Former CIA bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer explains that U.S foreign policy ought to consist much more in abstaining than doing.
The U.S. abstention on the UN Security Council’s resolution condemning Israel’s building of settlements in the West Bank was absolutely the right action, but it was taken for wrong, sophomoric, and really rather dastardly reasons.
The motivation for the abstention was not a clear view of genuine U.S. national security interests — which do, on this issue and many others, including UN membership, benefit from permanent abstention — but rather it came from Obama’s hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the arrogant and colossal error that Netanyahu, the Republicans, and Israel First made in staging the former’s address to a joint session of Congress on the Iran deal; and Obama’s all-too-appropriate anger at Mr. Trump’s all-too-inappropriate intervention in his conduct of foreign policy. (NB: One must be careful here, as Mr. Trump, not being a dumb-head, certainly knew that the thin-skinned, arrogant Obama would press ahead and abstain. Could that be what Trump wanted when he spouted off?)
The point for Americans here is not that Israel is the bad guy and that the Palestinians are the good guys, or vice versa. The point is that neither party, nor their respective actions, make(s) a lick of difference to the republic’s genuine national security interests as long as the U.S. national government stays out of the affairs of of each. If Israel drives all the Palestinians from the West Bank and builds an only-for-Jews metropolis there, or if the Palestinians find a way to kill Israelis in numbers like those of the Palestinians killed by Israelis, it amounts to precisely nothing that impacts the life-and-death interests of America and nearly all of its citizenry. The exceptions being, of course, those elite Jewish-Americans who prefer the survival of Israel to the welfare and survival of their fellow countrymen, and, who, after all, are expendable citizens who pose nothing but a threat to the republic’s survival. They are worthy only of being ostracized.
The truth is that any chance of a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict is a decade dead, and only more violence and perhaps war will be forthcoming over the issue of what each side considers its and its faith’s territory. Why would the United States want to stay involved in the bloody business that will ensue as the two states are left to work out their own problems and fanaticism? If the rest of the world lines up on the side of the Israelis or that of the Palestinians, and want to play in this nearly 70-year old, cruel but childish war, let them do so and pay and bleed as America has done for far too long.
Again, Obama, his team of juvenile diplomats, their gangsterish mother hen Hillary Clinton, and now the ketchup-king John Kerry are a reprehensible lot, who for eight years have conducted themselves as if it is still the malodorous 1960s, acting as if they are noble, Che-like agents who are duty-bound to make penitent amends for the supposed sins of colonialism and imperialism, while forcibly imposing the far worse sins of globalism, which will require global fascism to maintain. These people are war-causing imbeciles who were Ivy-League educated (indoctrinated?) with ideas, aspirations, and modes of behavior that reward the violent; cannonize the deviant, libertine, anti-religious, non-white, and subversive; and seek to destroy all the West has created since Athens and the Roman republic were pups.
John Kerry’s slogan-filled speech on 28 December 2016 is a fine example of mindless U.S. interventionism, a policy that has long displayed a vast ignorance of how a world of nation-states must work. Kerry’s blithe dismissal of the argument that asserts Israel needs more settlements in Palestinian territory to strengthen its national security may be true. That, however, is not what the Israeli government believes, and, as it is that government that must manage Israel’s absolute right of self-defense. Israel’s cabinet would have to be a gang of morons to heed the interventionist words of the hapless Kerry or any other U.S. politician.
Again, the Obama administration’s ego-satisfying and vengeful abstention from voting on the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements is a mark of its terminal ignorance about the proper America-centric goals of U.S. foreign policy. But, as noted, the abstention did produce a marvelous bastard of an offspring, one that gives Americans an opportunity to think about how in the world Israel’s nil worth as the republic’s ally can reasonably justify the pointless expenditure of tax dollars and human lives, an endless war with Islam, and unnecessary involvement in irrelevant overseas issues. All of these, at this point, can only distract the new administration from a campaign to repair the widespread economic, political, and social wreckage that is the signal and only achievement of Obama and his party.
On reflection, Americans — especially those who elected Mr. Trump — might well conclude, as did de Tocqueville, that for the good of themselves, their families, their republic, and their posterity, U.S. foreign policy from here on out ought to be one that “consists much more in abstaining than in doing.”
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