Beating the Drums of War

The American Israel Political Action Committee wants 2013 to be the year that America decides to go to war with Iran.

Fighting words took center stage at the annual American Israel Political Action Committee convention held in Washington, D.C. from Sunday to Tuesday. Ehud Barack, who is expected soon to end his term as Israeli defense minister, promised not once, but twice to the thundering applause of 13,000 attendees that Israeli threats of military action against Iran should be taken seriously. He stated that Israel’s hardest days are still to come, but added, “I believe we possess the character and courage as a nation to make those tough decisions for the future, peace and security of the State of Israel.” Former military intelligence chief Amos Yadin said that the time extension granted to Iran last year is running out. The people of Israel have experienced the trauma of the Holocaust and Americans the trauma of the Iraq War. “You don’t want another war, understandably,” Yadin said, and then added, “This is not a war, this is a one-night operation, and we should speak about it.”

At the very beginning of the Zionist festival, two former U.S. government officials engaged in mock battle. Democrat Dennis Ross, longtime friend and advisor to Barack Obama, took the side favoring a diplomatic approach to addressing Iran’s nuclear program. He maintained that the world has to see the Iranians reject reasonable negotiations before the United States can lose patience publicly. Neoconservative Elliot Abrams, who held several posts in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, took a skeptical view toward negotiating with Tehran, arguing that the West would be weakening its position while meanwhile Iran edges ever closer to producing its own nuclear weapons.

Obama personally attended the AIPAC conference in 2012, but this time he just sent his vice president. Biden delivered what was arguably the slimiest and most toadying speech ever given by a leading U.S. politician in modern times. Interrupted by continual applause, Biden insisted that nothing troubles him more than the “attempts of much of the world to isolate and delegitimize the State of Israel.” He went on to say, “To put it bluntly, there is only one nation — only one nation in the world that has unequivocally, without hesitation and consistently confronted the efforts to delegitimize Israel. At every point in our administration, at every juncture, we’ve stood up on the legitimacy — on behalf of legitimacy of the State of Israel. President Obama has been a bulwark against those insidious efforts at every step of the way.” Biden also emphasized that the U.S. was the only one of the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Commission to vote against establishing a fact-finding panel to investigate Israel’s settlement expansion policies in the occupied territories.

The dispute over the Iranian nuclear program enabled Biden to make another gaffe, namely his claim that Iran not only poses a threat to Israel, but that the entire world will be imperiled if Iraq gets access to nuclear weapons. Biden justified Obama’s desire for a diplomatic settlement by saying, “If, God forbid, the need to act occurs, it is critically important for the whole world to know we did everything in our power, we did everything that reasonably could have been expected to avoid any confrontation. And that matters. Because, God forbid, if we have to act, it’s important that the rest of the world is with us.”