Still in Need of His Protection
by Jonathan RosenblumJerusalem Post
October 5, 2012
All the festivals are occasions of rejoicing, but only Sukkot is specifically called zman simchaseinu. The essence of the festival is take the feeling of closeness to G-d achieved on Yom Kippur – described so movingly by Maimonides, "Last night he was hated by G-d, disgusting, distant, abominable [in His eyes] . . . Today he is beloved, a delight, close, a dear friend" -- and make it part of our everyday lives.
On Yom Kippur, we elevate ourselves above the physical -- fasting and refraining from all bodily pleasures; on Sukkot, we live in the sukkah – eating, drinking and sleeping – in Hashem's embrace. We leave our fixed dwelling for the makeshift sukkah, under the stars. The sukkah inspires our feelings of intimacy with G-d by reminding us of the Clouds of Glory, which surrounded and sheltered us for forty years in a howling desert.So goes the introduction to the Sukkot piece it sometimes feels like I've been writing every year since 2000/5761, when the Al-Aksa Intifada broke out two days before Rosh Hashanah and was in full throttle by Sukkot. Each year, I survey the threats facing the Jews of Israel, if only to remind myself of how palpably we need the Divine protection of which we gain a heightened awareness on Sukkot.
Rarely has that feeling been so strong as this year, especially now that President Barack Obama has put Israel on notice that it is on its own in terms of confronting Iran.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER NOTES that from the American point of view there are two possible internally coherent views to take of a nuclear Iran. The first is that a nuclear Iran is no big deal, and that it would be subject to deterrence in much the same fashion as the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Krauthammer himself finds the premise too questionable to be relied upon. The atheist Soviets did not believe in an after-life, and thus were not eager to fry. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which controls Iran's nuclear program, most certainly does believe in an afterlife. Iran's theocrats have shown in the past that they view it as an act of beneficence to provide their subjects an E-Z pass to paradise, as when they sent tens of thousands of children, armed only with the keys to heaven around their necks, to their deaths as human minesweepers in the war against Iraq.
Western models of rationality cannot be extrapolated to Islamic fanatics, whose views on nuclear war have their own internal rationality. Iranian leaders have long spoken of the logic of nuclear war with Israel: We wipe out six million and lose 20 million; we win. And as for those twenty million Iranian dead, they gain martyrdom.
Fortunately, President Obama has explicitly said that containment of Iran is not the policy of his government, and that a nuclear Iran is intolerable from an American point of view – the other possible view. But if that is the case, Krauthammer points out, the only chance of convincing Iran to abandon its dreams of nuclear weapons, without a massive aerial bombardment, is to convince them that such a bombardment is a real possibility. As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts it, "There are times when the best way to prevent war is to clearly communicate that it is possible." That was true in the 1930s, and it is true today.
The way to do so, writes Cordesman, is to set a specific date by which negotiations with Iran must be completed or it faces the physical destruction of its nuclear facilities by the United States air force. In other words, set forth precisely the type of "red lines" that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamim Netanyahu urged upon President Obama. Netanyahu does not seek to drag the United States into war against Israel to protect Israel, but to force the United States to take the one possible course that could avoid the necessity of such war.
THE ONE POLICY THAT IS TOTALLY INCOHERENT is to say, as Secretary of State Clinton did recently, that diplomacy, not red lines, is the best way forward. Diplomacy, without a credible military threat, is nothing more than a guarantee that Iran's nuclear program will proceed to completion. Iran and the West have been negotiating for over eight years. In that time, Iran has repeatedly reneged on earlier agreements and been caught lying to the International Atomic Energy Agency time and again. Freyedoun Abbasi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, boasted to the London-based Arabic Al-Hayat daily last week, "At times, we submitted false information [to inspectors] in order to defend the nuclear facilities and our achievements. We had no choice but to mislead the IAEA and other spies."
The only beneficiary of endless pre-negotiations and negotiations is Iran, which uses them to advance its program. Yet even after the complete failure of the last P5+1 negotiations with Iran, the EU's Catherine Ashton was back in Istanbul recently exploring the possibility of renewed negotiations.
