In 2004 Haim Saban told a New York Times reporter: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” That’s only important because Saban is a billionaire media mogul and generous political campaign donor who has contributed to individuals and lobbying organizations. Saban’s desire to influence US [...]]]>
In 2004 Haim Saban told a New York Times reporter: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” That’s only important because Saban is a billionaire media mogul and generous political campaign donor who has contributed to individuals and lobbying organizations. Saban’s desire to influence US foreign policy on Israel has been no secret either. He made his views and objectives clear in two long articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker, even listing for Connie Bruck “three ways to be influential” in US politics: “make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.” According to Bruck, in “targeting media properties, Saban frankly acknowledges his political agenda” and “repeatedly” tried to buy the Los Angeles Times because he considered it pro-Palestinian. Saban’s donations to the prominent Brookings Institution also resulted in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which is frequently used as a resource by media professionals in search of expert quotables.
Bruck revealed in 2010 that Saban has maintained an enduring friendship with the Clintons and reportedly withheld from donating to Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign after Obama failed to convince Saban that he would continue Clinton’s stated position on Israel and Iran:
For example, Saban continued, “Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked—‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand. Obama said only three words. He would ‘take appropriate action.’ I don’t know what that means. A rogue state that is supporting killing our men and women in Iraq; that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization; that is a supporter of Hamas, which shot twelve thousand rockets at Israel—that rogue state nukes a member of the United Nations, and we’re going to ‘take appropriate action’! ” His voice grew louder. “I need to understand what that means. So I had a list of questions like that. And Chicago”—Obama campaign headquarters—“could not organize that meeting. ‘Schedule, heavy schedule.’ I was ready and willing to be helpful, but ‘helpful’ is not to write a check for two thousand three hundred dollars. It’s to raise millions, which I am fully capable of doing. But Chicago wasn’t able to deliver the meeting, so I couldn’t get on board.”
But a little over 2 months before the 2012 presidential election, Saban explains in the Times that Mitt Romney’s unclear foreign policy simply doesn’t stand up to Obama’s firm support for Israel and that’s why he is endorsing and supporting the Obama campaign:
]]>When he visited Israel as a candidate he saw firsthand how vulnerable Israeli villagers were to rocket attacks from Gaza. As president, he responded by providing full financing and technical assistance for Israel’s Iron Dome short-range anti-rocket defense system, which is now protecting those villagers. In July, he provided an additional $70 million to extend the Iron Dome system across southern Israel. That’s in addition to the $3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel that the president requests and that Congress routinely approves, assistance for which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed deep personal appreciation.
When the first President Bush had disagreements with Israel over its settlement policy, he threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Israel. Mr. Obama has had his own disagreements with Mr. Netanyahu over the settlers but has never taken such a step. To the contrary, he has increased aid to Israel and given it access to the most advanced military equipment, including the latest fighter aircraft.
Ask any senior Israeli official involved in national security, and he will tell you that the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel has never been stronger than under President Obama. “I can hardly remember a better period of American support and backing, and Israeli cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us,” the defense minister, Ehud Barak, said last year, “than what we have right now.”
Having pulled all the stops to avert an Israeli attack against Iran last spring that never happened, has the Obama administration given all that it has to Israel’s hawkish leaders, only to learn that it has been played? If so, how might this affect the US response to Israeli warnings that [...]]]>
Having pulled all the stops to avert an Israeli attack against Iran last spring that never happened, has the Obama administration given all that it has to Israel’s hawkish leaders, only to learn that it has been played? If so, how might this affect the US response to Israeli warnings that it will attack Iran before the 2012 presidential election?
Martin Indyk, a former US Ambassador to Israel during the Clinton years who is now head of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, is reported by the Sheldon Adelson-owned Israel Hayom to have told Israel Army Radio on August 23 that:
The administration was convinced that Israel was going to attack in the spring. That was the official assessment, everyone ran to battle stations, mobilized, engaged with the Israelis, did whatever they could to calm them down and make it clear that the President [Barack Obama] was absolutely committed to Israel’s security and to ensuring that Iran would not get nuclear weapons. That seemed to work fine. But after that, the administration concluded that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and Defense Minister [Ehud] Barak were engaged in a complete bluff, and having succeeded in bluffing them, I think they were wary of being bluffed again.
