Red-Line Electioneering
by John Batchelor
The John Batchelor Radio Show
August 22, 2012
Visited this evening [August 21] with colleague Larry Kudlow, CNBC, to speak of the Iran threat to Israel and what is to be done. [see video below]
My best information is that Jerusalem has changed its political calculation based on the opinion that POTUS Obama will be reelected. The presumption in Jerusalem is that a second-term Obama administration will favor the Islamists of the Middle East and will tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Therefore, Jerusalem is considering that it has maximum leverage to attack Iran before the vote.
Why? Because POTUS Obama is foremost a political actor, and he will not quickly block Jerusalem for worry that it would harm his Jewish vote in the swing states.
It comes to this stark electioneering calculation: How can POTUS Obama get to Election Day while satisfying both the Jewish vote and Jerusalem and also while holding off Iran's and Syria's predation? My information is that POTUS believes the way to solve this standoff is to support a Turkish Army incursion into Syria and to provide air cover for a No-Fly Zone along the Turkey/Syria borderland. POTUS Obama's remark at the Monday press event in the White House about Syria's WMD being a "red line" was a predicate for the casus belli of entering Syria to prevent a genocide.
The chaos that will follow either will block Israel or will trigger worse -- lead to a helter-skelter of covert and/or missile attacks by Hamas from Gaza, Hizballah from Lebanon, and provocateurs from Syria. Enter the Devils.
Grand Bargain
Why does POTUS Obama hold back from supporting Israel against the Iran predators? Political opera is the answer. My information is that Mr. Obama has long offered a Grand Bargain to Tehran. In exchange for a peace conference in Tehran that is meant to imitate President Nixon's meeting with Mao in 1972 in Beijing, Mr. Obama will tolerate Iran as a nuclear-armed regional hegemon. I am told that Mr. Obama has offered this deal since 2009.
These days, approaching his final election with frantic fatalism, POTUS Obama believes that by threatening to use Turkish surrogates to invade Syria and cage Assad, Tehran will be obliged to the negotiating table. The tangled web is worse when we include the Kurds, the Iraqis, and the regional minorities in addition to the Jews and Kurds, such as the Druze, the Ismailists, the Christians, the Shiites.
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