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Aware that he could not simply leave the words "Israel has" twisting slowly in the wind, Lugar began again: "Well, Israel is alleged to have a nuclear capability."
Is "alleged" to have? Lugar was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee from 1985 to 1987; and then again from 2003 to 2007. No one told him that Israel has nuclear weapons? But, of course, he did know, but he also knew that U.S. policy on disclosure of this "secret" over four decades -- has been to protect Israel's nuclear "ambiguity."
Small wonder that our most senior officials and lawmakers -- and Lugar, remember, is one of the more honest among them -- are widely seen as hypocritical, the word Scott Wilson used to frame his question to Obama.
The Fawning Corporate Media, of course, ignores this hypocrisy, which is their standard operating procedure when the word "Israel" is spoken in unflattering contexts. But the Iranians, Syrians and others in the Middle East pay very close attention.
Obama Overachieving
As for Obama, the die was cast during the presidential campaign when, on June 3, 2008, in the obligatory appearance before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he threw raw red meat to the Likud Lobby.
Someone wrote into his speech: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided." This obsequious gesture went well beyond the policy of prior U.S. administrations on this highly sensitive issue, and Obama had to backtrack two days later.
"Well, obviously, it's going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations," Obama said when asked if he was saying the Palestinians had no future claim to the city.
The person who inserted the offending sentence into his speech was neither identified nor fired, as he or she should have been. My guess is that the sentence inserter has only risen in power within the Obama administration.
So, why am I reprising this sorry history? Because this is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees as the context of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
Even when Israel acts in a manner that flies in the face of stated U.S. policy, which calls on all nations to sign the NPT and to submit to transparency in their nuclear programs, Netanyahu has every reason to believe that Washington's power-players will back down and the U.S. FCM will intuitively understand its role in the cover-up.
L'Affaire Biden when the Vice President was mouse-trapped and humiliated when Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem shortly after he arrived in Israel to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with Israel -- was dismissed as a mere "spat" by the neoconservative Washington Post. (If the Post has a vestigial claim to distinction, it is how well it is plugged in to the establishment.)
Making Amends
Rather than Israel making
amends to the United States, it has been vice versa.
Obama's national
security adviser, James Jones, trudged over to an affair organized by the AIPAC
offshoot think tank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), last
Wednesday to make a major address.
I got to wondering, after reading his text, which planet Jones lives on. He devoted his first nine paragraphs to fulsome praise for WINEP's "objective analysis" and scholarship, adding that "our nation -- and indeed the world -- needs institutions like yours now more than ever."
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