Nathan Sharansky who was a dissident under the Soviet Union and who now lives in Israel has been given op-ed space in the Washington Post to issue a stinging attack on the United States President Barack Obama.
Sharansky was released from the Soviet Union in 1986 and he went to live in Israel. His attack on President Obama is one of the follow-up attacks initiated by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Republican senators. The purpose of these is to have the United States do all in its power to cripple the Iran government and its people by going to war against them. The idea that President Obama would seek a peaceful settlement with Iran is driving them to distraction.
Sadly, there is no sign of gratitude for all the American people have done for Israel over the years. It is a prime example of “what have you done for me lately.” Israel has been so used to having us serve as their prat boy that it unleashes an untoward attack on us for not following its demands. How could any nation be so ungrateful?
Sharansky is one of the oldest in the Israeli group which has been telling us that Iran is about to acquire bomb any day now. For years he has urged that the United States puts its armed forces in harm’s way. Israel seems to feel no need that it use its own forces.
Here is a quote from him in 2005. ”The only problem is that we may only have a few more months before Iran becomes a nuclear power. That would place the Jewish state in mortal danger.” Ten years and counting he has been calling wolf and urging us Americans to bring war and destruction to Iran based on the Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon.
Sharansky is one of those guys who gives Israel a pass on everything and places the blame for the world’s evils on the United States. In 2005 he said: “The fact that al-Qaida exists today comes from the United States having pursued a policy of appeasement for decades.” Not true. It is in part because of our unswerving support of Israel. He said that when we were then in the middle of war in Iraq being fought at the urging of Israel. That’s the thanks we get.
He also said: “The Saudis were only able to put so much support, both financial and ideological, behind their extremist version of Islam, Wahhabism, because the Americans let them do it.” How were we to stop Saudi Arabia from doing this? Why didn’t Israel do something about it? It follows from that Sharansky must blame the United States for the rise of the Islamic States and other radical Muslim groups. We can’t win.
Israelis like Sharansky are angry because we won’t bomb Iran. He says: “Today there is something the United States wants badly from Iran.” He does not spell it out. I’ll tell have to tell you. It’s that Iran doesn’t have the ability to get a nuclear weapon.
It is also the same thing Israel used to want. But now that Obama is about to achieve that result it has upped the stakes to the point it now wants a regime change. It wants us to do to Iran what we did to Iraq, invade. Sharansky says: “Tehran has disqualified itself from the negotiations or benefits being offered them.” Put more succinctly his position now is: “don’t bargain, bomb and attack.”
Then the insults are hurled: “I am afraid that the real reason for the U.S. stance is not its assessment, however incorrect, of the two sides’ respective interests but rather a tragic loss of moral self-confidence.” He tells how we negotiated differently with the Soviet Union believing we were morally superior and we were negotiating on behalf of the free world as a whole. He then says: “But in today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seem like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions.”
He continues: We have yet to see the full consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: The loss of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule. Although the hour is growing late, there is still time to change course – before the effects grow more catastrophic still.”
The desire of Israeli officials like Sharansky to have us invade Iran compels them now to turn on and belittle the country that has supported and financed them for decades. Make no mistake when Sharansky is talking about the U.S. he’s attributing those insults to our president. We are to believe Obama has a “tragic loss of self-confidence” and has “lost the courage of [his] convictions” and is ”morally diffidence” and has lost its “self-assured global leadership.”
The truth is quite difference. Obama’s self-confidence is shown by his ability to stand up to those Israeli zealots urged on by “bomb-bomb-bomb Iran” Republicans crying out for an invasion; his courage of convictions is shown by his willingness to negotiate to secure a deal that will prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons despite the outcry by the Israel leaders who want an invasion who care less how many more American kids are killed.
Far from showing moral diffidence, Obama, knowing the tragedy of war, fights for a peaceful solution. That is the way it should be.
Change Safavid to Sassanian empire. My bad.
There’s a cultural antipathy between Persians and Arabs. When the Arabs stormed out of the desert and defeated the Safavid empire, they gained all of Mesopotamia and most of present day Iran. The victorious Muslim armies brought their religion, and, gradually, the Mazdean Persians converted to Islam, and, adapted the Arabic lettering system to their native language, Farsi. Although the Persians became Muslims, they did not become Arabs. Iranian civilization had produced a magnificent epic literary heritage that could not be challenged by the cultural productions of their conquerors. The Arabs had the exquisite 101 line qasida poems of the jahiliyya, but, nothing comparable to the Shahnama, Iran’s national epic. By the tenth century Persian had replaced Arabic as the excepted medium of poetry and prose in the eastern Islamic lands. Arabs, while justly proud of bringing the revelation of the Book, feel a sense of inferiority in relation to Persian literary culture. This cultural alienation is called “Shuubiyya” in Arabic.
During the Iran/Iraq war , Iranian intelligence found it difficult to suborn Iraq’s Shia population. The Arab Shia considered the Iranians to be invading foreigners rather than coreligionists.
The Saudi-Israel alliance. This conflict seems just another move in the Sunni-Shia civil war that’s been running for centuries, only now with surrogates like Israel and the US. I remember when the late Shah bought US planes and the Saudis warned of war — that was 1970 or so. The Shah allegedly planned to take back Mecca and Medina for his side, like Lincoln taking Richmond. Allah had other plans for Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
“Non-democratic regimes always need to mobilize their people against external enemies in order to maintain internal stability.”
Natan Sharansky