The Blog (of the Weekly Standard) brings us this piece of dumbfounding news:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don’t read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites — the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

The reference here is to the USS Liberty which was fired on by Israel during the Six Days’ War in June 1967. It was a friendly fire error. (See Michael Oren’s article on the incident here.) Brzezinski is implying that Israel attacked the ship deliberately, and that the US should avenge it. To him, Israel is America’s enemy and not Iran.

Contrary to Brezinski’s half-hearted disclaimer that no one wishes for such an outcome, there are plenty on the left who would delight in a pitched battle between the United States and Israel. Democrats in Congress routinely support resolutions affirming Israel’s right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to assure its own national defense. And Obama has at least paid lip service to the concept. But hostility to Israel among the rank and file is very real on the left — and among “realists.”

So conjure the image — the Obama administration sending U.S. aircraft up to protect Iran’s airspace and it’s nuclear installations from an attack by a democracy that is one of America’s closest allies. Unfortunately, this may not be so hard to imagine in Israel, where the number of people who believe Obama is pro-Israel is at just 4 percent — and falling. And given Obama’s (literally) submissive posture to the Saudis, his indulgence of the Iranians, and his simultaneously hard-line approach to Israel, it seems even some of Obama’s supporters can savor the possibility of a “reverse Liberty.”

Zbignew Brzezinski , who was National Security Adviser (1977-1981) to that 0ther anti-Semite Jimmy Carter, is now influential again as adviser to Obama.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

Today it is officially announced that Obama has broken America’s promise to Poland and the Czech Republic to supply them with anti-missile defense shields – as we said he would two weeks ago (Obama abandons Poland and Czech republic to the enemy, September 3). Why is he doing it? The Russians were furiously against the plan, so that’s one poor reason. But the main and outrageous reason is, of course, that Obama is not interested in defending America or its allies or the free(-ish) world.

At ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger writes:

I thought Barack Obama would be a poor and troublesome president. Did I think he would yuk it up with Hugo Chávez, smirk with Daniel Ortega about the Bay of Pigs, turn his wrath on a Central American country trying to follow its constitution, denounce President Bush abroad, bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, endorse a radical Middle Eastern view of how Israel came into being, knock Western countries that try to protect Muslim girls from unwanted shrouding, invite the Iranian regime to our Fourth of July parties, stay essentially mute in the face of counterrevolution in Iran, squeeze and panic Israel, cold-shoulder the Cuban democrats in order to warm to the Cuban dictatorship, scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe, and refuse to meet with the Dalai Lama [this item doesn’t annoy us as much – JB] — in addition to his attempts to have government eat great portions of American society? No, I did not. You?

Yes, we did. We said so, in generalized prediction. We only don’t understand why the whole country couldn’t see what Obama would set about trying to do: at home, turn America into an impoverished socialist country, and abroad, ally America with its enemies and alienate its friends.

Europe is being slowly, and it seems willingly, crushed to death by the ‘soft’ jihad of Muslim immigration and birth increase. Europeans abase themselves before Muslim threats; fall over themselves to grant Muslim demands however unreasonable; abandon the values their ancestors fought and died for in order to appease the oppressive ideologists of Islam. European governments do anything, however dishonorable, to worm themselves into the good graces of disgusting Muslim tyrannies such as Libya and Saudi Arabia. Hardly  a word of condemnation of the ‘human rights’ record  of Muslim countries ever issues from a European leader’s mouth. Every day terrorists murder  in the name of Islam (see our left margin for the tally).

There are over 50 Muslim-dominated states. There are more than one and a quarter billion Muslims in the world, and growing. There is one tiny Jewish state. It is democratic. Its population, Jews and Arabs alike, enjoy freedom equally under the law. There is a free press, an uncorrupted judiciary. It is a country that has generously given asylum to non-Jews (such as persecuted refugees from North Africa, Muslims among them). When it is forced to defend itself with military action, it takes more trouble than any country in history to avoid civilian casualties. It has fulfilled its promises to yield territory taken in defensive wars in exchange for peace with its neighbors that they never deliver.

Yet it  is this small, beleaguered  state that is reviled, hated, accused, punished by the Europeans as a moral outrage – as if  there is a single European country that has earned the moral right to judge the Jews!

The continent is persistently and profoundly anti-Semitic. In their  blind and irrational obsession with Jew-hatred, Europeans cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge the immense contribution that Jews – a tiny minority in the world – have made to their civilization: their sciences, their philosophy, their arts, their technology, their prosperity, their power and glory. Jews are understandably pouring out of Europe by the tens of thousands, mostly to shelter in Israel – where they are threatened with annihilation by the hostile Islamic state of Iran, fast acquiring nuclear weapons.

It seems that Europeans would be more than content to see Israel annihilated. They will cheer. A last happiness for them before they themselves are overwhelmed by Islam.

And even in America, where a majority want the Jewish state to survive and flourish, there are those who positively wish for its demise – among them, we understand, the present radical left administration.

