“One Step Too Far”: Bibi Netanyahu — aka ‘The Republican Senator From Israel’ — May Have Made A Fatal Political Mistake
Set aside, for the moment, the diplomatic row being sparked by Speaker of the House John Boehner as he seeks to create two conflicting foreign policies for the United States—one pursued by the President and the other pursued by the Congress.
Boehner’s hubris, in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to interfere with American policy while seeking to bolster his re-election campaign, may turn out to be the very political screw-up that will allow the joint ticket forged by the Labor-Hatnuah political parties to bring an end to Netanyahu’s long reign atop the Israeli government.
According to a Channel 10 poll out this past Thursday in Israel, the joint ticket offered by the Labor-Hatnuah coalition currently stands to grab 24 seats in the Israeli Knesset in the coming election—up one seat from the previous poll—while Netanyahu’s Likud Party is holding steady with just 20 seats.
The poll also projects that the party leaders atop the Labor-Hatnuah ticket, Issac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, have an increasingly good chance of forming the next Israeli government by assembling a coalition of between 61 and 68 seats in support of their government.
It turns out that there are no shortage of Israeli voters who don’t care for the idea of their Prime Minister jumping into the middle of America’s internal disagreements over foreign policy and further understand that, at the end of the day, Israel remains deeply dependent upon the United States for critical assistance in the never-ending battle to preserve and protect their nation.
According to Hatnuah leader, Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu is sabotaging israel’s critical relationship with Washington.
“A responsible prime minister who first thinks of the good of his country’s citizens does not do such a thing,” Livni said, adding, “A responsible prime minister would know to work with the president of the United States — with any president — and protect our most important interests.”
If the polls are to be believed, there are quite a few Israelis who share Livni’s take on the subject.
So, how did all this happen?
It turns out, the plan to have the Israeli Prime Minister speak to Congress, without first discussing with the White House, was the brainchild of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer who has, for weeks now, been endorsing the re-election of Bibi Netanyahu on American television programs despite explicit Israeli Civil Service regulations prohibiting him from doing so.
An example of Dermer’s breaking his nation’s rules to play politics?
As reported by Israli newspaper Haaretz, Dermer broke those rules while being interviewed by Jorge Ramos on American cable network, Fusion.
During the discussion, Dermer said, “I have no doubt that when they [the Israeli public] look at all the people that stand for the leadership of the country, that they will have confidence in the leadership of prime minister Netanyahu.”
Dermer’s words came despite an admonition issued by Israel Civil Service Commissioner Moshe Dyan noting that, “A state employee must be careful that his actions or behavior cannot be interpreted as being aimed at promoting the interest of any particular party or candidate.” Anyone violating these instructions, Dyan said, “will face criminal or disciplinary proceedings in accordance with the law.”
In addition to Dermer’s apparent violation of Israeli law, he also revealed his penchant for duplicitous behavior by meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry just one day before Speaker Boehner announced his invitation to Prime Minister Netanyahu, yet never once mentioned to Kerry what was about to happen.
Making it all the more offensive, the White House has explicitly gone out of its way, since the announcement of the Israeli elections, to avoid saying or doing anything that could be interpreted as support for the Herzog/Livni ticket.
At least the American President had the good sense not to further endanger his relationship with Netanyahu and the Israeli people.
In reviewing Netanyahu’s political ploy, and his ambassador’s duplicitous behavior, it seems fair to ask whether this is really how friends treat friends?
While you may entirely agree with Boehner’s decision to invite Netanyahu to address the Congress, can you possibly not be disturbed that the Israeli ambassador to our country went out of his way to not tell our Secretary of State of his plan to interfere with our foreign policy and seek to embarrass our president in the process?
Israeli voters know these details and, by many accounts, are not all that happy with the way Netanyahu is inserting himself into the politics of the United States. What’s more, Israelis understand that, should Netanyahu win re-election, they are now looking at two years—if not more should a Democrat take the White House in 2016—of a very cold relationship with the White House at a time when this is likely not in the best interest of Israel.
