ultimately defeat and prepare the way for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
Obama’s policy will produce economic stagnation of the sort that the Europeans have suffered from for decades, and it will eventuate in a collapse of the American dollar. Obama and his minions understand this, and this is what they want: the elimination of the foundations for American hegemony and the crippling of this country. [In other words, Obama and his minions are pursuing intertwined domestic and foreign policies whose goal is to terminate America’s dominance in international affairs.]
They regard the role America has thus far played in the world as shameful; they are intent on dismembering the alliances that gave America its heft in the world; and they are not only appeasing America’s sworn enemies but openly, publicly embracing them and their agenda.
Obama’s decision to effectuate America’s decline explains the praise showered on him by Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro. This is the meaning of Obama’s recent betrayal of Poland—on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that country—when he cancelled the project of providing Poland with a defensive nuclear shield.
It explains why Obama initially responded to the open theft of an election in Iran by professing his confidence in the Iranian government, It is why the State Department recently cut off funds for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center…which was collecting information on the imprisonment, torture, and murder of those in Iran who protested against the theft of that election.
It explains the deliberate insults [Obama] cast at Gordon Brown of Great Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. And, of course, this explains the speeches given abroad again and again by President Obama, apologizing for American behavior in the past and signaling a radical shift in American policy. It is for this change of posture that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
[Professor Rahe concludes by saying]: “if you think that the United States is the principal source of evil in the world, you should vigorously applaud.”
Now let us go back in time to the very outset of the 2008 presidential election campaign and Obama’s mantra of CHANGE. To those aware of his scornful references to the American Declaration of Independence, it was obvious that by “change” Obama meant regime change. In other words, Obama rejected America’s founding principles.
Obama is a product of the New Left that gained prominence in academia during the 1960s. As I pointed out during presidential primaries, the philosopher of the New Left was Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse propagated an amalgam of ideas drawn from Marx, Sartre, and Freud—who denied timeless and universal moral ideas and saw them as relative to diverse historical epochs, diverse cultures, or diverse individual preferences. To those of us who saw the influence of Marcuse on college students, it was obvious Obama was a relativist—but no one exposed him as such during the presidential campaign.
To those of us who had studied America’s Founding Fathers, it was obvious that Obama rejected the immutable and universal truths or “natural rights” doctrine of the American Declaration of Independence—a document that stands for individual liberty and limited government—but no exposed him or put him to the test of his loyalty to America.
John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, described Obama as our first post-American president. I would put it more strongly: Obama our first anti-American president! This conforms to the teachings of his guru, the Rev. Jeremiah, Wright, who for many years has been preaching, “Don’t say God bless America; say God damn America.” All this bodes ill not only for America but for Israel.
In my book Sadat’s Strategy, I said that “America needs Israel as much as Israel needs America.” Today, however, Israel stands alone, as it was meant to stand alone. Can it be that by standing alone Israel if true to itself, may save America?
Let me leave you with this thought. A prominent U.S. engineer said: ‘”When I became VP of business developments for R.O.W. (rest of the world), it was obvious that Israel is now the capital of the rest of the world.” No doubt he was thinking in terms of nanotechnology, in which Israel leads the world. But perhaps this technology conceals a spiritual leadership simmering below the surface, and soon to emerge. It has been said that in Israel the only realists are those who believe in miracles.
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