U.S. State Department’s War on Israel Unrobed

...Though he has sought to flee from it, Obama is a wartime president. But, as this episode reveals, the war he prefers to fight is the political one against Israel, not the real one Islamists are waging against the United States and its allies.

Jonathan S.Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
10 November '14..

Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, exposed the hypocrisy of Obama administration officials who criticized Israel for taking insufficient care to avoid harming civilians during the war in Gaza this past summer. But the State Department isn’t backing down. Despite Dempsey’s statement that Israel gone to “extraordinary lengths” and had done what they could to spare innocents, when asked about the issue on Friday at the daily State Department press briefing, spokesperson Jen Psaki simply dismissed Dempsey’s avowal as irrelevant to the administration’s agenda.

Here’s the full exchange with Matt Lee of the Associated Press:

MATT LEE, ASSOCIATED PRESS: Yesterday, the ICC made its decision that there was no case to prosecute for war crimes in Gaza. But also yesterday – and you spoke about that very briefly here. But also yesterday, General Dempsey, who is no slouch when it comes to military things, told an audience in New York that the Israelis went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage during the Gaza war. And I’m puzzled, because I thought it was the position of the Administration – or maybe it was just the position of the State Department and the White House – that Israel was not doing enough to live up to its – what you called its own high standards. Back on August 3rd, there was the statement you put out after the UNRWA school incident, saying that the U.S. “is appalled by today’s disgraceful shelling.” And that was some pretty fierce criticism. How do you reconcile these two apparent divergent points of view? When this statement came out, the United States was appalled? Did that just mean the State Department was appalled?

JEN PSAKI, STATE DEPARTMENT: No, that is the position of the Administration; it remains the position of the Administration. As we made clear throughout the summer’s conflict, we supported Israel’s right to self-defense and strongly condemned Hamas’s rocket attacks that deliberately targeted civilians, and the use of tunnels, of course, of attacks into Israel. However, we also expressed deep concern and heartbreak for the civilian death toll in Gaza and made clear, as you noted in the statement you pointed to, that we believed that Israel could have done more to prevent civilian casualties, and it was important that they held their selves to a high standard. So that remains our view and position about this summer’s events.

LEE: Okay. But I’m still confused as to how you can reconcile the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – who knows a bit about how military operations work, I would venture to guess; I don’t know him, but I assume that he wouldn’t be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he was – if he didn’t –

MS. PSAKI: Correct.

LEE: — says that the Israelis essentially did the best that they could and lived up to – by extension lived up to their high standards by taking – by going to, quote, “extraordinary lengths” to limit the collateral damage.

MS. PSAKI: Well, I would point you to the chairman’s team for his – more specifics on his comments. But it remains the broad view of the entire Administration that they could have done more and they should have taken more – all feasible precautions to prevent civilian casualties.

This stand tells us two things about the Obama administration.

The first is that facts played no part in its attacks on Israel at a time when thousands of rockets were raining down on Israeli cities and terrorists were using tunnels to cross the border to attempt kidnappings and murders of Jews. Hamas did its best to hide behind civilians in Gaza, something that was aided and abetted by an international press corps that was either too intimidated by the Islamists to report on their activities or to shoot videos of photos of armed terrorists or missile launches. But, as Dempsey rightly concluded, the Israelis were cautious about firing at positions embedded among civilians and adopted various strategies to keep collateral damage to a minimum.

Yet the State Department and the White House both sought to hammer the Israelis for every incident in which civilians were killed. The fact that the Israelis were every bit if not more scrupulous about this concern than American forces operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, or Syria is not in dispute, certainly not by their U.S. commander.

State Dept. Defines “Success” at the Counterterrorism Forum

Rick Richman..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 December '12..

At Friday’s State Department press conference, spokesman Mark Toner was asked again about the U.S. commitment to get Israel involved in the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), which will be meeting again on December 13 without Israel. Reporter Matt Lee asked Toner “what exactly the Administration has done … since the last [GCTF] meeting, when you all said that you were going to try to get [Israel] included in this group, or at least some of this group’s work.”

