Drumbeats of War - Gates and Barak Strike a Deal
Although Israeli Defense Minister Barak was specifically told not to ‘negotiate’ with the US during his stay in Washington DC this week, and although there were no official ‘negotiations’, it is clear that negotiations took place. What a surprise.
Today our Defense Secretary Gates stood with Defense Minister Barak … and of course we all know that in diplomatic language “War” is translated as “Defense”… answering questions from the cadre of Pentagon reporters.
Barak enunciated Israel’s part of the deal this way: “The time is clearly, at this stage, the time for sanctions and diplomacy.”
Gates answered with America’s part of the deal like this: “I’m very satisfied with the planning process ( by the Defense Department and other elements of the U.S. government to counter threats from Iran) both within this building and in the interagency. We spend a lot of time on Iran, and we’ll continue to do so.”
Barak went on to clarify the Israeli position by saying that the sanctions, expected in early May, “must be effective and to be limited in time so we will be able to judge to whether — what kind of results stem from the sanctions regime… only time will tell to what extent they are really effective.”
I’m sure you catch the part where he almost misspeaks. Or put another way, almost tells the truth. He clearly was about to say “whether they work or not.”
So Israel… who has placated the Obama administation by pulling a sort of ersatz moratorium on building in East Jerusalem by simply not having the germane planning and approval committees meet for an unspecified time… has promised to sit still for a little while to see if the Obama administration can pull a rabbit out of their collective hats, and get China and Russia to approve realistic sanctions against Iran.
The US must have given them a quid pro quo. That is most likely the promise to green light a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if sanctions are either a no-starter, or fail in a specified period of time. The extrapolation from Gate’s statements is that the US will ‘help’ in some way, perhaps by facilitating the strike by releasing the bunker busters promised Israel at one time, and/or use of America’s ultra cutting-edge X-band facility that we built in Israel but is completely run by and controlled by the US. Or perhaps we have agreed to absorb the retaliation on American assets in the Middle East that such a strike will certainly engender.
Or perhaps we have agreed to a joint strike.
That last ‘perhaps’ does not seem likely, because the Obama administration has been chewing Israel in its teeth like a rag doll for weeks. But it does not seem the Obama administration knows what it is doing with Israel, with Iran, with Syria, with Lebanon, with anything in the Middle East. So anything is possible.
There has been a lot of talk for a very long time about war in the Middle East this summer. All that occurred today fits perfectly with that timeframe. And summer is just a few weeks away.
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