When Obama met with Netanyahu in March, according to Indyk, the president came away convinced that an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was about to occur. He did everything possible to reassure Israel’s leader that the US would do whatever was necessary to deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. “Apparently, Israel complied, as no attack has yet taken place,” according to the religious nationalist news site Arutz Sheva.
A diplomatic success story? Hardly, according to The Jerusalem Post:
After no Israeli strike took place, Indyk said that the US officials felt as though they had been duped by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s ruse. The former ambassador added that there is a sense within the US government that Washington is once again being misled by Israeli declarations and leaks.
It’s not clear whether Indyk is working for or against the President in suggesting that the Obama administration feels it was played by Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. Or, by stating that after having been misled about Israel’s intentions, the administration remains committed to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons but views Israel as “the boy who cried wolf” and is therefore taking less seriously the hyperbolic hints that Israel will attack Iran prior to the US election. It’s possible that Indyk’s current message intentionally contrasts with the recent recommendation of fellow Clinton adviser Dennis Ross that Obama try to avert an Israeli military strike on Iran by promising Netanyahu even more armaments and military support.
The author of the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy that simultaneously targeted Iran and Iraq (instead of playing the two Persian Gulf powers off against one another as traditional “balance of power ” strategic logic would have suggested), Indyk has served as Assistant Secretary of State for Near East affairs, Special Assistant to the President, and the US National Security Council’s senior director for Near East and South Asia. Bill Clinton appointed Indyk as Ambassador to Israel in 1993. A former Research Director at the American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Indyk was the founding director of the Washington Institution for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC-created think tank dedicated to influencing the executive branch on Middle East foreign policy while AIPAC focused on lobbying members of Congress. Indyk is also the founding director of Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy. During the 2008 presidential primaries, Indyk backed Hillary Clinton, but supported Barack Obama when he won the Democratic nomination.
In the past several months, however, Indyk has grown critical of Obama’s foreign policy. As co-author of Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy (with Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Lieberthal) he classified Obama as a pragmatist who opted for reasonable policies — often the least-worst available options — “with an approach typified by thoroughness, reasonably good teamwork, and flexibility when needed”. Indyk told Nahum Barnea of the Hebrew-language Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot in an interview coinciding with the book’s publication that despite the greatness of the vision he presented, “Obama’s cold, analytical and aloof attitude didn’t suit the Middle Eastern climate.”
In a February 29 op-ed in the New York Times, Indyk criticized the “fundamental design flaw” in the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions policy. Indyk warned that “crippling” sanctions designed to “persuade the Israelis that there is a viable alternative to a preventive strike” could backfire as “the Iranians conclude that they have no choice but to press ahead in acquiring the ultimate means of assuring the regime’s survival.” Furthermore, Indyk opined, the constant warnings of Obama’s military advisers about the grave consequences of a military strike by Israel might signal that the US cannot be counted upon to restrain the Israelis from launching a war against Iran. Indyk also suggested that election year rhetoric might impact Iran’s strategic calculus. The louder Obama insists that that he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that that Iran will respond defiantly:
The only way out of the vicious circle is for Khamenei to understand that Obama is not seeking his overthrow — that behind the negotiating door lies a path to Iran’s peaceful use of nuclear power and not a corridor to the gallows. But how, while pursuing sanctions designed to cut Iran’s economic jugular, can Obama credibly signal this to Khamenei without opening himself up to the charge of weakness? Any hint of reassurance to the Iranian regime will surely be seized upon by his Republican rivals as a sign of appeasement.
Yet during an Yediot Aharonot interview at the end of May, Indyk recommended that Israelis be wary of US efforts to negotiate with Iran. “The Israeli response must be skeptical, regardless of what exactly is agreed upon there,” Indyk said. “When others are negotiating in your stead, you have every reason to suspect you are being sold out.”
In his latest interview, Indyk’s message seems to be that Obama has nothing left to promise Netanyahu:
Essentially, the U.S. had done everything it could to reassure Israel, the president doesn’t have anything more in his quiver, no other arrow to shoot to reassure it. I think this time around they thought, ‘Here we go again, there’s nothing more we can do we’ll just learn to live with it.
What exactly is Indyk’s game?
]]>Some key quotes from the panel included Saban Center director Kenneth Pollack calling for the U.S. to hold Israel back from any “rush action” while the Middle East is in a state of turmoil:
This hasn’t been about Israel. And the most important thing for the Israelis to do is to not make it about Israel. There are a lot of things that the government of Israel could do right now that would be extraordinarily unhelpful. Unhelpful to the events playing out in the region and ultimately unhelpful to the future and security of the state of Israel.
