Is Israel most important strategic US ally in the region?
9/17/2014
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Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman (L) sits with US Representative Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., (C) and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., during a joint news conference in Jerusalem, Sept. 2, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
Listening to US President Barack Obama’s Sept. 10 speech to the nation about the military campaign against the Islamic State (IS), it was hard not to recall the declaration of war by President George H.W. Bush against Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein. In the first Gulf War, just as today, the US administration enlisted a group of Western and Arab states to form an international and regional coalition. Then, too, the coalition faced a common enemy that sent violent tentacles from Iraq into its surroundings, near and far. What’s more, 23 years ago, Israel was left out of the military arena. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir responded to Bush’s pleas and reined in his government colleagues, who demanded a forceful Israeli response to the barrage of rockets fired from Iraq into the heart of Israel.
Today, too, while IS is advancing toward its borders, Israel, the closest US ally, is looking on from the sidelines as the superpower and its partners take action. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel both bypassed Jerusalem in their recent trips to the region. Once again it’s time to ask whether Israel is, in fact, the most important strategic US asset in the region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leading advocate of this thesis, was forced to console himself with the front-page headline of his home-team newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, which quoted an anonymous “Western diplomat” as telling Reuters that Israel had provided the coalition with intelligence information and satellite photos.
Nonetheless, as far as the Israeli side is concerned, there’s a significant difference between the first Gulf war and the battle against IS. In the early 1990s, the leaders of the Arab states that were part of the coalition — headed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Gulf states — were unwilling to accept Israel into the club under any circumstances. But since the start of the millennium, these same states have not only been willing to recognize Israel and its right to exist securely within the 1967 borders — they propose establishing “normal” diplomatic and economic ties with it. If the option of partnership in a Middle Eastern coalition was not even an option for Israel then, since March 28, 2002, the day the Arab Peace Initiative was born, Israel has consistently been missing the opportunity to become a respected member of this club. Had it heeded the pleas of the Arab League to adopt the initiative as the basis for negotiations, it might have been awarded entry.
It’s too soon to foresee the outcome of the current campaign being waged by the United States in the region, but one can determine that just as Saddam dragged Bush into the Middle East in 1991, and a decade later al-Qaeda dragged his son to the region, so IS brought Obama into the same quagmire in September 2014. Bush Senior understood that ending the Israeli occupation of the territories and resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict were essential in keeping together the coalition’s Gulf war achievements and upgrading it. On the day after the war, the 41st president of the United States dragged Shamir to the Madrid Conference and sat him down next to the representatives of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf states. He forced Shamir to choose between advancing the Madrid process, getting economic aid and preserving Israel's special relationship with the United States, and advancing the settlement enterprise, derailing the diplomatic process and hurting the ties with the United States and all that entailed.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/coalition-obama-is-george-bush-gulf-war-road-map-netanyahu.html#ixzz3DnRaMybp
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