The brilliant Israeli columnist Caroline Glick paints the picture vividly in this article:

The main fantasy governing Europe’s attitude toward the Middle East is the belief in Israeli militaristic venality, fundamentalist messianism, and territorial greed. It is this fantasy that protects European leaders from the need to account for their six years of failed appeasement toward Iran, during which Iran has made its swiftest progress toward completing its nuclear weapons program.

It is the predominance of anti-Israel attitudes throughout the continent that enables European leaders to make light of the Iranian nuclear threat even as ever growing swathes of the continent fall within the range of the Islamic republic’s ballistic missiles.

A mere glance at the daily Middle East coverage of your standard European newspaper suffices to demonstrate the depths of Europe’s obsession with hating Israel. The absence of peace is always Israel’s fault. The fact that the Arabs have never accepted Israel’s right to exist is either whitewashed or justified. So too, Arab terrorism is explained away while every act – small and large – that in any way asserts Israel’s right to defend itself is pounced upon as proof of Israel’s criminality and brutality…

Israel has for years based its public diplomacy regarding Teheran’s nuclear weapons program on successive governments’ assessments that given Iran’s global reach and the threat it poses to global security, states will be more willing to act to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons than they are to acknowledge Palestinian terrorism which is employed almost exclusively against Israel. What Israeli leaders – including Netanyahu – have failed to recognize is that the antipathy of Europeans toward Israel is so great that they are willing to explain away Iran’s nuclear weapons program because it is aimed first of all against Israel. …

Such views inevitably temper any propensity European leaders may have to act against the Islamic republic…

Case in point is the newest Swedish media blood libel against Israel, and the numerous blood libels – most prominently France 2’s [TV] Muhammad al-Dura blood libel from September 2000 – that preceded it. Stories like [the Swedish newspaper] Aftonbladet‘s fiction of IDF theft of Palestinian organs and France 2’s false allegation that the IDF murders Arab children sell newspapers and raise television ratings because the popular animus against Israel is so great that people are willing to buy newspapers and watch television networks that propagate obvious lies that feed this irrational hatred. Indeed, it pays to disseminate such lies.

France 2’s Charles Enderlain, the father of the al-Dura lie, just received France’s Légion d’honneur from President Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, too, anti-Israel activist Felicia Langer just received Germany’s Federal Cross of Honor, and Israel-hater and former Irish president Mary Robinson was just awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The lesson of all of this for Israel is clear. Whether Netanyahu is dealing with Obama or European leaders, the game is rigged against us. Any move that Israel makes toward these leaders will simply facilitate their further castigation of the Jewish state and support their clear intentions to do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy Israel.

As we have been all too often in our history, today Israel stands alone against our enemies. We can either defeat them, or we can be defeated. The choice is ours.

Jennifer Rubin writes at Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

Hillary Clinton insists with great bluster that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is “futile.” What’s missing? Well, a coherent plan for denying Iran nuclear weapons.

One is left with two possible interpretations. One may be that despite denials to the contrary that he is living in a diplomatic fantasyland, Obama is convinced of his own powers of persuasion and believes the Iranian mullahs will fall under his spell and give up their nuclear weapons. After all, we are setting such a good example by proposing all sorts of disarmament agreements; the mullahs would be foolish not to go along, right? This supposes the administration is stocked with fools who are oblivious to the nature of the Iranian regime. Possibly.

The other alternative is that Clinton knows Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is futile because eventually Israel will “take care of it.” This is actually a less charitable explanation than the “they are foolish” option. It supposes a level of timidity, an unwillingness to assume American responsibilities, and a level of deceit. Having bashed Israel for six months and declared that no country has the right to tell another whether it can pursue nuclear power, Obama and his team now are banking on Israel to do their dirty work. They will complain after the fact, of course. Is this possible? Well, unless you think Obama and his team are fools, it is the only explanation.

In our view, the administration is stocked with fools and lying cowards. But there is a third possible explanation: While Obama is against America being nuclear armed, he is not against iran being nuclear armed, nor against Israel being wiped off the map. Nothing he has said or done contradicts these propositions.  

Ralph Peters writes in Front Page Magazine:

Clinton test-marketed the administration’s willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Instead of trying to prevent Tehran’s acquisition of such weapons, she told our regional allies (real or imagined) that we’d respond by extending a “defense umbrella” to negate the effects of Iranian nukes.

Except that it wouldn’t. What good would such a defense umbrella be to Israel after its destruction?

And one suspects that, with Tel Aviv a wasteland, “cooler heads would prevail” and there would be no response in kind, that we’d all just “deplore” what happened and hold conferences to insure it “never happens again.”

Apart from its bewildering reluctance to try to understand Iran’s leaders on their own terms, this administration clearly doesn’t grasp the dynamics of nuclear proliferation among rogue regimes.

When one more bad actor gets nukes, the increase in the threat of nuclear war isn’t plus-one-more, but exponential. While I doubt that the majority of Iranians want to risk launching nuclear weapons at Israel, wars aren’t unleashed by the masses, but by determined leaders. And for all its other weaknesses, Iran has tough guys at the top: After all, ruthlessness is what’s kept them in power for 30 years.

