Israel, Republicans scupper Obama re-election bid

of necessity, the one in Iraq was a war of choice. There were many people who knew from the outset at the time that the manifest rationale peddled by the George W Bush-Dick Cheney White House to justify its wilful invasion of Iraq was fabricated.
It wasn’t quite long right after the invasion when that fabrication crumbled and fell into pieces before the eyes of the world. No scintilla of hard evidence existed as proof that then Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, possessed either the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or the infrastructure to fabricate them.
On yet the other hand, reasonable people believed there were several latent factors that motivated the invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Hussein from power by the US, culminating in the occupation of the country that followed.
One of such was the belief held by the bunch of the so-called neo-conservative ideologues (ultra-conservatives who claim that America’s manifest destiny in the current century includes wielding its colossal military might to alter the course of human history regardless of attendant destruction and bloodshed) with whom the Bush-Cheney White House palled around that regime change in Iraq would, amongst other foreign policy accomplishments for George W Bush, translate to a “more secure state of Israel”.
If you recall, the ranks of the neo-conservative ideologues included prominent uncritical supporters of the state of Israel in the United States. They range from wealthy Jewish Americans to academics and influential mass media personalities of all sorts.
The money men among them spare next to nothing in the way they fund pro-Israel causes and politicians, while those in the media peddle and use their opinion to steer the course of US foreign policy, in particular the Middle East and elsewhere, towards directions that aid and abet their perception of peace in that part of the world.Anyone who is conversant with the antecedences of US Mideast policy in the post-World War II era will quickly concur when I say that its centrepiece encapsulates the state of Israel and its overall security.
To the neo-cons, Iraq under Hussein became Israel’s nemesis when the latter positioned himself as a benefactor to the Palestinians and their struggle to shake off Israeli occupation and attain statehood. When the Palestinians embarked on their second Intifada in 2000, Hussein stepped up his support to them one notch with a payment of US$10 000 to the family of each suicide bomber or anyone who died in the hands of the Israeli military.
Exactly one year before his ouster by the US, he increased the dole to the families of suicide bombers to US$25 000. His motive being to encourage many more “to volunteer for martyrdom in the name of the Palestinian people”. The election of Barack Obama is perceived as an upset and a new denominator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the neo-cons particularly.
The reason being that he expressed the belief that the proper path towards peace between both belligerents must include their willingness to make hard concessions at the negotiation table. Those would include the cessation of the construction of new settlements in the occupied territories by the Israelis and the acceptance by the Palestinians of Israel’s right to exist.
Although these would situate the US for the first time as an impartial arbiter in the quest to bring both belligerents together and prevail on them to make peace, to the neo-cons and diehard Israeli politicians and their supporters in Israel and the US, Obama is enemy of state personified.
To them, he was therefore unfit to be president of the US as a result. Principal among those Israeli politicians who have girded their loins in the open season to torpedo Obama’s re-election bid is the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies in and outside the bellicose Likud party.
In the US, they include the Republican Party and its Jewish American financiers and, of course, the neo-cons who are hell-bent on doing all in their power to get his Republican Party opponent, Mitt Romney, into the White House through any means necessary. Their overzealousness on this is palpable in the ongoing presidential campaign in the US.
One doesn’t need a crystal ball to discern that bringing about an “October surprise”, a foreign policy crisis that will sap and probably divert Obama’s re-election efforts and focus in the next 50-something days before the election is possibly on their permutation.
Netanyahu has been so much on the march in his bid to use his obsession to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and suck the US into another war in the Mideast and the Muslim world. On Tuesday, September 11, he stopped short of demanding that Obama issue an ultimatum to Iran.
He went as far as insisting that Obama must give him audience in the White House or New York during his scheduled trip to the UN in September, even though he has been told that there’s no room in the president’s schedule. Obama rejects Netanyahu’s arrogant demands that he (Obama) must spell out a specific “red line” that Iran could not cross in its nuclear programme.Rightly so.
After all, neither Israel, nor Netanyanhu is an overlord to the US or Obama. That Obama is the son of an African from Kenya does not in any way imply that his authority as the president of the US is counterfeit. One wealthy Jewish-American supporter of Republican candidates doled out money to fund an anti-Obama documentary.
The shoddy anti-Islam movie deceptively entitled, Innocence of Muslims that triggered the protests in Egypt, Libya — where the US consulate in Benghazi was rocketed, killing the ambassador and three other Americans in Yemen and elsewhere in the Muslim world — was allegedly funded and made by elements whose motive is plainly to incite anti-US protests in the Muslim world and trigger a foreign policy crisis for Obama.
But it doesn’t seem like they are hitting their target so far. Efforts by Mitt Romney to capitalise on the events falling off the movie are not yielding his campaign much traction at all. He has been roundly rebuked by people from almost all corners who characterise the accusation he levelled that the Obama White House responded to the crisis with apologies, as jumpy, untrue, reckless, and crass political opportunism especially because he failed to condemn the loss of American lives.
The invisible thread that strings this recent crisis that the Obama White House has been saddled with in the Mideast and Muslim world over the anti-Islam film made by shadowy elements in the US and the relentless diabolic orchestration by racists in Israel and the US proper all in the bid to prevent Obama from achieving a second term might be insidious to many people.
But if you take the trouble to reach back a little you will unearth specific indicators by way of utterances made by individuals that make up the unholy alliance against Obama that reveal that thread and implicate them somehow in the latest crisis at this time in the campaign.
The Arab Spring and its outcomes in Egypt for one, where Hosni Mubarak was chased from power agitated Netanyahu tremendously. He severally expressed his preference for Mubarak and his “dictatorship” in contrast to anything else. His conviction is that Mubarak’s repressive regime suited Israel and its interest best, even though it augured badly for the people of Egypt.
His allies in the US are not only distressed that Obama wound down the war in Iraq and is doing the same in the Afghan war. They have also expressed their dislike for his handling of the Arab Spring, and of course its outcomes. Some of them strongly believe that and even accuse Obama of abandoning Mubarak.
They agitate for a muscular involvement by the US in the Arab Spring. John McCain who is still smarting out his electoral defeat by Obama in 2008 advocates direct US military involvement in Syria and in the Muslim world. Egypt’s Coptic Christians are also implicated. They are distressed over Mubarak’s ouster in the Arab Spring, and they blame Obama for that.
Some of them claim that he shepherded the Islamist Brotherhood and their party into power in Egypt. Most of the revelation so far about the makers of the incendiary anti-Islam film points at immigrant Coptic Christians in the US. The revelation has even linked them to a Quran-burning fundamentalist pastor in Florida who has been characterised as a “crackpot” in a story in the New York Daily News recently.
They seem to have achieved their “October surprise” in the US election campaign. But how much they will reap from it by way of scuttling Obama’s re-election bid remains to be seen. — Southern Times.