It would be driven by the fear, the siege mentality. It’s one of our roles as the United States, and their great ally and friend, to help them through this period without taking rash action that will ultimately be to the detriment of Israel and the U.S. and to the benefit of Iran.
I think the Iranians would like nothing more than to see the Netanyahu government take a series of rash steps that would infuriate the Arab populations.
This theme — that hardliners in Iran, not to mention other Arab leaders facing citizen uprisings, will benefit from aggressive behavior on the part of Israel — was recurring during the panel’s discussion.
Pollack also addressed the argument that democratic revolutions in the Middle East can be hijacked, saying:
We need to be alive to the possibility that these revolutions can come off the rail, that there are spoilers out there who look to take advantage of it. Iran is one that is unquestionably trying to do just that. What we have to do is make it hard for Iran to do it and help our allies in Israel not become spoilers themselves.
Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, added her own warning: that the U.S. must be careful not to fall victim to Islamophobic fear-mongering as popular democracy movements sweep across the Middle East.
You are seeing at every level people who conflate the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al Qaeda as if they were all one thing whose primary purpose is to blow us up in our supermarkets. That is the rhetoric we’re going to be confronting here in Washington.
The New York Times’s Roger Cohen emphasized that the constant predictions that Iran is on the precipice of producing a nuclear weapon (with many of the deadlines already having passed) has been highly inaccurate:
We’ve had a lot of predictions that [Iran would be producing nuclear weapons] and the fact is it hasn’t happened.
And
The Iranians have been messing around with this nuclear program for forty years! What are they doing?
The discussion about Iran tended to focus on what the democratic uprisings in Iran and elsewhere will mean for Israel and its fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The panelists admitted that Iran had lost its position on the front pages of newspapers and, as breaking news emerges from the Middle East on a daily basis, the Obama administration’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program will be diminished.
Pollack observed:
]]>A lot of the people who previously spent all their time working on Iran, trying to craft these sanctions, trying to bring all these other countries aboard against Iran are now spending 24 or 25 hours a day doing nothing but working on Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, etc… Iran is very much on the backburner at the moment in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.
- The Wall Street Journal: Kenneth M. Pollack, director of the Saban center at the Brookings Institution, opines, “Could al Qaeda Hijack Egypt’s Revolution?” and observes, “the Iranian regime is also gleeful about the collapse of Mr. Mubarak, one of America’s most important Arab allies and one of Tehran’s most passionate enemies.” He continues, “Iran’s mullahs often see opportunity in chaos and violence, believing that anything that disrupts the region’s American-backed status quo works to their advantage,” and concludes, “All of this gives Iran and al Qaeda common interests that may drive them toward tacit cooperation—with the goal of fomenting a modern Bolshevik Revolution.”
- Tablet Magazine: Hudson Institute visiting fellow Lee Smith argues that the Muslim Brotherhood is still a radicalizing force in Egypt and calls Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood preacher who exiled himself from Egypt in 1961, a “prospective Khomeini.” Qaradawi, who hosts the show “Shariah and Life” on Al Jazeera, “has cultivated among some American analysts a reputation for moderation with his fatwas, permitting masturbation and condemning Sept. 11 (while supporting suicide bombers in Israel),” says Smith. Smith goes on to argue, “While the parallels between Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 can be overdrawn, it is foolish to pretend that they are not there,” and warns, “To the Iranians, Qaradawi is perhaps not the ideal voice of Sunni Islamism, but insofar as he rises and the Americans suffer, Tehran will make its accommodations.”
- Los Angeles Times: Jonah Goldberg writes a column on “The real realism in Israel” in which he argues against linkage and supports the view that the current unrest in Egypt has nothing to do with Israel. Goldberg, who is at the Herzliya Conference, on a trip underwritten by the Emergency Committee for Israel, says that proponents who see an Israeli-Palestinian peace process as a key U.S. foreign policy goal, such as Gen. James Jones, are detached from reality. “Such thinking falls somewhere between wild exaggeration and dangerous nonsense,” says Goldberg. He goes on to argue, “As we’ve recently been reminded, Israel is the only truly democratic regime in the region, and therefore the most stable. But, we are told, if we were only more conciliatory to corrupt dictatorial regimes and more sympathetic to the ‘Arab street,’ the region would be more stable. (Ironically, this is very close to Israel’s own position, no doubt because it will take any peace it can get.)”