In what was touted right here on the Huffington Post as "one of the few genuine debates on Israel-Middle East issues" in Washington, former US Ambassador Chas Freeman and WINEP Executive Director Rob Satloff tackled the subject of "Israel: Asset or Liability" at the Nixon Center last week.
Freeman, whose nomination as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was scuttled by Jewish-American groups in the early days of the Obama administration, could well become their worst nightmare. On the inside, he would have had to toe the party line. But having been very publicly and unfairly discredited by the pro-Israel crowd, Freeman can walk that rare line and speak honestly about the Jewish state without drowning in the caveats that accompany most such attempts in Washington.
His post-resignation comments were not those of someone who had been cowed. Freeman slammed the "Israel lobby" for preventing "any view other than its own from being aired" and accused them of "an utter disregard for the truth."
So who better to argue the "Israel as a liability" side than Freeman, who has shown a rare frankness on this subject over his career.
The Nixon Center event was timely. The debate on Israel's strategic value was blown open by General David Petraeus' testimony earlier this year linking lack of progress in Mideast peace talks to CENTCOM's difficulties in the Iraq/Afghanistan military theater. Which naturally demanded a re-examination of Israel's importance as a strategic ally of the United States.
And while others may carefully traverse these sensitive waters, Freeman clearly feels no such compunction. Which is what made this debate the "ticket of the month."
Without further ado, here then is Freeman - unplugged - at the Nixon Center:
"Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States? Interesting question. We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it. In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well. Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.
American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel's defense budget (depending on how you calculate this). Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products. Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement. Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when - as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles -- the technology being developed is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements. In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel's military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies. Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.
Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II. The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included. These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.
Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 -- on a par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it. Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren't available to any other foreign country.
These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story. The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or - most recently - on the high seas. The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg. We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the international community. The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.
Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it. As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel's behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries. It matters also that America - along with a very few other countries - has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a state in the Middle East. Many more Jews live in America than in Israel. Resolute American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.
Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us. Yet it's pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what's in it for Americans. I can't imagine why. Still, the question I've been asked to address today is just that: what's in it -- and not in it -- for us to do all these things for Israel.
We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater. In 1973, for reasons peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt. The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly. And then there's all the time we've put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct "peace process."
Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences. There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates them to attack us. In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus "the American people ... on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people ...." As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world's Muslims, has said again and again: "we have . . . stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of ourdisagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine ...." Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship with Israel.
It's useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with "host nation support" that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops', rather than their own troops' use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.
Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them. Perhaps it can't. It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel's behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.
Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform. All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.
Meanwhile, it's been decades since Israel's air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel's army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.
It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether Israel's battles are or should also be America's. It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel. No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.
Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing. It has severely impaired our ties with the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.
Against this background, it's remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps it's just that as someone once said: "people ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one." Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship. Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous. It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States. These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home. To flourish over the long term, Israel's relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war."
Well said, Chas. I wonder if he will not ultimately serve US interests better on this side of the fence - free to engage and speak out on our policy imperatives in the Mideast. Good minds can go bad in government, where process dominates logic and ensures the kind of directionless adventures we undertake in the region. A few more Freemans out there would do us all some good. Straight-talkers, we need you now!
Follow Sharmine Narwani on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snarwani
Lately, he's been employed as a paid shill for the arabs. He's the president of Middle East Policy Council, which is nothing more than a Saudi funded arab lobby.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/there-is-no-new-antisemit_b_40600.html
AIPAC doesnt like Arab lobbying groups. Oil-rich, well-located and wealthy Arab states have a lot more to offer the US than Israel. They get jealous and aggressive.
Could it be all those Israel firster politicians who said Saddam Hussein was a threat to Israel's existence (as a reason for going to war not with Al-Qaeda but Iraq)?
Could it be the Israel-centric think tanks and neo-con 'political advisers' who said invading the M.E. would 'secure the realm'? Silly we, who thought that meant the U.S.
So, if you want to understand why we're stuck in a quagmire and have made enemies of 1.6 billion Muslims who once used to be our best friends and allies, then look back to the events of 1948, when our most brilliant soldier and Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, warned us of this exact same outcome if we recognized Israel.
They figured they go in there with a 1 billion investment, put their own people there, get them to sign a 40 year hydrocarbon law, and take over Iraqi oil reserves. Unfortunately, it didn't work the way it was supposed to.
This is the most nonsensical one of all. Radical Islamic terror is perpetrated on the soil of dozens of nations, including India, Philippines, Egypt, Spain, Darfur, etc....
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/Islamic_Terrorism_Timeline_1960-1969.Islam
First of all, she is not talking about 0.001% radical Muslims that are funded by Saudi Arabia,
She is talking about all Muslims that can see injustice towards the Palestinians all by themselves, and the double standards that are only enjoyed by Israel.
Here are some:
The first statement on the subject came from Saddam, who, on or about Sept-14th, 2001 said "The USA has inherited the sharks teeth of its own actions".
This from a guy who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and was responsible for 2-million (Muslim) casualties in the Iran/Iraq war. He had NO PROBLEM conscripting hundreds of thousands of mainly disempowered Shiites to invade Kuwait and ultimately take 100,000 (mainly Shiite) casualties. Of course Saddam's long term hatred for Jews was not to be dismissed. But his primary issues in 2001 were the sanctions, "oil-for-food" and what he claimed caused the slow death of thousands of Iraqi's (the ones he liked enough not to murder) through the denial of medical supplies, etc.
