US President Barack Obama views lies as legitimate political tools. He uses lies
strategically to accomplish through mendacity what he could never achieve
through honest means.
Obama lies in both domestic and foreign
policy.
On the domestic front, despite Obama’s repeated promises that
Obamacare would not threaten anyone’s existing health insurance policies, over
the past two weeks, millions Americans have received notices from their health
insurance companies that their policies have been canceled because they don’t
abide by Obamacare’s requirements.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
board explained that Obama’s repetition of this lie was not an oversight. It was
a deliberate means of lulling into complacency these Americans who opted to buy
their insurance themselves on the open market, in order to stick them with the
burden of underwriting Obamacare.
In the editorialist’s words, “The
[healthcare] exchanges need these customers [whose private policies are being
canceled] to finance Obamacare’s balance sheet and stabilize its risk pools. On
the exchanges, individuals earning more than $46,000 or a family of four above
$94,000 don’t qualify for subsidies and must buy overpriced insurance. If these
middle-class Obamacare losers can be forced into the exchanges, they become
financiers of the new pay-as-yougo entitlement.”
Sure there is an outcry
now about Obama’s dishonesty and the way he has used lying to take away from an
unwilling public a right it would never have knowingly surrendered, but it is
too late. There is no chance of revoking the law until at 2017, when Obama
leaves office.
And by then, everyone will have been forced to accept what
they consider unacceptable or be fined and lose all health
coverage.
Obama’s mendacity is not limited to domestic policy. It
operates in foreign affairs as well. Several commentators this week recalled
Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez’s angry response to the Obama administration’s
attempt to block Senate passage of sanctions against Iran in December 2011.
Expressing disgust at the administration’s bad faith to the Senate, Menendez
noted that before the White House tried to defeat the legislation, it first
forced senators to water it down, making them believe that the White House would
support a weaker bill. In the end, despite the White House’s opposition, the
Senate and House passed the watered-down sanctions bills with veto-proof
majorities. Obama reluctantly signed the bill into law and then bragged about
having passed “crippling sanctions” on Iran.
As was the case with
Obamacare, the White House knows that most Americans won’t support its policy of
doing nothing to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. So the White
House never says that this is its policy. Obama and his advisers insist that
preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power is a central goal of the
administration. But their actions move US policy in the opposite direction. And
if they get caught on the lies after Iran gets the bomb, well, Obama won’t be
facing reelection, so he will pay no price for his duplicity.
The
mendacity at the heart of Obama’s political playbook is something that Israel
needs to understand if it to survive his presidency without major damage to its
strategic viability. The events of the past week make clear that the stakes in
understanding and exposing his game couldn’t be higher.
Three major
developments occurred this week.
On Sunday, PLO officials leaked to the
media a position paper that Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat presented
to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni outlining the PLO’s position on a finalpeace
settlement. In a nutshell, the paper requires Israel to destroy itself
demographically, democratically, militarily, legally and politically and that it
relinquish its water supply. Six months after it does all these things, the
Palestinians will agree to sign a peace treaty with it.
The Palestinian
document claims not only all of Judea and Samaria, (except for 1.9 percent of
the territory that Israel can keep in exchange for money and more land within
sovereign Israel), and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. It demands the
northern Negev, the Hula Valley, Latrun and the Elah Valley. And it demands them
all free of all Jewish presence.
They demand that Israel relinquish its
rights under international law to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem by agreeing that
they are “occupied.”
They demand full control over the airspace over
Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem, and over the waters off the Gaza coast. They
demand an end of air force overflights of those areas.
They demand
control over all the underground aquifiers, and over the electromagnetic
spectrum.
Moreover, the Palestinians are demanding that Israel allow 5
million foreign-born Arabs the right to freely immigrate to its remaining
territory.
They refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist and claim they
have sovereign rights over all of Israel.
The Palestinian document
reveals that there is no chance whatsoever that the current negotiations will
lead to peace. PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies don’t want peace. They
want to destroy Israel.
And yet, to demonstrate Israel’s good faith with
the cause of peace, and genuine devotion to the goal of appeasing Abbas, on
Sunday the cabinet approved the release of another 26 Palestinian murderers from
its jails. On Tuesday night, Abbas threw them a party in Ramallah and pledged
that he would force Israel to release all Palestinian terrorists from its
prisons.
