We now know that President Barack Hussein Obama apparently intentionally misled Israel when demanding that Israel must make substantial one-sided concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to gain support from the Arab nations to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
This above stated fact is screaming from the pages of the recently released 250,000 diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing organization, Wikileaks. These leaked documents reveal that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are insistent on stopping Iran’s nuclear program above any other consideration including the Israel-Palestinian Arab situation. These diplomatic cables prove that President Obama and Secy. Of State Clinton knew from the outset that this linkage paradigm was utterly false and that the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict was no obstacle to wide Arab support for the toughest possible sanctions and even military action against Iran.
It is deeply troubling to go back and read President Obama’s public statement to Israel about Iran when he said, “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians – between the Palestinians and the Israelis – then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”
Obama and Clinton repeatedly insisted that it is necessary to first deal with the Palestinian issue as the way to stop Iran. This never made sense – now we see that it also contradicted the specific information Obama received from his own U.S. officials.
Now we know that President Obama was repeatedly urged by many Arab leaders to destroy the Iranian nuclear program they feared – that was their primary concern and priority, not strengthening Abbas and the PA and pressuring Israel.
Some statements from the Wikileaks release:
- Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah didn’t mention the Palestinians but pleaded with Obama to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”
- King of Bahrain told the US the Iranian nuclear program “must be stopped.” Later added, “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”
- The United Arab Emirates defense chief Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Zayed of Abu Dhabi told US General John Abizaid the US needs to take action against Iran, “this year or next.”…”Ahmadinejad is Hitler.”
- Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak said the Iranians are “big fat liars.”
- Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, ”had told the Israelis in October 2006 that he believed Iran was determined to develop a nuclear bomb no matter the cost.” Israeli diplomats told their US counterparts “Hamad complained at the time that he felt the U.S. would not listen to him and tended to believe what it heard from Iran.”
- Israel’s deputy director of Foreign Ministry Yaacov Hadas said, “The Gulf Arabs believe in Israel’s role because of their perception of Israel’s close relationship with the US, but also due to their sense that they can count on Israel against Iran.”
- Washington Times Eli Lake wrote [12-2-10] “The new disclosures by Wikileaks coincide with other classified cables made public in recent days that show Arab leaders have been urging US officials to take military action against Iran.”
Jerusalem Post editor Dovid Horowitz wrote [12-1-10], “Obama was not the prisoner of a misconception, convinced in absolute good faith that if he could deliver Israeli concessions at the negotiating table he might stand a greater chance of getting the Arabs on board for the battle with the mullahs. No, he had the diplomatic cables to prove that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no obstacle to wide Arab backing, indeed wide Arab entreaties, for the toughest possible measures against Iran, emphatically including military action…
“Obama had internalized full well that he didn’t actually need the cover of a substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace process to generate Arab support for tackling Iran’s nuclear program, but chose to pressure Israel just the same, as a tactic, because he felt Israel was not being sufficiently forthcoming on the Palestinian front…
“It is not fair to indicate to the Israeli prime minister, when it’s patently untrue, that he ought to put aside some of his skepticism and take risks for peace because otherwise Israel might impede the US’s capacity to thwart the genocidal enemy, Iran.”
A Jerusalem Post editorial (11-30-10) stated: “Prominent pundits of Mideast affairs have argued Israel alone was pushing for military attack on Iran, WikiLeaks debunked these theories. In recent years, prominent pundits of Middle East affairs such as Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch, The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, have argued that Israel alone was pushing for a military attack on Iran.
“It was the ubiquitous “Israel lobby” that would make sure the US continued to threaten Iran with military strikes, said Walt and Mearsheimer. It was clear to all that “for Saudi Arabia the worst thing that could happen would be… an Israeli attack on Iran,” Dreyfuss claimed just this month. Lynch, meanwhile, asserted that “while Arab leaders would certainly like Iranian influence checked, they generally strongly oppose military action which could expose them to retaliation.” Warmongering Israel, ran the thesis, was single-handedly endangering geopolitical stability by attempting to plunge the Middle East into a war with the US.
“All of these learned gentlemen also posited the premise of “linkage,” according to which all Middle East pathologies are a direct outcome of Israeli aggression and obstinacy. Only after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, they have argued, can other issues, such as Iran’s belligerence, be addressed.
“Sunday’s revelations provided by WikiLeaks conclusively debunk these risible theories.
“From the flood of classified documents, it has become unequivocally clear that Israel is not alone in arguing that Iran, rather than perceived Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue, is the principal destabilizing element in the Middle East. We can read in black on white that a broad coalition of Arab countries, particularly in the Persian Gulf area, have been articulating to American leaders for some time, in private and intense conversations, their fear of Iran and, in some cases, the desperate need to take military action…
“What is also now clear is that some American foreign policy experts, who may have had significant influence on the Obama administration, were wrong to single out Likud-led Israel and the neocon “cabal” in America as the sole driving force behind the military option for Iran. And their insistence that a Palestinian state is prerequisite to mustering Arab support for sanctions or military action against Iran is definitively disproved – revealed as either a severe analytical error or part of a deliberate bid to prompt unwarranted US pressure on Israel.
“Whatever the wider repercussions of the WikiLeaks cable deluge, it has exposed the hypocrisy of those Arab leaders who publicly blame Israel for their woes while privately pleading for military measures to thwart their true enemy, Iran. And it has exposed the incompetence, too, or malice, of the analysts who took those Arab leaders’ public utterances at face value, and utilized them in a bid to ratchet up pressure on, and to besmirch, Israel.”
ZOA Co-Directors of Government Relations Joshua London and Dan Pollak said, “One of the many deeper questions people should be asking of President Obama is, despite the clear evidence available to you, why did you recklessly waste time and resources pretending that there is some semblance of a diplomatic ‘link’ between the ‘peace process” and the Iranian nuclear threat?”
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “We can see from these leaks that the Obama Administration has been cynically using the Iranian nuclear issue as a tool for extracting concessions from Israel, knowing all the while that such concessions bear no relation whatsoever to regional support for confronting Iran. The clear vision of the Arab states is of the threat that Iran poses to them, and their greatest desire is to end that threat.”
“These cables increase the validity of many analysts and journalists views who state that President Obama may be the most hostile president to Israel, ever. Mr. President, Israel is the most reliable ally to the United States in the Mideast. Mr. President, we respectfully ask you to start acting on that truth.”