Friday, August 15, 2014

Nixon and Obama on Israel

Compare and contrast, administration policy toward Israel in time of war.

Compare and contrast, the Nixon administration in 1973 and the Obama administration in 2014.

Arnold Steinberg summarized what happened in 1973:

To this day, few Jews recognize that at Israel’s greatest time of existential threat — the 1973 surprise attack known as the Yom Kippur War — Republican Richard Nixon saved Israel: his friend, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called in the middle of the night; Nixon unilaterally overruled the Pentagon to airlift massive military supplies to our beleaguered ally.

Now, the situation is reversed. The Pentagon was providing Israel with the arms that it needed to defend itself. The White House and the State Department were unhappy and decided that further sales of Hellfire missiles would require their approval.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

Then the officials learned that, in addition to asking for tank shells and other munitions, Israel had submitted a request through military-to-military channels for a large number of Hellfire missiles, according to Israeli and American officials.

The Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, was about to release an initial batch of the Hellfires, according to Israeli and congressional officials. It was immediately put on hold by the Pentagon, and top officials at the White House instructed the DSCA, the U.S. military's European Command and other agencies to consult with policy makers at the White House and the State Department before approving any additional requests.

A senior Obama administration official said the weapons transfers shouldn't have been a routine "check-the-box approval" process, given the context. The official said the decision to scrutinize future transfers at the highest levels amounted to "the United States saying 'The buck stops here. Wait a second…It's not OK anymore.' "

And…

The White House and State Department have sought to regain greater control over U.S.-Israeli policy. They decided to require White House and State Department approval for even routine munitions requests by Israel, officials say.

Instead of being handled as a military-to-military matter, each case is now subject to review—slowing the approval process and signaling to Israel that military assistance once taken for granted is now under closer scrutiny.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nixon gave ammunition to a sovereign state that was under attack by almost all its geographic neighbors, an attack based on the idea that it had no right to exist. Thus, it was an existential threat, in 1973 and every other time.

Barack Obama refuses to support this same State of Israel with promises of ammunition re-supply, while his administrative departments (war-weary agencies like the Postal Service,Social Security and Health & Human Services, to name a few) purchase billions and billions of rounds of small arms ammunition in a form (hollow point bullets) that violates international laws of war, including the Hague Convention of 1899, which NATO members still follow.

Who would up you say are Obama's enemies?

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