Of course, just as Netanyahu has already pushed the date of his speech—originally scheduled for February 11—to a date in March just two weeks before the election, my prediction is that Netanyahu will realize his mistake (or take note of the polls) and seek to push the speech well past election day.
By then, it may be too late as this latest insult to the American President may prove to be one step too far for the man many Israelis have dubbed “the Republican Senator from the great State of Israel.”
As for Boehner’s behavior, I’ll have more on this later.
For the moment, suffice it to say that using the Israeli Prime Minister in an attempt to embarrass the President of the United States is beyond shameful.
I get that the Speaker doesn’t like the President or his policies. I get that many readers of this piece will have snarky responses about how this President already embarrasses himself and our nation, etc., etc., etc.
But what neither the Speaker, nor those who cannot manage to think beyond their distaste for this president, understand is the truly unprecedented step Boehner has taken by joining with the leader of a foreign nation against his own president.
Presidents come and go. However, respect for the office of the presidency, particularly on the part of the man who is second in the line of succession to the presidency, should not.
Through his actions, Boehner may have scored some points for his party and for his preferred policy option vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear negotiations. But in the process, the Speaker of the American House of Representatives has succeeded in embarrassing the Office of the President.
Considering that Speaker Boehner has failed to accomplish anything of note during his Speakership, I can only wonder how it must feel to have his legacy be his effort to disgrace the American President in the effort to bolster the political chances of a foreign leader.
I can’t imagine it would feel very good, unless Boehner has now become so consumed by party politics that he no longer can be bothered to consider what is best for his country in the long run.
While I have often disagreed with Speaker Boehner, I have always kind of liked him in the belief that, while our solutions might be at odds, he wanted to do what he believes is best for America.
It would be a struggle for me to harbor such positive feelings going forward.
Seeking to damage any American President by helping a foreign leader embarrass our own leader can never be considered something that is best for the nation. And that is simply the truth no matter what your political persuasion or your feelings about the current occupant of the Oval Office.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, January 25, 2015
“The Likud Lobby”: Let’s Stop Pretending Israel Isn’t A Partisan Issue
When House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without bothering to let the White House know, as is normal practice when dealing with foreign leaders, he no doubt thought he was getting a little sauce for the gander. You want to find ways to get Republicans mad, President Obama? Okay, how about if I invite the leader of one of our closest allies here to basically lobby against your position on Iran? How do you like that?
Boehner was right on that score: President Obama doesn’t like it very much. Neither did Nancy Pelosi, who blasted Boehner’s move this morning as “inappropriate,” adding: “It’s out of the ordinary that the Speaker would decide that he would be inviting people to a joint session without any bipartisan consultation.”
But maybe this skirmish over diplomatic protocol is a good thing for everyone. Maybe we can stop pretending that Americans and Israelis are nothing more than loving and committed allies offering unwavering support to one another, when the truth is that parties in both countries are active participants in each other’s partisan politics.
The current disagreement is about negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. There’s a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Bob Menendez, to impose new sanctions on Iran if a deal isn’t struck by June 30. The administration says that passing such legislation now, while the negotiations are at a sensitive point, would guarantee failure: the Iranians would pull out, then ramp up their nuclear program.
Republicans, and some Democrats like Menendez, don’t think so. They seem to believe that the only thing that produces results is being “tough,” and that even in diplomacy there are no carrots, only sticks. This also happens to be the position of the Netanyahu administration, which supports the sanctions bill. But not all in the Israeli government agree. Josh Rogin and Eli Lake report that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, has been telling both the Obama administration and whatever American senators will listen that “if legislation that imposed a trigger leading to future sanctions on Iran was signed into law, it would cause the talks to collapse.”