The Obama administration's top officials have already told Congress that while international sanctions are taking their toll on Iran's economy, there are no signs whatsoever that they have slowed its nuclear program. If sanctions and diplomacy have failed, what is left?
The Obama administration cannot answer that question because it subscribes to at least two of what Foreign Affairs' Adam Garfinkle terms the "big whoppers" of the mush-headed Left: (1) the use of force should always be conceived of as a last resort; and (2) bad actors can never take advantage of meliorative diplomacy – i.e., talk-talk is always better than war-war.
That naivete is of a piece with that of that Obama administration's outreach to the Moslem world, the centerpiece of the President's foreign policy, at least until it blew up in Benghazi and Cairo. Obama's belief that he could charm the Iranians in ways the Europeans had not been able to over the preceding four years was but a subset of the larger approach.
The administration did not cause the events in Benghazi and Cairo, which had more to do with local power struggles between various shades of Islamic fanatics, though it was certainly insufficiently prepared for them. But those events demonstrated the limits of a policy based on treating jihadis as a fringe phenomenon, and the larger Moslem world as at worst, petulant adolescents, and at best, as sharing fundamental American values of tolerance and democracy, as Obama proclaimed in his ballyhooed Cairo speech, which would quickly abandon its anti-Americanism if approached with sufficient nicey-nice.
FOR All HIS PROTESTATIONS THAT A NUCLEAR IRAN would be intolerable, President Obama has adopted a far more menacing tone towards Israel over a possible Israeli attack than towards Iran. Understandably, his worst nightmare is an Israeli attack prior to elections, which would certainly spook world financial and oil markets, and likely trigger a full-scale war into which the United States would inevitably be drawn.
Yet by refusing to enunciate any "red lines" for Iran, refusing even to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the President all but ensures an Israeli attack, sooner or later. Netanyahu went on two major Sunday talk shows just prior to Rosh Hashanah to again call for the establishment of red lines vis-à-vis Iran. He was practically begging Obama for some proof of American seriousness about preventing Iran from going nuclear.
Netanyahu knows that Obama loathes him. Obama is on record on open-mic to former French President Sarkozy to that effect, and has gone out of his way to make his disdain clear, including his recent snub of Netanyahu's request for a personal meeting. And Netanyahu surely knew that Obama would take a very dim view of his attempts to sway American public opinion, particularly in the midst of a tight presidential campaign. Finally, Netanyahu knows that Obama has a better than even chance of being re-elected, and will be unconstrained in his treatment of Israel if he is.
In short, Netanyahu's move was an act of desperation. For he also knows that in the absence of any credible American intent to stop the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons of either the clear or dirty (transported in a suitcase) versions, Israel will have no choice but to act. It cannot live under the cloud of a nuclear Iran, whose leaders have repeatedly described Israel as a cancerous growth that must be extirpated. Nor can it tolerate Hizbullah and Hamas acting under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.
But the consequences of Israeli action, which likely can do no more than set back the Iranian program by a couple of years, will be very grave. Among those consequences, will likely be a full-scale war with Hizbullah and Hamas, and possible attacks on a half-prepared homefront involving biological or chemical weapons. (These consequences would also follow an American attack.)
Moreover, Iran would almost certainly strike at American targets and attempt to mine the Straits of Hormuz, and thereby draw American military intervention. Israel will be blamed for having dragged America into war and for the sharp spike in energy prices sure to follow in the short-run. Maureen Dowd at the The New York Times is already sounding the alarums about "slithering" neo-cons (read Jews) seeking to get their hands on American foreign policy again and drag America in another Mideast quaqmire.
A Machievellian might almost suspect that Obama is deliberately egging on Israel to attack – albeit after the elections -- as a means of bringing Israel to total isolation internationally as the prelude to finally being able to impose his own vision of Middle East peace.
SO WHAT is the consolation? No matter how perilous the situation in which we find ourselves today, it is certainly no more frightening than when the entire Jewish people -- two million men, women, and children -- followed G-d into an unplanted, barren desert, protected only by the Clouds of Glory.
Chag Sameach
Read more articles by Jonathan Rosenblum at Jewish Media Resources
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