Most of my friends have already heard this story, but if you are one of them, don’t skip it. There’s an important parallel.
When I served in the IDF reserve, my job was guard duty at Air Force installations. This is (or was) one of the lowest tasks in the army, being reserved for people who hadn’t done regular service, or who had various ‘problems’. And we were a motley bunch. In particular there was one guy who always wore sneakers instead of boots. He explained to his commanders that he had a ptor, a medical release.
One day in 1987 when we guarding Tel Aviv’s Sde Dov airport, we were informed that a helicopter carrying the Chief of the General Staff was arriving and we were to go out and meet it. With feelings of great importance (and relief from the crushing boredom of guard duty), we surrounded the landing area. The helicopter touched down, and out stepped the highest-ranking officer in the IDF, Dan Shomron, along with other generals, bodyguards, etc.
The first thing he noticed was the sneakers. Before he stepped into his car, he nudged a major, who spoke to my associate.
Major: You. What’s on your feet?
Cpl. X: Sneakers.
M: Why?
X: I have a ptor.
M: Show it to me.
Of course he couldn’t, since it existed only in his mind. There were unpleasant consequences for him.
Which brings us to the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani. (h/t: Elder of Ziyon). Rouhani — and his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — have claimed several times that Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons because the Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa [judgment of Islamic law] against it.
In fact, they even succeeded in persuading President Obama, who mentioned it in his speech at the UN last week. But like my unfortunate friend’s ptor, the fatwa seems to be imaginary. Read what MEMRI says about it:
In fact, such a fatwa was never issued by Supreme Leader Khamenei and does not exist; neither the Iranian regime nor anybody else can present it.
The deception regarding “Khamenei’s fatwa” has been promoted by the Iranian regime and its spokesmen for several years. Each time it was mentioned, the “fatwa” was given a different year of issue – for example, 2005, 2007, or 2012 – but the text of the “fatwa” was never presented.
MEMRI has conducted in-depth research with regard to this “fatwa” and has published reports demonstrating that it is a fiction. See MEMRI reports:
Renewed Iran-West Nuclear Talks – Part II: Tehran Attempts to Deceive U.S. President Obama, Sec’y of State Clinton With Nonexistent Anti-Nuclear Weapons Fatwa By Supreme Leader Khamenei
The Iranian regime apparently believes that its frequent repetition of the “fatwa” lie will make it accepted as truth. To date, the Europeans refuse to accept it. According to unofficial sources, the legal advisors of the EU3 made an official request to the Iranian regime in 2005 to provide a copy of the “fatwa,” but in vain.
The imaginary fatwa is just one of many lies told by the Iranians about their nuclear program. Another is that it is for peaceful purposes, when the overwhelming evidence indicates that it is intended to produce weapons.
Iran has been making great sacrifices for more than a decade to become a nuclear power, something which it correctly believes will change the balance of power in the Middle East, replacing US influence with that of Iran. Now it is on the verge of completing its project — is it likely to give up now just to end the leaky sanctions that it has borne up to this point? Would the US have scrapped the Manhattan Project in January of 1945?
The Iranian lies are transparent, but they are not designed to be convincing. They are designed to provide cover for the Obama Administration, which has already decided that it is more important to achieve a ‘diplomatic solution’ to the Iranian crisis than it is to actually prevent them from assembling nuclear weapons (or coming close enough to do so on very short notice).
Unlike the IDF major I mentioned above, President Obama is not prepared to call an obvious bluff.
Technorati Tags: Iranian nuclear weapons, fatwa
Look, Obama is not stupid. Not in the literal sense in this instance, anyway.
It is a matter of priorities for him.
I’m sure he has no doubt about Iran’s intentions and capabilities, at least in terms of developing nuclear arms (in terms of intents from there…I’ll get to that in a minute).
But, his priority is to screw Israel by means of shoving a Saudi-style ‘surrender’ agreement down Israel’s throat vis-a-vis the PA.