Toner responded that “we’ve succeeded and agreed with our partners in the GCTF to have this issue as a formal agenda item on the – at the December 13 meeting.” That produced this colloquy:

QUESTION: Okay. What exactly is it that’s on the agenda? I mean, what is – can you say what –

MR. TONER: To have this issue discussed about –

QUESTION: Israel’s participation as a full – in the — …

MR. TONER: That the GCTF needs to develop more concrete policies on the involvement of non-members.

Lee asked whether the agenda item is specifically about Israel, and Toner said no: it’s about all non-members, although “certainly, Israel would be included” in this category. OK, but is the agenda item at least about how non-members can become members?

Gordon - The State Department’s Wishful Thinking

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
09 January '12..



What do the State Department and the Arab League have in common? Both believe in wishful thinking. But while the Arab League version is farce, the State Department version could well end in tragedy.

Last week, the Arab League asked Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stop slaughtering Syrian protesters. After all, an organization that kneecapped opponents and threw them off rooftops during its 2007 takeover of Gaza is the obvious choice to convince Assad to treat his own opponents more gently. Were it not already amply clear that League efforts to stop the violence in Syria are mere lip service, this might be tragic; as it is, one can only laugh.

But the State Department’s wishful thinking is far more troubling. Last Thursday, department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters that the Muslim Brotherhood, which won Egypt’s recent elections, positively won’t abandon the peace treaty with Israel. How does she know? Because the group has given Washington private assurances to that effect – and private assurances in English are obviously far more reliable than Brotherhood leaders’ numerous public pledges in Arabic to scrap the treaty.

A Fourth Approach to the Muslim World

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
21 July '10

American policy toward the Middle East has been traditionally split between the Stabilizers and the Radicals.

The Stabilizers were old foreign policy hands in the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA, sometimes tied in with the oil industry. They advocated maintaining stability in the Middle East by putting American support behind "our friends", the dictators. The US would supply them with weapons and military backing in case they were ever invaded or overthrown, and in exchange we would have reliable access to oil. From the Eisenhower interventions to the Gulf War, the United States protected Arab Muslim tyrannies in order to maintain stability in the region.


The Radicals were often academics, part time journalists or old line leftists. They insisted that everything wrong in the Middle East was caused by Western colonialism and imperialism, and the healing could only begin when the United States stopped backing the tyrants and began backing Marxist and Islamist terrorists in taking over their respective countries. The Radicals believed that if the United States would only abandon the dictators and throw their support behind the Marxists and the Islamists, a wonderful new age would dawn in the Middle East.

Until the Carter Administration, the Stabilizers held sway over foreign policy. With Carter though, the Radicals had their first taste of power. Following the doctrine of the Radicals, the Carter Administration helped bring Islamists to power in Iran, and began providing aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Its Green Belt strategy was focused on creating an alliance of Islamists to ally with the US against the Soviet Union. The real result was the same one you get when you try to breed poisonous snakes in order to get a bear off your land. You might succeed in getting rid of the bear, but now you'll have a whole other problem on your hands. That's exactly what happened with the US and the Islamists.

Neither the Stabilizers nor the Radicals were utilizing new ideas in their approach to the Middle East. The Stabilizers were echoing the British Empire's attempts to maintain control of the region through puppet sheikdoms and princedoms. The problem was that it hadn't worked too well for the British, who found themselves entangled in internal Arab and Muslim conflicts and coups. Like the British had before them, United States diplomats and oil company executives would cultivate a tyrant or two, only to discover that they were also completely untrustworthy. The House of Saud wound up seizing the same oil companies, and reversing the power relationship by doling out the oil on their terms, and using the money to begin the Islamization of the United States and Europe, while bribing half the foreign policy establishment to do it.

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Stop Worshipping the False “Peace Process” Religion

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
19 April '10

There have been few more dogged proponents of and participants in the “peace process” than Aaron David Miller. So when he now hops off the bandwagon and declares the “peace process” to be the equivalent of a false religion, it’s worth taking note. He explains:

Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.

He notes that he wrote his share of memos reciting the same catechism, but he couldn’t do it again today:

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