Caroline Glick


Even the diehard leftists in the media had a hard time swallowing his words. After all, when Barak was premier, he oversaw Israel's unilateral surrender of south Lebanon in 2000. Barak promised that by giving Hezbollah south Lebanon, Israel would force the Iranian proxy army to disarm and behave like a Western political party.


Then of course, there is the Gaza precedent.




Apparently Barak was referring to the same imperative when on Wednesday he said that Israel needs to act fast because, "We are on borrowed time. We will reach a wall, and we'll pay the price."


Given the high value Barak and his comrades place on winning the love of the West, it is worth considering what motivates the West - or more to the point, the US, which leads the Western world.

Unfortunately, the situation is not pretty. US President Barack Obama's policies are just as irrational as the ones that Barak is urging Israel to implement in order to win Obama's support. And Obama's rationales for adopting these policies are just as divorced from reality as Barak's are.

The place where this irrationality is displayed most prominently today is in Obama's policy regarding Iran. As Michael Singh rightly noted on Wednesday in the New York Daily News, under Obama, US policy towards Iran is based on the view "that at the root of the Iran nuclear crisis is US-Iran conflict, and that the root cause of that conflict is mistrust."



Rather than accept this fundamental, but unpleasant truth, Obama and his advisors base their policy of engaging Iran on fairy tales about nonexistent fatwas that purportedly ruled out the development of nuclear weapons. As Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon put it delicately this week, the Iranians are "laughing all the way to a bomb."

Ya'alon explained, "During talks with world powers, the Iranians have managed to enrich 750 kilograms of uranium to 3.5 percent, and 36 kilograms of uranium to 20 percent."





Allowing Iran to go nuclear isn't the only price Obama has been willing to pay to fulfill his fantasy of solving Iran's conflict with the US by building trust. He is also willing to destroy any chance of Syria becoming a responsible actor on the international stage.

Obama's willingness to sit on his thumbs for 14 months as Syrian President Bashar Assad has killed as many as 15,000 of his countrymen owes in part to Obama's desire to win the trust of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Since Assad is Iran's client, any US move to overthrow him would weaken Iran. And since as far as Obama is concerned Iran doesn't have anything against the US, but simply suffers from a chronic lack of trust in Washington, it would be wrong to harm Tehran's interests by overthrowing the ayatollahs' Syrian lackey.

Obama's Syria policy is not only a product of his fantasy-based policy towards Iran. It is also a consequence of his fantasy-based policy towards Turkey. Rather than intervene early in the conflict and support pro-Western forces in Syria as an alternative to Assad's tyranny, Obama outsourced the organization of the Syrian opposition to Turkey's Islamic Prime Minister Recip Erdogan.

In Obama's fantasy world, Erdogan is a great ally of the US. The fact that Erdogan has redefined Turkey away from the West and towards Tehran and the Muslim Brotherhood; rendered incoherent NATO's strategic mission; ended Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel; used advanced US arms to kill Kurdish civilians, and threatens war in the eastern Mediterranean over natural gas deposits that do not belong to him is irrelevant. All that matters is the fantasy that Erdogan is America's friend. And since Obama embraces this fantasy, he subcontracted the formation of the Turkish opposition to Erdogan.


THIS BRINGS us back to Barak, and the Israeli establishment that cannot rid itself of the notion that we need to give away the store to the Palestinians to win the support of the "international community," that is, to win Obama's support. But towards the Palestinians as well, Obama has embraced fantasy over reality. This week the State Department had the bureaucratic equivalent of an apoplectic fit when it learned that US Sen. Mark Kirk inserted an amendment into the State Department funding bill that will require the department to provide Congress with two pieces of information: the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and the number of their descendants administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA.





This policy is in perfect alignment with the US policy on Jerusalem. In late March we learned that in the interests of not prejudging the outcome of nonexistent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians over eastern Jerusalem, the US refuses to recognize Israeli sovereignty not only over eastern Jerusalem, but over any part of Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is Israel's capital is of no interest. The fact that US law requires the US government to recognize that Jerusalem is Israel's capital and to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem is irrelevant. To appease the international community, the US won't even recognize Israeli sovereignty over western Jerusalem.

So according to Barak and his associates, to prevent Israel's isolation by securing US support, Israel ought to ignore the lessons of the Lebanon withdrawal, the phony peace process with the PLO, and the withdrawal from Gaza and move full speed ahead with policies that will make it impossible to defend the country.


Standing alone never looked so good.

Caroline Glick

