The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
The Donald Lives!
By Patrick J. Buchanan
October 13, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- Donald Trump turned in perhaps the most
effective performance in the history of
presidential debates on Sunday night.
As
the day began, he had been denounced by his
wife, Mike Pence, and his own staff for a
tape of crude and lewd remarks in a
decade-old “locker room” conversation on a
bus with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood.”
Tasting blood, the media were in a feeding
frenzy. Trump is dropping out! Pence is
bolting the ticket! Republican elites are
about to disown and abandon the Republican
nominee!
Sometime this weekend, Trump made a
decision: If he is going down to defeat, he
will go out as Trump, not some sniveling
penitent begging forgiveness from hypocrites
who fear and loathe him.
His
first move was to host a press availability,
before the debate, where a small sampling of
Bill Clinton’s alleged victims — Kathleen
Willey, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick —
made brief statements endorsing Trump and
denouncing the misogyny of the Clintons.
“Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but
Bill Clinton raped me,” said Broaddrick,
“and Hillary Clinton threatened me.”
The
press had to cover it. Then the women
marched into the auditorium at Washington
University to watch Hillary Clinton defend
her behavior toward them after their
encounters with Bill.
As
the moderators and Hillary Clinton scrambled
to refocus on Trump’s comments of a decade
ago, Trump brought it back to Bill’s
criminal misconduct against women, his lying
about it, and Hillary’s aiding and abetting
of the First Predator.
It
was like a tawdry courtroom drama in an
X-rated movie, a new low in presidential
debates. But what it revealed is that if
Trump is going down, his enemies will carry
away their own permanent scars.
As
Caesar said of Cassius, “Such men are
dangerous.”
Hillary Clinton has never been hammered as
she was Sunday night, and it showed. Knocked
off her game, she was no longer the prim and
poised debater of Hofstra University.
There were other signs that, win or lose,
Trump intends to finish the campaign as he
began, as a populist-nationalist and
unapologetic adversary of open borders,
globalization and neo-imperialism.
When moderators Martha Raddatz and Anderson
Cooper revealed their bias by asking Trump
tougher questions and more follow-ups, and
interrupting him more rudely and often, he
called them out.
“It’s one on three!” said Trump. And it sure
looked like it.
How
could the moderators have ignored that other
leak of last week, of Clintons’s speech to
Brazilian bankers where she confessed she
“dreams” of a “hemispheric common market
with open trade and open borders.”
If
the quote is accurate, and Clinton has not
denied it, she was saying she dreams of a
future when the United States ceases to
exist as a separate, sovereign and
independent nation.
She
envisions not just a North American Union
evolving out of NAFTA but a merger of all
the nations of North, South and Central
America, with all borders erased and people
moving freely from one place to another
within a hemispheric super-state.
If
this quote is accurate, Clinton is working
toward an end to the independence for which
our Founding Fathers fought the American
Revolution.
After all, Thomas Jefferson did not write
some declaration of diversity in 1776, but a
Declaration of Independence for a new,
unique and separate people.
Clinton dreams of doing away with what
American patriots cherish most.
When the issue of Syria arose, Clinton said
she favors a “no-fly zone.” Unanswered,
indeed unasked by the moderators, was
whether she would order the shooting down of
Syrian or Russian planes that violate the
zone.
Yet, what she is suggesting are acts of war
against Syria, and Russia if necessary,
though Congress has never authorized a war
on Syria, and Syria has not attacked us.
Trump did not hesitate to overrule the
suggestion of Mike Pence that we follow
Clinton’s formula. He believes ISIS is our
enemy, and if Syria, Russia and Iran are
attacking ISIS, we ought not to be fighting
them.
As
of sunrise Sunday, the media were writing
Trump off as dead.
By
Sunday night, they were as shocked and
stunned as Hillary and Bill.
What did Trump accomplish in 18 hours?
He
rattled Hillary Clinton, firmed up and
rallied his base, halted the stampede of the
cut-and-run Republicans, and exposed the
hypocrisy of liberal and secular celebrants
of the ’60s “sexual revolution,” who have
suddenly gotten religion where Trump is
involved.
Trump exposed the fraudulence of the
Clintons’ clucking concern for sexually
abused women, brought Pence back into camp,
turned the tables and changed the subject
from the Trump tapes to the Trump triumph at
Washington University.
Upshot: The Donald is alive.
While his path to 270 electoral votes still
looks more than problematic, there is a
month to go before the election, and
anything can happen.
Indeed, it already has — many times.
Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor
to three Presidents, twice a candidate for
the Republican presidential nomination, and
the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.
http://buchanan.org/
Trump
Appears Before Debate with Juanita
Broaddrick and Other Clinton Accusers
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