01 December '10
The main thing I’ve learned from the WikiLeaks documents is that I was wrong about Barack Obama. I’d thought that he was putting the screws to Israel in order to appease the Arab world, particularly the Saudis. Apparently not. David Horowitz puts it very well:
The Obama administration, it is now clear for all to see, was not pressing a reluctant Netanyahu to make settlement-freeze and other concessions to the Palestinians in part because it truly believed this would be helpful in generating wider support for tackling Iran.
Not at all. The United States, we now know courtesy of WikiLeaks, was being repeatedly urged by a succession of Arab leaders to smash an Iranian nuclear program they feared would destabilize the entire region and put their regimes at risk. Their priority was, and is, battering Ahmadinejad, not bolstering Abbas.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in 2008, had not urged the US to chivvy those recalcitrant Israelis toward concessions to the Palestinians as a pre-condition for grudging Saudi support for a firmer US-led position against Iran. Anything but. Never mind the Palestinians, the king simply implored Washington to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”
Likewise, with minor variations in the course of the following year, the rulers of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.
We are now starting to hear, courtesy of WikiLeaks, what Jordan and Egypt had to say on the matter too.
So, one asks, if Obama was not doing the Arabs’ bidding, why did he base his entire Mideast policy on the obviously false ‘linkage’ theory that asserts that ‘solving the Palestinian problem’ is a prerequisite to stabilizing the Middle East, and in particular, to dealing with Iranian expansionism?
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