The AIPAC Shuffle

For the record, Barack Obama spent the day after clinching the primary at TWO conferences; the SEIU convention (via satellite) and the AIPAC conference. One gives us hope that he will be a leader on labor rights and universal health care; the other, as Scarecrow notes, was terribly depressing. Obama's speech to the conservative pro-Israel group had moments of pushback, suggesting that the failed Bush policies like the Iraq war have strengthened the hand of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and weakened Israeli security, for example (yeah, no kidding). But by and large, it was a full-on pander, designed to reassure hardliners that he was tough enough to out-bluster them.

Virtually every speech ever delivered to an AIPAC conference, going back 54 years to the first AIPAC conclave, is a litany of pro-Israeli shibboleths. Obama didn't disappoint. He learned about the Holocaust from a camp counselor at age 11, he said, and his great-uncle helped to liberate Buchenwald. Check. "As president I will never compromise when it comes to Israeli security." Check. He advocates strengthening US-Israeli military ties, and wants to sign a memorandum of understanding to provide Israel with $30 billion in military aid over the next ten years to "ensure Israel's qualitative military advantage." Check. No negotiations with Hamas and Hezbollah. Check. And while he will talk to Iran, it will be "tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing--if, and only if--it can advance the interests of the United States." Check. And just in case AIPAC thinks that he won't act, Obama added: "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table."

In case anyone missed the point, Obama added: "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." He repeated that sentence twice, for emphasis. And for additional emphasis, he said again: "Everything."

I'll get to the Iran scaremongering in a moment, but a major failing of the speech was Obama calling for an undivided Jerusalem, even though parts of it are entirely Arab, and from a historical standpoint it remains the capital of Palestine. Obama tried to clean up the comment later, saying that he was just talking about barbed wire or barricades in the city. But this kind of talk is very detrimental to the quest for peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict and not worth a few idle votes from hardliners.

The Iran talk is even more worrisome. It mirrors Condi Rice's tough talk at the conference, and suggests that the only way to deal with Iran is through making belligerent threats and then asking them to be an honest partner in negotiations. The world doesn't work that way. Obama may be making a distinction on negotiating at all - a distinction that American overwhelmingly support - but the style of the rhetoric is redolent of your garden variety Bush press conference:

President George W. Bush told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday Iran posed an "existential threat to peace" the world must take seriously.

The White House talks came a day after Olmert, on a U.S. trip while under criminal investigation at home, issued his toughest warning yet to Iran, saying its nuclear program must be stopped by "all possible means."

Echoing Israel's frequent description of a nuclear-armed Iran as a risk to its survival, Bush said at the start of the meeting: "It is very important for the world to take the Iranian threat seriously, which the United States does."

(no word on whether Olmert, trying to wag his own dog, asked Bush to bomb Iran, but I wouldn't call that unlikely.)

By engaging Iran solely on the terms of a nonexistent nuclear program, Obama insults the intelligence of the international community and causes great danger over the next six months for the entire region. As Scarecrow says:

Even more troubling, if the Bush Administration is planning to attack Iran, claiming it's necessary to carry out their promise not to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, it doesn't appear the Democrats said anything to AIPAC that could be interpreted as demanding the Administration stop. If everyone says, "we won't allow Iran to do this," while adding "we won't rule out military force to make sure they don't," then there's no reason to expect George Bush and Dick Cheney to interpret these statements as anything other than a green light to do as they please. The only thing to decide is the timing.

When/if this Administration attacks Iran, it simply won't be credible for Democrats to say, "gee, we thought Bush should have pursued diplomacy more than he did." Clinton said that about Iraq, and that's probably why she lost the nomination. The usual rationale, that by providing a united political front against Iran, we strengthen the Administration's diplomatic hand, thus encouraging more compliant behavior from Iran, might make sense with any Administration other than the Bush/Cheney regime, whose judgment cannot be trusted. We heard that reasoning before too, on the Lieberman/Kyl resolution regarding Iran, and Obama rejected that argument then. The point then, as now, is not whether we trust Obama to act wisely once he is President, but whether we trust Bush/Cheney to act wisely in the next six months, given what others say today.

Exactly right, and considering the close ties between Iraq and Iran, failure to check such warmongering deliberately puts our own soldiers at risk and makes possible a total regional conflagration.

We already know that John McCain is a lunatic cowboy. It was very depressing seeing Obama give his cowboy impression.