If Obama were to act on his transparent lies concerning preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms capability, this would force him to a) abandon his program on the Israeli-Palestinian front, at least for the time being, and b) openly treat Israel as an ally in the face of Iran. What is more preventing Iran from getting nukes, in advance of any agreement between Israel and the PA, would take away Obama’s most important perceived element of leverage in coercing Israel to capitulate to the PA.
So, being the world-class liar that he is, Obama is perfectly comfortable with pursuing this appeasement path towards Iran, as a way of “punishing” Israel for her “lack of cooperation” on the Palestinian front.
Finally, on the matter of being “stupid”, Obama enters world-class territory here when he and his band of morons (i.e., Hegel, Kerry, Power, Rice, Dempsey) rationalize what they are doing by convincing themselves that a nuclear Iran can and will be “contained” as was the Cold War-era USSR and Maoist China, in the event they go nuclear. And, in any case, a nuclear-armed Iran, so their reasoning goes, is mostly “Israel’s problem”; conveniently forgetting that to Iran, the U.S. is the “Great Satan” while Israel is merely the “Little Satan”.
Obama doesn’t care about the existence of any “fatwa”. Obama cares about screwing Israel. That is the entire focus of his foreign policy.
Netanyahu should have hit Iran, and crushed the PA, back in the fall of ’11 when the Palis went to the UNSC to apply for statehood.
Failing that, Netanyahu should have hit Iran a year ago right now, when he was apparently on the verge of pulling the trigger, and Obama screamed “NO!”. He should have done it anyway.
So, here we are.
Looking at Netanyahu’s behavior up to now, I for one no longer have any faith that Netanyahu is going to defy Obama on Iran. I allow that I may be wrong, but as things stand, I wouldn’t SWAG the chances of an overt strike on Iran by Israel at greater than 20% going forward.
I believe that Netanyahu has made a calculation that where he is going to stand his ground is on the PA issue. He has given up on hitting Iran. He is hoping that the cloak and dagger stuff will keep Iran from developing usable nukes long enough for the regime to collapse, or perhaps long enough to put off an Israeli strike until near the end of, or after Obama’s term in office. I’m not very optimistic about the latter case, however, in that Russia is probably going to install those new S-300 SAMs in Iran and Syria before then, making a strike almost impossible (unless Israel finds a way around these, which can’t be entirely ruled out).
So, having nothing left to lose in terms of U.S. support with respect to Iran, Israel is going to pretend to play along on the PA negotiation front, but won’t really give up anything important. I note that there was supposed to be a second prisoner release at the end of September; unless I missed something, this has not happened yet, and it is now the last day of September as I write this. Thus, I deduce from this that Netanyahu has decided to say to Obama in effect: “Fine. Don’t do anything about Iran, Obama. We won’t either [at least not overtly]. But we already have means of retaliating against them, and we have missile defenses, so we have a fighting chance…a lot more than your Gulf Arab ‘allies’ have. So, we’ll ride this out as best we can…and you can take your ‘peace’ plan with the PA and stick it where the sun don’t shine, pal.”
Gonna be a loooong three years, four months (who’s counting?).
It seems that President Obama is going to do whatever he can to avoid another U.S. involvement in a Middle Eastern War. This is his priority and in one sense it makes good sense. Why be involved in another Iraq, or Afghanistan when no positive results for the United States can emerge?
On the other hand a nuclear Iran is something not simply Israel but other U.S. Mideast allies see as major threat. It is also something Obama has repeatedly promised to prevent.
It would seem fairly likely that this lead to a kind of phony deal in which Iran already close to, or perhaps having nuclear capability will retain this capability though not go for outright weaponization. If this is the case then Obama will have failed and left to his successor a much worse Middle East situation.
Still there remains the possibility that Iran will be so boldly and openly defiant of the U.S. that President Obama will decide to take out the nuclear sites. I agree that this seems a very unlikely prospect at the moment.