Thursday, April 14, 2011
THE RUBIN REPORT
By Barry Rubin
It's very difficult to overstate the illogical nature of Obama Administration Middle East policy. Here's a small example.
Israel made a peace treaty with the government of Egypt. The government of Egypt has now been overthrown. All the political forces in the country now openly talk about unilaterally revising or throwing out that peace treaty. The "moderate" candidate for president said that if Israel attacked the Gaza Strip (after being attacked from the Gaza Strip of course) Egypt should go to war.
SO the Obama Administration concludes that Israel must rush to make a deal with another government (which doesn't even control half the territory that it claims to represent) that might be overthrown and...
Well, you get the picture. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration doesn't.
Add to this:
--Israel's other peace treaty is with Jordan. And while that regime probably won't fall (and its successor tears up the peace treaty) it is facing a bigger possibility of being overthrown than at any time in 40 years.
--Israel's other main agreement was to end the war with Hizballah in 2006. At that time, the U.S. government guaranteed and the UN promised to have a force to keep Hizballah from returning to southern Lebanon. Now, Hizballah has more weapons than ever and a recently released Israeli map of Hizballah's military positions in Lebanon shows dozens of them, more than in 2006.
So are these the people and this is the advice to be followed?
The funny thing is that I doubt you could see the chain of reasoning above even mentioned anywhere in the Western mass media.
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Posted by Barry Rubin at 8:40 AM