The next comment came from Bin Laden. In his first recorded statement on the 9-11 subject, he almost forgot to mention Israel, instead spending most of his time talking about American troops on Saudi soil and what he characterized as "they're taking our oil", plus a few other grievances. Even then he never mentioned Israeli "occupation". He simply said (almost in passing) that he was upset by what he called the mistreatment of Arabs by Israel. Heck, if I believed 1/2 the propaganda being proffered I would be upset too.
This from a guy who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and was responsible for 2-million (Muslim) casualties in the Iran/Iraq war.
Trollstein, sufficient onto the person is the ever thereof.
The fact that Saddam had some sharks teeth of HIS own does not invalidate the evident truth of his observation.
[Translation: The consequences of defending its borders]
I suggest you take your "I love Israel" glass off and take a look at all the UNSC resolutions against Israel, starting with UNSC resolution 242 that ordered Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories it claimed in 1967. In addition, under international law, you can't just start colonizing occupied territories.
Maybe you should look again. Res. 242 does NOT say that. It says many things but it does not require Israel to return to pre-1967 borders. It states (in pertinent portion) that Israel must withdraw ITS MILITARY (only its military) from those territories it "occupied" [under the legal definition of "occupation"]. Since East Jerusalem was already legally part of the "Jewish National Homeland" and was LIBERATED not "occupied in 1967, the provision is inapplicable to East J. 242 also calls for "just" resolution to the refugee crisis. It does not specify what that resolution involves nor does it except Jewish refugees from 1948 from such protection.
Hard-leftists would just LOVE if the globe was run by the third and fourth-world dictators who hold the majority of votes in the United Nations. They can't understand why or how national law can usurp international law.
Here's why. Because international law is NOT a popularity contest. It is based on 'mutual consent of the parties'.
"all the UNSC resolutions against Israel, starting with UNSC resolution 242"
Res. 242 is NOT "against" Israel. Accurately read, it places responcibilities on all sides. Inaccurately depicted, why not just call it res. 242,000 (sounds so much more important).
Both were removed as contrary to stated moderation policy.
Fair enough. One looks forward to 'Islamist' also being banned, and if not, why not?
The word is not negative and Mr. Chesnoff did not make the word up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabist
http://www.usdiplomacy.org/history/service/arabists.php
We are seeing the consequences of that mistake today, and that is why our foreign policy in the region is a shambles, as it clearly is being run by 'Zionists'.
Thanks for the reminder.
Will the American public be smart enough to wake up & really see the insidious nature of how our pols cave so easily to foreign interests that are vastly at odds with the needs of American families? I don't have much faith that circumstances will change, unfortunately, but this is something that can't be tolerated or overlooked forever, esp. when it is so easy to overcome the usual flood of disinformation in our media.
Perhaps the desperate circumstances of our economy will help to clarify for the American public the follies of hemorrhaging billions of our tax dollars on an ugly occupation in Palestine. We voted for transformational leadership, still a hopeful sign that the American people saw the need for change, but we have received little of value so far in the current leadership that perpetuates all the mistakes of decades past, by not challenging the vested interests.
It is the "canary in the coal-mine". If (may God forbid) it ever topples, look out rest-of-the-world.
I obviously disagree with both the premise and some of the specifics of the above article. One year in Afghanistan costs the USA about 1,000 lives, 10,000 injuries and $100-billion cash money. (Oh, I forgot, Afghanistan is also Israel's fault). I keep forgetting the first (really the only) rule: Everything is Israel's fault.
Did you read the article?
"It's useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with "host nation support" that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops', rather than their own troops' use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them."
Do you understand the concept of "canary in coal mine"?
The canary serves no useful purpose except to keep the miners alive.
Thus, Israel is the thinnest of barriers between radical Arab pan-Nationalism and the rest of the world.
Had Saddam succeeded in monopolizing the oil of the Mid East, as was his longstanding goal, there would today be a MUCH bigger problem.
Directly, Israel provides the world with a drastically disproportionate amount of technology in science and medicine. This is a benefit to the entire world. If oil is ever to be replaced, there is a good chance that Israel will an inventor of that technology.
The United States has a LONG list of so-called allies. The recent news on Wiki leaks confirms what I have been posting for YEARS, almost exactly. Money being sent to Pakistan--supposedly to eradicate the Taliban was in fact being diverted to aid and abet the Taliban.
So Korea serves no useful interest to the USA. We have a treaty which commits us to defend them from No. Korea, who (BTW) has promised us a nuclear "sacred war", from a nation who actually prohibits any and all religious practices. (They are starting to learn political maneuvering from the Arabs.)
We also have a similar treaty with Taiwan. Luckily, we owe so much money to China that they will probably leave it alone. (Cont'd)
We have protected all NATO nations from the Soviets. We had even protected Muslim Bosnians from Russian backed Serbs. What strategic interest did that involvement have?
Maybe we choose to aid Israel to protect our supply of lawyers.
Aside from the fore mentioned technology and Israel being our dependable guy on the ground in the region, we protect them because its the right thing to do. When it becomes in our best strategic interests to do the wrong things, then, we will be beyond salvation.
>EOF
"Now it came about when Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the field in the wilderness where they pursued them, and all of them were fallen by the edge of the sword until they were destroyed, then all Israel returned to Ai and struck it with the edge of the sword. And all who fell that day, both men and women, were 12,000—all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not withdraw his hand with which he stretched out the javelin until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Joshua burned Ai and made it a heap forever, a desolation until this day. "
He was "unfairly" discredited by wast majority of fair minded americans, who were able to decipher real facts from the ones skewed through the prism of anti Israel propaganda