So the Republicans have asked Netanyahu to come join them in this debate, and he is more than willing. Which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. For years we’ve had one party (the Republicans) that is fervently committed to the right-wing Likud’s vision for Israel, and another party (the Democrats) that is much more committed to the Israeli Labor party’s vision. When each holds the White House, they put those beliefs into policy. But both will say only that we all have a bipartisan commitment to “support” the Jewish state, as though what “support” means is always simple and clear.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has done what he can to help Republicans. In 2012, his all-but-explicit advocacy for Mitt Romney ended up getting him in trouble back home. The current Israeli ambassador to the U.S. is American-born political operative Ron Dermer; as Josh Marshall says: “His relationship with Netanyahu has been compared to Karl Rove’s with George W. Bush. And a main reason for his being Ambassador is his ties to DC Republicans.”
And here’s a colorful illustration of the symbiotic relationship between the GOP and Netanyahu’s Likud. The Republican Party’s greatest patron is casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who spent somewhere between $100 and $150 million trying to unseat Barack Obama in 2012. And who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest patron? None other than Sheldon Adelson, who a few years ago created a free daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, whose primary purpose is to blanket the country with news favorable to Netanyahu.
It has long been true that the debate about what Israel should do — with regard to the Palestinians or anything else — is infinitely more varied and robust in Israel itself than here in the United States, where the only allowable public position for a politician to take is that we support whatever the Israeli government wants to do. This unanimity is maintained by a variety of forces, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” but in practice has for decades been not the Israel lobby but the Likud lobby, representing one particular faction in Israeli politics.
Benjamin Netanyahu is the leader of his country, but he’s also the leader of that faction, and at the moment he’s in the midst of an election campaign (one the Obama administration would be all too happy to see him lose). If Congressional Republicans want him to come be a spokesperson for the Republican position in the debate over Iran, that’s fine. But we should use the occasion to allow ourselves a little honestly. Yes, the United States and Israel are close allies whose core interests are aligned. But in neither country is there agreement about how to serve those interests. There’s no such thing as a “pro-Israel” position on this issue, because Israelis themselves have a profound dispute about it, just as there’s no such thing as one “pro-America” position on anything we argue about.
So we can call this speech what it is: an effort by one conservative politician to help a bunch of other conservative politicians achieve their preferred policy. Maybe afterward, John Boehner can return the favor and cut some ads advocating Netanyahu’s reelection. Though I’m not sure how well that would go over in Israel.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 22, 2015
“There Are Things You Simply Don’t Do”: Boehner Willing To Partner With A Foreign Government To Undermine American Foreign Policy
On the record, President Obama and his team have said very little about congressional Republicans partnering with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to derail international nuclear talks with Iran. Administration officials said the president will not meet with Netanyahu during his March trip, but that’s only to prevent the appearance of interference with the Israeli election to be held two weeks later.
Behind the scenes, however, it seems the White House isn’t pleased.
“Senior American official” as quoted by Haaretz: “We thought we’ve seen everything. But Bibi managed to surprise even us. There are things you simply don’t do. He spat in our face publicly and that’s no way to behave. Netanyahu ought to remember that President Obama has a year and a half left to his presidency, and that there will be a price.”
Josh Marshall added that even American Jewish groups “who seldom allow any daylight between themselves and the Israeli government appear shocked by Netanyahu’s move and are having difficulty defending it.”
There are things you simply don’t do.
I’ve been thinking about why this story strikes me as so important, and I realize that on the surface, it may not seem shocking to everyone. Republicans oppose the diplomacy with Iran; Netanyahu opposes the diplomacy with Iran. Perhaps their partnership was predictable?
Sure, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) ignored U.S. protocol by circumventing the administration and reaching out to a foreign leader on his own, but given the degree to which Republicans have abandoned traditional norms in the Obama era, maybe this isn’t that startling, either.
The problem, however, which I fear has been largely overlooked, is that it’s genuinely dangerous for the federal government to try to operate this way.
I’m reminded of an incident from August, near the height of the crisis involving Central American children reaching the U.S. border, when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) traveled to Guatemala. While there, the senator met with leading Guatemalan officials, including their president, and told them that the problem was Obama’s problem, not theirs.
