The US Veto and the Israel Lobby

A Pyrrhic Victory in the UN Security Council

By URI AVNERY, Counterpunch

Israel is becoming a liability to the United States, bringing US into the same international isolation into which Israel itself was cast.

The so-called "Israel Lobby", which prevents Israeli misconduct from ever being corrected, is a grave danger to Israel's future.

The vote in the U.N. shows the entire world unanimous in regarding settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as manifestly illegal and a major obstacle to any chance of peace. It is clear to the entire world that there is no point to negotiations while the State of Israel is daily creating accomplished facts in the territory which is the subject of negotiations.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, too, are well aware of this. They gave unconvincing excuses for their act of imposing a veto on a highly justified and needed resolution, which all other countries supported. These excuses cannot hide the one and only reason for this illogical vote: the intervention of the government of Israel in American politics, using the power of the so-called "Israel Lobby" in the U.S. Congress. ... cont.

With settlement resolution veto, Obama has joined Likud

An America that understands that the settlements are the obstacle should have joined in condemning them.

By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 20 February 2011

This weekend, a new member enrolled in Likud - and not just in the ruling party, but in its most hawkish wing. Located somewhere between Tzipi Hotovely and Danny Danon, U.S. President Barack Obama bypassed Dan Meridor and Michael Eitan on the right and weakened their position.

The first veto cast by the United States during Obama's term, a veto he promised in vain not to use as his predecessors did, was a veto against the chance and promise of change, a veto against hope. This is a veto that is not friendly to Israel; it supports the settlers and the Israeli right, and them alone.  ...   cont.

Hillary Wow's the Arabs

Obsessions are dangerous, because in any conflict, be it political, economic, or military, they create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by one's adversaries -- not to mention one's purported allies.  That is because obsessions shape the Orientation of one's Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action (OODA) loop in a way that induces one to see and act on what one "wants" to see rather than what "is."  When this happens, one's decision cycle looks inward and becomes disconnected from its environment, and as a result, the actions decided on will not have the desired outcome.  The mismatch between desires and reality will then feed back into subsequent decision cycle, and if the obsession is not corrected inside the decision-maker's orientation , the mismatches will amplify themselves in subsequent actions.  Left unaddressed only one outcome is possible: what the American strategist Colonel John Boyd, the inventor of the OODA Loop, used to call "incestuous amplification," or an increasingly self-referencing decision making spiral, that by "talking to itself, succumbs to an inevitable evolution into chaos.  

America's amplifying obsessions with Israel are creating just this kind of evolution, and there is no better example than in our increasingly dangerous self-referencing  policy towards Iran, which itself is now turning into an obsession.

 The downward spiral becomes apparent when one tries to examine the results of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent visit to the Middle East through the eyes of those she was trying to win over.  Her aim was to shore up our Arab "allies" in a unified anti-Iran policy.  But as Rami Khouri, a highly-regarded observer of politics in the Middle East (bio), explains in this commentary in Lebanon's Daily Star, Clinton's pathetically transparent efforts devolved into yet another version of our old self-referencing efforts to shore up a pro- Israeli, neo-colonialist, foreign policy that is doomed to fail again.