Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Mooring the American Ship of State to Israel?

There is an old saying which goes something like this: “When God decides to destroy someone, he first renders them mad.” If you look at the situation in America today, you'll find that it applies on the dot to the self appointed leaders of the Jews who are losing the allegiance of their rank and file in droves, and are going bananas.

One of those going really mad is Lee Smith who wrote “A World Unmoored,” an article published on April 18, 2016 in the Weekly Standard. Smith begins his presentation by saying that Secretary of State John “Kerry hearts Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian minister … Kerry has a man crush on his Iranian counterpart.” And why is that? Because “Kerry reportedly speaks to Zarif on the phone regularly.” That is, Kerry is doing jaw-jaw instead of war-war, says Smith – and this must be love (or is it luv?) not politics or diplomacy.

If you are old enough to remember the time during the 1960s when all the talk was about sexual politics, you'll be tempted to put today's events in that context. So you ask why John Kerry is talking to Javad Zarif as often as he does, and Lee Smith provides the answer: “That's a good thing, says Kerry, because it means there's now a channel open to discuss issues between the two countries”.

Okay, you say, and you contrast that reality with the never ending talk in America and Israel about the exceptionally close relationship that is said to exist between America and Israel. To wit, you remember the time when the Jewish leaders in America and the Israeli operatives everywhere else lured President Obama into visiting Israel with the promise that the move will beget a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.

Obama took the bait, visited Israel in good faith, and had what was described as a love-in with Netanyahu and his party. But no peace treaty was begotten, an outcome that was predicted by those who know the Jews inside out. So the question we pose to Lee Smith is the following: What do you call that, Lee? Was it luv or was it the seductive promise of a dick-teaser?

Perhaps Smith had realized this much by the time he got thus far writing the article. We make this assumption because he shifted the imagery from sexual politics to this: “Why Kerry boasts of this dubious achievement is partly a function of his vanity.” He now says it is vanity not love, and goes on to make the scenario a little more complicated. It's not only one man, he says, it's two of them: “The pictures of Kerry laughing with Zarif as well as his opposite number in Moscow, Sergey Lavrov, are evidence of something gone wrong in Washington”.

But why all this vitriol, you want to know? Two reasons, says Lee Smith. First, “the Iranians threaten America's chief Middle East ally, Israel, while the Russians are trying to drag another U.S. partner, Turkey, into conflict.” Second, he explains that: “Kerry is off the reservation, but it's the president who is giving Iran concession after concession.” And there is a dark reason for that, he explains. It is that Obama is doing worse than appeasement, “it's an Obama reeducation program”.

It is that bad, huh? Bad? We are told it is bad? What's bad? What the hell does it all mean, anyway? Good set of questions, says Lee Smith. And he answers them. He says that Obama is “correcting American foreign policy by changing a mindset 'characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy' … He believes he freed himself from the 'Washington playbook' [that's] out of the foreign policy establishment prescrib[ing] military responses,” and only that.

Wow, no more military responses, says Obama. It is back to the Sixties. It is peace and love (luv) again where flower power will defeat the mighty gun. Will Lee Smith be asked to tiptoe on the tulips?

He must fear this will happen because Obama believes that “decades of American thinking were wrong.” No, says Smith, that's false and he explains why: “The purpose of America's post-WWII foreign policy was to ensure a degree of stability abroad.” But how was this to be achieved? By dividing the world into two camps, says Smith: “These are our allies, and these are our adversaries”. And he warns: “dismantling the global order backed by American power, Obama has left the world unmoored”.

But how do we know who is our ally and who is our adversary? Simple, says Lee Smith. If someone extends his arm in friendship, he's our adversary. If he teases our dick, he's our ally. Israel is doing that and the American ship of state should be moored to it.