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Remembering Clinton and Obama on Israeli Bombing of Syria

Seymour Hersh has written a new article about Israel's bombing of Syria last September. Laura Rozen may have more to say about it, but it seems inconclusive. No one—Israeli, Syrian, or American—has a convincing explanation of what happened. But certainly there doesn't appear to be strong evidence Syria truly was, as Israel claimed, building a nuclear reactor. Moreover, the hazy evidence, long links of supposition, and hints of other agendas are strongly reminiscent of the Iraq/WMD story.

With that in mind, it's interesting to remember what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were saying about the bombing soon afterward, at the September 27 MSNBC debate. Here's Clinton:

CLINTON: [W]e don't have as much information as we wish we did. But what we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out. I strongly support that...there was evidence of a North Korea freighter coming in with supplies. There was intelligence and other kinds of verification.

And here's Obama:

OBAMA: Now, we don't know exactly what happened with respect to Syria. We've gotten general reports, but we don't know all the specifics. We got general reports in the run-up to the Iraq war that proved erroneous, and a lot of people voted for that war as a consequence.





Comments

Senator Clinton is from New York, so she needs to support her people and they make large contributions to her campaign, so this explains her position.

Posted by: Henry on 02/04/08 at 12:13 PM  Respond

1) North Korea is not known for it's nukes, and if I were Syria I'd never buy nukes from them.
2)North Korea IS known for it's missiles.
3) July 25th, 2007 Syria had a major 'accidental' fire in a chemical weapons factory, which killed a lot of Koreans. http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/09/syrian-chemical.html

I'd say Israel bombed to get rid of the missiles that were being modified to have chemical w.m.d. Syria doesn't want to admit what it was doing and so is not talking.

Obama and Clinton won't say or do anything to attract attention to this before the election - too hot to handle without looking like a 'softie'. What are the options? Tell Israel it was naughty? Embargo Israel for violating the airspace of a country hosting too many American made Iraqi refugees? Bomb Israel? What?? We'll hear an abundance of crickets.

Posted by: sailmaker on 02/04/08 at 1:34 PM  Respond

Sure bet someone at the CIA would like to talk to Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Posted by: kirkbrew on 02/04/08 at 1:40 PM  Respond

By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — In July 1969, while the world was spellbound by the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, President Richard M. Nixon and his close advisers were quietly fretting about a possible nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Their main worry was not a potential enemy of the United States, but one of America’s closest friends.
“The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons,” Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser, warned President Nixon in a memorandum dated July 19, 1969.
Israel’s nuclear arms program was believed to have begun at least several years before, but it was causing special fallout for the young Nixon administration. For one thing, President Nixon was getting ready for a visit by Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel, who was also in her first year in office and whose toughness was already legendary.
Should Washington insist that Israel rein in its development of nuclear weapons? What would the United States do if Israel refused? Perhaps the solution lay in deliberate ambiguity, or simply pretending that America did not know what Israel was up to. These were some of the options that Mr. Kissinger laid out for President Nixon on that day before men first walked on the moon.
The Nixon White House’s concerns over Israel’s weapons were recalled in documents held by the Nixon Presidential Library that were released today by the National Archives. They provide insights into America’s close, but by no means problem-free, relationship with Israel. They also serve as a reminder that concerns over nuclear arms proliferation in the Middle East, currently focused on Iran, are decades-old.
The papers also allude to a campaign by friends of W. Mark Felt, who was then the second-ranking F.B.I. official, to have him succeed J. Edgar Hoover as director of the bureau in 1972. President Nixon, of course, did not take the advice, choosing L. Patrick Gray instead, and Mr. Felt later became the famous anonymous source “Deep Throat,” whose Watergate-scandal revelations helped to topple the president.
There are also snippets about Washington’s desire to manipulate relations with Saudi Arabia, so that the Saudis might help to broker a peace in the Mideast; discussion of possibly supporting a Kurdish uprising in Iraq; and a 1970 incident in which four Israeli fighters shot down four Russian Mig-21’s over eastern Egypt, even though the Israelis were outnumbered two-to-one in the battle.
But perhaps the most interesting material released today, and the most pertinent given the just-completed Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, concerns Israel and its relations with its neighbors, as well as with the United States.
“There is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel’s weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States about 1965,” Mr. Kissinger noted in his long memorandum.
One problem with trying to persuade Israel to freeze its nuclear program is that inspections would be useless, Mr. Kissinger said, conceding that “we could never cover all conceivable Israeli hiding places.”
“This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us,” Mr. Kissinger said, “and may even have stolen from us.”
Israel has never officially acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons, but scientists and arms experts have almost no doubt that it does. The United States’s reluctance to press Israel to disarm has made America vulnerable to accusations that it is a preacher with a double standard when it comes to stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.
Mr. Kissinger’s memo, written barely two years after the Six-Day War and while memories of the Holocaust were still vivid among the first Israelis, implicitly acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself, as subsequent American administrations have done.
After President Nixon met Prime Minister Meir at the White House in late September 1969, he said: “The problems in the Mideast go back centuries. They are not susceptible to easy solution. We do not expect them to be susceptible to instant diplomacy.”

Posted by: David on 02/04/08 at 3:07 PM  Respond

This is the central reason for progressives to vote for Obama, in my opinion (I was an Edwards supporter, but since he dropped out I have decided to vote for Obama largely because of this issue). Clinton also cheered on the Israeli bombing of Lebanon during a 2006 pep rally. The bombings killed thousands of innocent lives and is a move most Israelis admit was a mistake. She has publicly supported the building of the wall, despite it being declared illegal by an international court. Such obvious pro-Israel no-matter-what attitudes by Hillary will likely mean no peace in the Middle East for at least four more years. It will also further degrade world opinion of the U.S.

Posted by: SM on 02/04/08 at 6:05 PM  Respond

Washington Post, “on Faith” 1/7/08, Mahatma”s grandson, President and co-founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.
Jewish Identity Can't Depend on Violence
Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community that can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me that the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.
The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit -- with many deadly snakes in it -- and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you? Can you not reach out and share your technological advancement with your neighbors and build a relationship?
Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.(Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. He is president and co-founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, now at the University of Rochester in New York) Vote for Hussein.

Posted by: Mahatma on 02/04/08 at 6:38 PM  Respond

When you cannot forgive, you are stuck and cannot move forward. The Holocoust was terrible indeed. And I have empathy for the Jewish People. What about the Slave Trade? Historians say that 250 million Africans died in the Atlantic Ocean. Now that's very sad.

Posted by: MSO on 02/04/08 at 7:41 PM  Respond

MSO, speaking of the slave trade. Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25Jews and Judaism in the United States Jews and Judaism in the United States

The following passages are from Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael's

book Jews and Judaism in the United States , pp. 14, 23-25.
"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.”

"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent." E.g. Judah P. Benjamin - Secretary of State - US Confederacy

Posted by: Tyrone on 02/04/08 at 9:20 PM  Respond

国際協力

岡山 不動産

広島 不動産

thanks dış cephe.

thanks from turkey.İ like this page.

hekimboard is good.

Senator Clinton is from New York,turksiding from turkey.

出会い系

出会い系

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