In other words, an American senator visited with foreign leaders on foreign soil, denounced the American president, and undermined American foreign policy. During the Bush/Cheney era, Republicans used to characterize such moves as borderline treasonous.
Five months later, the GOP en masse is working to cut off American-led international talks at the knees.
The point, of course, is that in the Obama era, Republicans have no use for the maxim about politics stopping “at the water’s edge.” For many GOP lawmakers, there is no American foreign policy – there’s the president’s foreign policy and there’s a Republican foreign policy. If the latter is at odds with the former, GOP officials are comfortable taking deliberate steps to undermine the White House.
There is no real precedent for this in the American tradition. The U.S. system just isn’t supposed to work this way – because it can’t. Max Fisher’s take on this rings true:
To be very clear, this is not just a breach of protocol: it’s a very real problem for American foreign policy. The Supreme Court has codified into law the idea that only the president is allowed to make foreign policy, and not Congress, because if there are two branches of government setting foreign policy then America effectively has two foreign policies.
The idea is that the US government needs to be a single unified entity on the world stage in order to conduct effective foreign policy. Letting the president and Congress independently set their own foreign policies would lead to chaos. It would be extremely confusing for foreign leaders, and foreign publics, who don’t always understand how domestic American politics work, and could very easily misread which of the two branches is actually setting the agenda.
All of which leads us back to this week. The United States and our allies have reached a delicate stage of diplomacy on a key issue, but as far as congressional Republicans are concerned, the United States isn’t really at the negotiating table at all – the Obama administration is. GOP lawmakers not only disapprove of the process, and they not only have no qualms about trying to sabotage the international talks, they’re even willing to partner with a foreign government to undermine American foreign policy.
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I honestly don’t think this has ever happened before, at least not in our country. In effect, Boehner has invited Netanyahu to play the legislative branch of the U.S. government against the executive branch of the U.S. government, and the Israeli prime minister is happy to accept that invitation.
Cynicism about our politics is easy, but this isn’t just the latest outrage of the week. We’re talking about the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy.
There are things you simply don’t do – and right now, Republicans are doing them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 23, 2015
“The Duck That Roared”: Obama Has Demonstrated That The Term “Lame Duck” Has Its Limits
Politics in a democracy is a team sport that leans heavily on individual high performers. This explains the paradoxical closing of President Obama’s most difficult year in office.
He ends 2014 in surprisingly buoyant spirits, having proved that he still has the power to push policy in new directions in foreign affairs and on issues ranging from immigration to climate change.
But his underlying political position is weaker, meaning that Obama and his aides are aware that changing the trajectory of the nation’s debate and the fortunes of his party are among his primary obligations over the next two years. Just as Ronald Reagan’s legacy was secured by the presidential victory of George H. W. Bush in 1988, so does Obama need a Democrat — at the moment, this would seem to be Hillary Clinton — to win in 2016.
In the short run, Obama has demonstrated that the term “lame duck” has its limits. Over the seven weeks since the Democrats’ pummeling in November’s midterm elections, the president has moved forcefully to show he will use all the power he still has.
He used executive action to legalize the situations of up to 5 million undocumented immigrants and in doing so created a political problem for Republicans. They are split on the immigration question and will greatly weaken their ability to appeal to Latino voters in 2016 if they are too aggressive in trying to reverse what Obama has done.
He reached an agreement with China setting ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gases. It was a signal, his senior aides say, that acting on climate change will be a central focus of Obama’s final two years in office.
And last week, he upended 53 years of American policy by opening diplomatic relations with Cuba. Republican opposition was fierce. Yet, as on immigration, Obama’s opponents will have difficulty altering the course he has set unless they win the presidency in 2016. And by then, both initiatives may be too widely accepted to uproot.
In the meantime, Obama continued with negotiations to stop Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, even as some of his older bets were paying off. The Russian economy is reeling from sanctions imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine (and from low oil prices). An approach seen by its critics as not tough enough is beginning to show its teeth.