Then there is Iran. Just as it did in 2011, before the US Senate
and House passed veto-proof sanctions bills, the administration is aggressively
fighting to block lawmakers from passing new sanctions against Iran. To this
end, Obama’s national security advisers summoned American Jewish leaders to the
White House to demand that they stop speaking in favor of intensified
sanctions.
Also this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry took a swipe
at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for daring to question the administration’s
total commitment to negotiating with Iran. Kerry indignantly insisted, “We will
not succumb to fear tactics” against holding talks with Iran.
The same
day that Kerry decried Israel for supposedly sowing fear unnecessarily about the
status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Olli Heinonen, the former deputy head
of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the Iranians may have
already passed the breakout phase and have the capacity to build an atomic
weapons within two weeks.
But in accordance with the Obama
administration’s wishes, Democrats in the Senate are now suggesting a four-month
pause in sanctions deliberations to give Obama a chance to reach a
deal.
Rather than post the Palestinians’ position paper on his Facebook
page and instruct Israeli diplomats worldwide to publicize it as proof of the
Palestinians’ continued commitment to Israel’s destruction and bad faith at the
negotiating table, Netanyahu remained mum on its leaked contents. Netanyahu
didn’t use the paper or Abbas’s open support for recent terror attacks, and
leadership of the global movement, to destroy Israel’s economy through trade
wars and commercial boycotts, as ample justification for keeping the Palestinian
murderers in prison.
Instead, he and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon
insisted that they had to be released. Israel’s “strategic interests” would be
adversely affected, they said, if the government kept them behind
bars.
Since Obama first entered the White House, Netanyahu and his
colleagues have used the term “strategic interests” as a euphemism for American
pressure. By using the term in the context of the freeing of murderers,
Netanyahu and Ya’alon made clear that the US has blackmailed Israel into keeping
up concessions to the PLO despite the fact that the concessions demoralize the
country, destabilize the government, embolden terrorists determined to murder
still more Jews, and encourage Abbas to escalate his support for terrorism and
his diplomatic war against Israel.
The question is, what are Obama and
his colleagues threatening to do to us? What is the “or else” that follows the
American demand for Israel to capitulate to Palestinian demands? The media claim
that Netanyahu continues with the phony peace talks because he doesn’t want to
be blamed when they fail in April. But even if Netanyahu were to break with his
party and form a new government with Livni and the Labor Party, the Arabs and
Meretz, and offered Abbas Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and some symbolic right
of immigration for a few foreign Arabs to the rump Jewish state, Abbas would
reject his offer, just as he rejected Ehud Olmert’s offer and just as Arafat
rejected Ehud Barak’s offer.
And just as Obama has blamed Israel for
Palestinian intransigence and radicalism for the past five-and-a-half years, so
he will blame Israel for the failure of the current talks. So as unpleasant as
it will be to be blamed, the best thing Israel can do is expose Palestinian bad
faith to minimize the price it will pay when it is blamed.
The thing is,
Netanyahu must know that Obama will blame Israel no matter what the Palestinians
say or do. So perhaps the “strategic interests” he is threatening are more
strategic than simply blaming Israel for scuttling phony peace talks. Maybe
Obama is telling Netanyahu that if he fails to keep faith with the fake talks,
Obama will tip Iran off to an impending Israeli strike on its nuclear
facilities.
Here, too, Obama has a track record. According to former
national security adviser Giora Eiland, Netanyahu was poised to attack Iran’s
nuclear installations in the fall of 2012, but Obama pressured him into standing
down. It is hard to believe that Obama’s was a soft sell.
Then there is
the issue of military sales. Government officials have whispered periodically
that Obama is threatening to curtail weapons sales to Israel. Such a move could
quickly paralyze the air force.
There is an argument to be made for
keeping silent on the nature of Obama’s blackmail.
Exposing it would also
expose the growing fissure between the US and Israel, and much of Israel’s
deterrent posture is based on a widespread assessment that Israel’s strategic
alliance with the US is unbreakable. But then again, Obama’s weakening of the US
alliance with Israel – and with Saudi Arabia and Egypt – is well-known. The
damage has already been done.
Given this, the argument for exposing the
nature of Obama’s threats becomes more compelling by the day. Congress still
plays a supervisory role in foreign policy. And the American public supports
Israel deeply. There is a strong probability that if the nature of Obama’s
threats is revealed, he will be forced to rescind them before Israel becomes the
foreign corollary to the Americans whose health insurance Obama
canceled.
caroline@carolineglick.com