Regarding "Obama's Hollow Promises Abroad"

Submitted by Allen Z. Hertz (Canada), Feb 12, 2014 at 04:46

Daniel Pipes tells just half of the story in pointing to the sheer emptiness of President Obama's promises to USA friends and allies. This would cause us to believe that President Obama is perhaps without a game plan. If so, I beg to differ, because I firmly believe that he has a grand strategy. And, even one that has a fair chance of success -- principally because Russia, China and Iran will immediately perceive that President Obama's plan would enhance their own interests and critically weaken the USA, which Obama wants to see out of the Mideast.

Quite remarkably, President Obama has already said that there's less than a 50% chance for the success of the three sets of current negotiations about Iran, Israel and Syria respectively. He also has very curiously opined that all three negotiations are connected. Really? Are they in any substantial sense already connected? If so, how are they already connected? Rather, President Obama is significantly telling us that he will connect them!

My reading is that, with respect to Iran, President Obama is planning an imminent crisis which he wants to coincide with the likely collapse of the bilateral peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Specifically, President Obama wants the three different issues of Iran, Israel and Syria to align. He hopes to achieve this alignment in the short term, and in any event well before the November 2014 Congressional elections.

With references to "peace in our time" and also the possibility of some recourse to force, President Obama will likely use this imminent global crisis to convince Iran to "agree" to go no further than "threshold nuclear state," just like Japan. To get this (perhaps worthless) commitment from Iran, he will probably pay Iran in gold coin, i.e. denuclearizing Israel's defense. Namely, President Obama is likely planning to trade off Israel's nuclear weapons for little more than a piece of paper bearing an Iranian promise to stop short of actually building a nuclear weapon.

Shafting Israel in the cause of world peace? Sounds like both a Muslim and left-liberal winner to me! It also has that element of prima facie plausibility that might successfully snow independents in the USA. Could even get President Obama a second Nobel Prize.

In the same way, President Obama will probably try to force Israel to withdraw from the Golan to pay for Iran's consent to a Syrian outcome to be proposed by the USA and agreed by the rest of the P5+1.

Part of this big package would also be creation of a new Palestinian State in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This outcome would likely also be imposed by Iran together with the P5+1, as part of the aforementioned diplomatic bargain "to preserve the peace of the world."

Moreover, there is perhaps a chance that such a new Palestinian State might also include a land bridge linking Gaza with the West Bank; or Israel might even lose all of the Negev. Once the fate of the Jewish State is to be decided without the Israel government in the room, who knows what will happen?

This was done to Czechoslovakia in 1938. President Obama is making every effort to do this to Israel in 2014. As suggested by the structure of the June 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama has from the beginning been out to get Israel not Iran. In essence, President Obama plans to ride the Iran crisis as a way to render Israel virtually defenseless, just as in 1938 Czechoslovakia was strategically crippled by the cession of the Sudetenland.

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