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The World => Current Affairs => Topic started by: I-Luv-Rashi on September 19, 2013, 03:25:05 am
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Obama's Reversals Weaken US Credibility!
(http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_view/public/DSC_3168_-_Flickr_-_U.S._Embassy_Tel_Aviv.jpg)
Let’s say you’re an Israeli prime minister and you get a visit from the US secretary of state, and this secretary of state assures you that nearby Syria, your longtime enemy, will be undergoing “the most far-reaching chemical weapons removal ever.”
If you were a top Israeli official who had watched the US back off a military strike on Syria because the Russian despot Vladimir Putin, of all people, had promised all those 1,000 metric tons of Syrian poison would get seized and destroyed in the middle of a civil war—would you believe such assurances? Should anyone?
In fact we have to ask: who is going to believe America about anything anymore? So rattled is the Obama administration by the prospect of re-energized potential aggressors now that it has retreated from its previous stance on Syria that the American president felt compelled to issue yet another pallid threat over the weekend—this time to Iran. Iran’s nuclear program is “a far larger issue for us” than Syria’s chemical arsenal, said Obama, and no one should think that just because the US didn’t strike Syria “we won’t strike Iran.”
Who briefs Obama these days on what to say on TV? I-didn’t-mean-what-I-said-about-Syria-yesterday-but-I-mean-what-I-say-about-Iran-today is not exactly a Churchillian response to the threat of war.
Small wonder then that, as the Washington Post reports, Israel’s prime minister sounded pretty doubtful after meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry. “We hope the understandings that have been achieved between the US and Russia regarding Syria’s chemical weapons will show results,” said Benjamin Netanyahu (emphasis added). “Here as well it is not words that will determine the outcome, but rather actions and results.”
In Israel, as a poll by the newspaper Israel Hayom indicates, three-quarters of Israel’s Jewish population reflects the skepticism of their leader: they don’t, in other words, believe for one minute that Syria will relinquish all its chemical weapons. And they also don’t believe—by a margin of two-thirds—that Obama can prevent a nuclear Iran.
They are not pessimists, these Israeli poll respondents. They are realists. They know—by now everyone knows—the US cannot be trusted.
Judy Bachrach.