Shackled Warrior
Israel in bondage.
An NRO Q&A
Caroline B. Glick is the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy. Author of the recently released book Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, Glick recently spoke to National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez about the region, the book, and the American presidency.
Some selections:
Lopez: You recently wrote, “Today the Gaza strip is a terror state run by an Iranian proxy.” What can be done?
Glick: Iran’s proxy — Hamas — must be defeated militarily. Israel must overthrow its regime in Gaza by force of arms. And Israel mustn’t agree to simply replace Hamas with Fatah.
Fatah is an unacceptable alternative to Hamas for two main reasons. First of all, Fatah refuses to fight Hamas and is far less popular than Hamas among Gazans, so transferring control over Gaza to Fatah would simply permit Hamas to regenerate and reassert control. Second, Fatah itself is a terrorist organization. Even today with Hamas in power in Gaza, Fatah terrorists continue to attack Israel with missiles from Gaza. Indeed, it bears recalling that until its government was overthrown by Hamas in June 2007, Fatah smuggled more Iranian weapons into Gaza from Egypt than Hamas did.
-------
Lopez: Is there any hope for Israel in any of the presidential candidates?
Glick: Israel is at war. Its enemies seek to destroy it. The U.S. is at war; its enemies — which are also Israel’s enemies — seek to bring America to its knees with the intention of eventually destroying it also. If an antiwar candidate wins the presidential elections, and if anti-war politicians are able to win filibuster-proof control over one or both houses of Congress, it will be bad for Israel. Israel is the frontline state in the global jihad and so it will be the first to pay a price for a U.S. capitulation. If the counterjihad that Israel and the U.S. are fighting is the contemporary equivalent of Vietnam for instance, then Israel is Cambodia.
But then, unlike the North Vietnamese, our common enemies have already attacked on U.S. soil. And so in the event that the U.S. simply stopped fighting, while Israel would be the first to suffer, the U.S. would also suffer.
Moreover, unlike the South Vietnamese and the Cambodians, Israel is not dependent on direct U.S. military assistance to defend itself. It only needs spare parts. So if the U.S. cut and ran under an anti-war administration, if Israel had good leaders, it would probably do just fine.
-------
Lopez: How bad would a President Obama be for Israel? Why should that question matter to Americans?
Glick: Senator Barack Obama would be bad for Israel most of all because he refuses to acknowledge that there is a jihad being waged against the free world. Indeed, he refuses to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an “enemy” in international affairs. And as a consequence, he is unable to understand what an ally is. As the U.S.’s most stalwart ally in the Middle East, and as the frontline state in the global jihad, Israel will likely suffer greatly if Senator Obama is elected to the White House.
There are several reasons that Americans should care about the fact that an Obama White House will be hostile towards Israel. First, when Islamists perceive Israel as weak they become emboldened. And when they become emboldened, they tend to attack not only Israel but the U.S. as well. Indeed, some of the largest attacks against the U.S. — like the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983 — came when the U.S. was most hostile towards Israel.
Second, when the U.S. places pressure on Israel, Israel is perceived as weak by the Muslim world. And when this happens, the tendency for wars to break out is increased. So when the U.S. has in the past blamed Israel for regional instability — the Arabs and Iran — which are the actual sources of that instability — exploit the situation by attacking Israel and sending the region into a tailspin. One can for instance attribute Yassir Arafat’s decision to attack Israel in 1996 — an attack which left 15 Israelis dead — to the Clinton administration’s massive pressure on the new Netanyahu government to accept the PLO as its “peace partner.”
Finally, U.S. pressure on Israel tends to weaken Israel and as I have argued, Israel is perceived by the jihadists as the frontline state in their war, the ultimate aim of which is global domination and the destruction of the U.S. So when the U.S. weakens Israel, the U.S. appears weak. Jihadists are then emboldened to attack not only Israel, but also the U.S. This is why, for instance, Shiite violence in Iraq rose steeply after Israel was perceived as having lost the war in Lebanon with Hezbollah in 2006. And Israel ended the war when it was under tremendous pressure from Secretary Rice to accept a ceasefire that left Hezbollah fully intact and free to rebuild its forces with Iranian and Syrian assistance.
All of this happened under U.S. administrations which in their day were considered friendly towards Israel. If Sen. Obama, who is perceived as sympathetic to the jihadists, is elected, the consequences of U.S. appeasement of Iran and others at Israel’s expense will likely be more profound — both for Israel and for the U.S.
Technorati Tag: Caroline Glick.
No comments:
Post a Comment