By Larry Gordon
We all pushed hard in our own ways for the P5+1 deal with Iran to go down to defeat. It doesn’t appear that those efforts were successful, as the presidential executive order has not garnered enough opposition in Congress and, as a result, it will be implemented over the next several months as U.S. policy on Iran.
The New York Times reported last week that the effort to have the Iran deal rejected was a significant defeat for AIPAC—the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. But was it really?
Israel’s prime minister lobbied the Congress hard to turn the deal down, but those efforts seem to have come up short—or did they?
The Israeli leadership is perceptive. They most likely knew that this effort was not going to be successful. Why didn’t the prime minister pull back or at least go with the flow and make the best of a difficult situation? And why didn’t AIPAC do the same thing?
It now appears that although Israel knows that this full-court press in Congress would not turn things around for Israel on the Iran deal, there were numerous benefits to be reaped by continuing the struggle against the deal, with Prime Minister Netanyahu planning on speaking out forcefully against the nuclear agreement when he speaks before the UN General Assembly later this month.
As things turn out, it seems that Israel might be in a much better position strategically and diplomatically with the deal going forward than if it had been defeated in Congress. At the same time, the benefits would not be as copious had there not been organized and vehement opposition to the deal. AIPAC knew this, Netanyahu knew this, and many in the Republican Party understand this to be the best way to proceed. In a sense, Mr. Obama may have gotten his way but he also may have been checkmated by Israel and her representatives here in the U.S.
On the surface, none of this makes sense. From the outside, it looks to many like Israel took a huge gamble in going up against Mr. Obama and lost. There should be repercussions and consequences for the position taken against the president. For now, it looks like Mr. Obama might be a little unnerved, but the diplomatic jockeying and the tradeoffs with senators for support for the deal will benefit the Jewish state beyond anyone’s expectations.
That is, except for the New York Times, which relishes pronouncing a setback or defeat for Israel on its front page as often as possible. That is the nature of the critical but superficial types of reporting that the Times specializes in, especially when it comes to Israel.
Now in the aftermath of the battle for the deal, it looks like the U.S. will have to compensate and build Israel’s defensive military arsenal to a much larger scale than if circumstances were different. In a sense, this is a win for all sides—at least temporarily. The president gets his lone foreign-policy achievement that will not be viewed as a novice’s error until quite a few years from now, and though Israel opposed the achievement, the Jewish state has to receive a consolation gift in order to ameliorate the potential pain and suffering down the line.
The odd thing about all this contradictory interplay is that the president has claimed all along that he had to take steps that endanger Israel and other Middle Eastern states in order to protect them. If we take a step back and try to analyze the Obama approach to international scoundrels like the Iranian leadership, it is an approach that while dangerous, is also somewhat refreshing.
This is aside from the worn-out phrase that “all options are still on the table,” which is supposed to mean that if all else fails, the U.S., Israel, or a combination thereof can still use utilize the military option that can set Iran back not just to a state worse than being ravaged by economic sanctions, but back to a previous century and a condition they may never be able to recover from.
In a way, these possible scenarios or threats are a throwback to the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, when the arms race was about which country could destroy the other hundreds of times. We all know that in reality, in a knockdown, drag-out war, any country only needs to beat or destroy its opponents once—that should do the trick.
In that vein, Mr. Obama presented his position by explaining that the Iran military budget is only $15 billion annually while that of Israel is several times more than that, and the U.S. military budget is hundreds of billions of dollars. In other words, this entire drama may be little more than something akin to a political election campaign where the candidate with the most money has the best chance to win.
So while the Times and other liberal media are overjoyed that the effort of elements of the organized Jewish community were reversed, they may be greatly disappointed when they find out that defeat might have been the plan all along.
It seems that for the time being, the more Mr. Netanyahu criticized the Iran deal, the more Mr. Obama has to do for Israel. That might only be part of the current strategy. The other aspect is that the more Israel is out there condemning and censuring the deal, the more difficult it is for the Obama administration to exact any retribution for being so overtly condemned by Israel and her representatives.
It has been expected all along that Mr. Obama would wait until his last year in office in order to create additional international pressures and discomfort for the only true democracy in a sea of dictatorships dominated by violence and terror in the Middle East. That is just one of the oddities of what it means to be a Jew these days in this world.
This wild state of affairs is reminiscent of the outcome of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli Army had the Egyptians encircled and was ready to crush them if not for the intervention of President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the aftermath of the lightning victory of the Six Day War in 1967, this was a hard fight for Israel that included large sacrifices in human life. It took three weeks for Israel to defeat the attacking armies of Egypt and Syria.
Still, Egypt observes the October War—as they call it—as a great victory marked by parades, pageantry, and fanfare. What are they celebrating exactly? They are celebrating the fact that it took them three weeks to be defeated instead of six days. The Arab world is a tough place in which to find things to celebrate, especially in these tumultuous times. So now, in a way, it is Israel’s turn to take a chapter out of that book and celebrate defeat—a loss that, in the end, will be looked upon as a victory after all.
Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com.