The health care website, whose crash was an enormous political and practical problem for Obama and his party in 2013, is working smoothly. The fact that so many Americans are interested in obtaining health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, his aides argue, is a vindication of the effort Obama put in to passing it. And the economy continues to hum with the unemployment rate at its lowest in six years while gas prices are also sharply down. This year is set to produce the largest increase in payrolls since the late 1990s.
Thus did Obama’s good mood at his news conference on Friday defy the political obituaries that proliferated after the election. “My presidency is entering the fourth quarter,” he said brightly. “Interesting things happen in the fourth quarter.”
But in that quarter, Republicans will control both houses of Congress, and Obama will have to work with them just to keep the government running. He will also have to pick his fights. A senior administration official said the president would lay out bottom lines — one imagines especially on health care and financial reform — where he cannot compromise with the GOP and will count on congressional Democrats to uphold potential vetoes.
On the economy, Obama will try to square a circle that flummoxed Democrats in the midterms. His aides say he wants to highlight what’s working in the economy while also making clear that ending wage stagnation will require government to invest in variety of areas, including infrastructure, education and economic development. Democrats can also be expected to press fights on issues related to employee rights, including overtime rules, the minimum wage and family leave.
The irony is that while Republicans can certainly make life more difficult for Obama, the president and his party can also make life more difficult for the newly empowered GOP by casting them as obstructing broadly popular measures.
Obama has shown he can still accomplish a lot on his own. The harder test will be whether he can advance ideas and arguments that strengthen the ability of his allies to sustain his policies beyond the life of his presidency.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 22, 2014
“John McCain Is A Dangerous Radical”: He Has Advocated Attacking Roughly Half The Eastern Hemisphere’s Land Mass
It should be obvious by now that John McCain wants to attack everyone, everywhere. In September 2013, Mother Jones made a map of the world showing that McCain has advocated attacking roughly half the Eastern Hemisphere’s land mass. Now he wants to attack basically everyone in Syria. Even the hawkish Jeffrey Goldberg thinks this is a bit much:
McCain’s second criticism: Obama is not attacking the root cause of the Syrian war, which is the behavior of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its supporters in Iran. He said the U.S. should be bombing government targets at the same time it is bombing Assad’s Islamic State enemies. I, too, am dispositionally interventionist, but it seemed to me that McCain was outlining not only a formula for chaos, but also a program that could not possibly be sold to the American people.
I asked him this question: “Wouldn’t the generals say to you, ‘You want me to fight ISIS, and you want me to fight the guys who are fighting ISIS, at the same time? Why would we bomb guys who are bombing ISIS? That would turn this into a crazy standoff.’ ”
“Our ultimate job is not only to defeat ISIS but to give the Syrian people the opportunity to prevail as well,” McCain answered. “Remember, there are 192,000 dead Syrians thanks to Assad. If we do this right, if we do the right kind of training and equipping of the Free Syrian Army, plus air strikes, plus taking out Bashar Assad’s air assets, we could reverse the battlefield equation.”
The U.S. could conceivably wage war on two fronts against two vicious parties that are also warring against each other, on a battlefield in which another set of America’s enemies — Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps — are also fighting. But this is a much too complicated mission for any post-Iraq War American president to prudently tackle, even a president not quite so reluctant as Obama.
For those Americans who are moving toward McCain and away from Paul on crucial questions concerning the U.S.’s role in the world, I can’t imagine that they would be able to stomach such a war, either.
If you think John McCain actually understands the complexity of trying to hold together an alliance to fight ISIS that includes Sunni governments in Amman, Riyadh, Cairo, and Ankara and Shiite governments in Baghdad and Teheran, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. The war in Syria is sectarian in nature, as are most of the problems within Iraq.
If you are trying to get Baghdad to govern inclusively, you can’t take the side of the Sunnis in Syria. If you can get consensus from the Sunni powers to eliminate the most radical and effective army on their side of the fight, then you’ve accomplished something. But, if you take it too far, everything will blow up in your face.
I wake up every day thanking fate that John McCain never got to order our armed forces around.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 14, 2014
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