Our government’s shift from the position that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable to the stance that a nuclear-armed Iran can be handily deterred could prove to be the most dangerous error the United States ever made in the Middle East — a high standard, indeed.

Our president is good at sending signals — not least, when he sends the wrong ones. When he spent several days in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, lavishing praise on Islam and slyly comparing Palestinian misfortunes with the Holocaust, he sent one signal.

When he sent Secretary Gates to calm down those troublesome Israelis, he sent another.

This administration must stop living in a fantasy world in which monstrous fanatics will do what we want because we’re suddenly nice to them. You don’t deter butchers who believe they’re on a mission from their god by complimenting them on their rich history.

The only hope — albeit a slim one — for peace in the Middle East is to make it clear that our support for Israel is steadfast and unwavering, that Israel will endure and its enemies must accept its existence.

The current rift between the Israeli government and the Obama administration isn’t about expanding settlements in the West Bank. It’s about declining courage in the West.

Or is it about Barack Hussein Obama’s visceral hatred of Israel and love of Islam?

David Solway writes:

I will say this bluntly and without equivocation. Obama is a disaster of the first magnitude, bowing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, smiling benignly on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and cuddling up to Dimitry Medvedev—and by extension Vladimir Putin—of neo-Soviet Russia. He still maintains a flaccid negotiating stance toward an oppressive Iranian regime repudiated by its own people and rapidly closing in on nuclear capability. He would no doubt parley amiably with Hu Jintao of communist China should it launch an invasion of Taiwan, another small democratic nation in approximately the same “straits” as Israeland Honduras.

No less and perhaps even more frightening is Obama’s now undeniable intentions vis à vis his own country, imposing his own brand of demagogic politics upon the people he ostensibly represents. Unimaginable budgetary deficits, fiscally unsustainable policies, redistribution of honestly come by income, severe cutbacks in defence, bills hastily rammed through Congress affecting an entire population, soaring unemployment, opacity rather than transparency in the decision-making process, rule by charisma and fiat, the spectre of restrictions on freedom of expression—these are Obama’s gifts to his country. The new direction which American foreign policy has taken, alienating its democratic allies and mollifying tyrannical and illicit governments, renders the U.S. even more vulnerable to what we might call the expropriation of its destiny. Its enemies will not hesitate to seize the opportunity when it presents itself to undermine American interests and security.

“We are living at the edge of a catastrophe,” warned Newt Gingrich, addressing the Heritage Foundation onJuly 20, 2009. Whatever one may think of Gingrich, he is speaking truth to power, and truth to the powerless as well. Gingrich is concerned about the prospect of a massive terorist attack for which Americais manifestly unprepared, but the attack of its own administration on the nation’s traditional liberties and endangered solvency is equally menacing. This is the calendar of events envisaged by the international Left whose program, however  improbably, has now taken root in the United States, the presumed bastion of freedom in the world. The enemy is within the gates and the outlook for the future is perturbing, to say the least. But there is a certain ironic justice at work. What Israel and Honduras are now discovering, America too will learn in the course of time.

 I do not fear Abbas, Zelaya, Putin, Chavez or the rest of that disreputable bunch. I am alarmed when I consider Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But I am scared to death of Obama.

How was it possible that some of us could see  clearly that the election of Obama would be disastrous, yet a majority of voters could not see it at all?

The US and Europe’s message to Israel: 

We’ll let you save us from a nuclear-armed Iran if you’ll promise to let yourself be put in existential jeopardy. 

Apparently, Israel may accept the offer!!!

From the Jerusalem Post:

A deal taking shape between Israel and Western leaders will facilitate international support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in exchange for concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors,The Times reported Thursday.

According to one British official quoted by the paper, such an understanding could allow an Israeli attack “within the year.”

The report in the UK paper quoted unnamed diplomats as saying Israel was prepared to offer concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state as well as on its settlement policy and “issues” with Arab neighbors, in exchange for international backing for an Israeli operation in Iran.

… but not for the gander. 

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ‘stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

A fascinating article from Caroline Glick.

WHEREAS UPON examination it is clear that the Obama administration is wrong in insinuating that Israel is in breach of its international legal commitments through its refusal to bar Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the Obama administration’s own policy toward the Palestinians places it in clear breach of both binding international law and domestic US law.

On September 28, 2001, the UN Security Council passed binding Resolution 1373. Resolution 1373, which was initiated by the US government, and was passed by authority of Chapter VII, committed all UN member states to “refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts.” Resolution 1373 further required UN member states to “deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts or provide safe haven” to those that do.

In 1995, the US State Department acknowledged that Hamas fits the legal definition of a terrorist organization. Today, due to its policies toward Hamas, the Obama administration is in breach of both Resolution 1373 – that is, of international law – and of US domestic law barring the provision of support and financing to foreign terrorist organizations.