A defiant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Israel will continue to stand up for its right to exist against the growing threat posed by Iran, and defended his controversial Tuesday speech to Congress as a chance to warn America that this threat is growing.
“For 2,000 years, my people, the Jewish people, were stateless, defenseless, voiceless. We were utterly powerless against our enemies, who swore to destroy us,” Netanyahu said at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in Washington.
“No more!” he said to applause. “The days when the Jewish people are passive in the face of threats to annihilate us — those days are over.”
Netanyahu said his Tuesday speech before a joint session of Congress is a chance to warn America that Iran needs to be checked even today, and that Iran would become an even larger problem with nuclear weapons.
“We must not let that happen,” he said of the possibility of Iran obtaining those weapons.
“I plan to speak about an Iranian regime that is threatening to destroy Israel, that’s devouring country and after country in the Middle East, that’s exporting terror throughout the world, and that is developing, as we speak, the capacity to make nuclear weapons, lots of them,” he said.
Netanyahu Tries To Head Off Iran's Machinations After Obama Empowers Tehran As Favored Mid East Ally
On the one hand, he made sure Israel was well supplied with all its material security needs. This enabled him to boast that no US president or administration before him had done as much to safeguard Israel’s security.
But behind this façade, Obama made sure that Israel’s security stayed firmly in the technical-material-financial realm and never crossed the line into a strategic relationship.
That was because he needed to keep his hands free for the objective of transferring the role of foremost US ally in the Middle East from Israel to Iran, a process that took into account the ayatollahs’ nuclear aspirations.
This process unfolding over recent years has left Israel face to face with a nakedly hostile Iran empowered by the United States.
In the meantime, without President Obama lifting a finger in defense of “Israel’s security,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps officers are drawing Israel into a military stranglehold on the ground.
Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.
It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold - at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.
This is not something that Barack Obama or his National Security Adviser Susan Rice are prepared to admit. They are not about to confirm intelligence reports, which expose the military collaboration between the Obama administration and Iran’s supreme leader Aytatollah Ali Khamenei as being piped through the office of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani is frequently spotted these days flitting between Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut, while his intelligence and liaison officers file reports to the Obama administration, through the Iraqi prime minister’s office, on their forthcoming military steps and wait for Washington’s approval.
America understandably lacks the will to have its ground forces embroiled in another Middle East war. Washington is therefore not about to turn away a regional power offering to undertake this task – even though it may be unleasing a bloody conflagration between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that would be hard to extinguish.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Gulf are as dismayed as Israel by Obama’s regional strategy, which, stripped of its diplomatic veneer, boils down to a straight trade: The US will allow Iran to reach the status of a pre-nuclear power and regional hegemon, while Tehran, in return, will send its officers and ground troops to fight in Iraq, Syria and even Afghanistan.
The 180 ex-IDF officers and Israel’s opposition leaders, Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, were right when they argued that Israel’s bond with the US presidency is too valuable to jeopardize. But it is the Obama White House which is trifling with that bond – not Netanyahu, whose mission in Washington is no more than a tardy attempt to check Iran’s malignant machinations which go forward without restraint.
Top diplomats from Iran and the US began a new round of marathon talks on a nuclear deal late Monday, as Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu warned the emerging accord could threaten his country’s survival.
The pace and intensity of the negotiations to hammer out a deal to rein in Iran’s suspected nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief have gathered pace as a March 31 deadline for a political accord nears.
As a deal appears within grasp, the US administration has clashed with Israel, with Netanyahu saying he would address Congress on Tuesday “to speak up about a potential deal with Iran that could threaten the survival of Israel.”
Throughout history, political, financial, and military leaders have sought to create empires. Westerners often think of ancient Rome as the first empire. Later, other empires formed for a time. Spain became an empire, courtesy of its Armada, its conquest of the New World, and the gold and silver extracted from the West. Great Britain owned the 19th century but lost its empire due largely to costly wars. The US took over in the 20th century and, like Rome, rose as a republic, with minimal central control, but is now crumbling under its own governmental weight.
Invariably, the last people to understand the collapse of an empire are those who live within it. As a British subject, I remember my younger years, when, even though the British Empire was well and truly over, many of my fellow Brits were still behaving in a pompous manner as though British “superiority” still existed. Not so, today. (You can only pretend for so long.)
But this does suggest that those who live within the present empire—the US—will be the last to truly understand that the game is all but over. Americans seem to be hopeful that the dramatic decline is a temporary setback from which they will rebound.
Not likely. Historically, once an empire has been shot from its perch, it’s replaced by a rising power—one that’s more productive and more forward thinking in every way. Yet the US is hanging on tenaciously, and like any dying empire, its leaders are becoming increasingly ruthless, both at home and abroad, hoping to keep up appearances.
Warfare is often the death knell of a declining empire—both in its extreme financial cost and in its ability to alienate the peoples of other countries. In the new millennium, the US has invaded more countries than at any other time in its history and appears now to be in a state of perpetual warfare. This is being carried out both militarily and economically, as the US imposes economic sanctions on those it seeks to conquer.
Russia and China dealt with the latest round of strong-arm tactics by the US to adhere to the petrodollar by creating the largest energy agreement in history. This and all trade between the two countries will be settled in the ruble and the yuan. Russia has since been active in creating agreements with other fuel customers, also bypassing the petrodollar.
In creating these agreements, the Asian powers have unofficially announced the demise of the petrodollar. For decades, the US has applied its muscle to other countries, using the petrodollar. So, the Sino-Russian agreement stands, not only to end the petrodollar monopoly, but to create a decline in US power over the world, generally.
Presently, the vast majority of economic transfers in the world pass through the SWIFT system, located in Brussels but controlled by the US. In recent years, the US has barred, or threatened to bar, other countries from the SWIFT system, effectively making it impossible for banks to transfer money and, by extension, causing the collapse of their banking systems. Russia has responded by creating its own SWIFT system.
It’s entirely likely that, if Russian trading partners, such as Iran, are barred from the use of the Brussels SWIFT (or even threatened to be barred), Russia would extend the use of its SWFT to them.
The creation of a second worldwide SWIFT would effectively remove the SWIFT threat from the US bag of tricks as an economic weapon. As long as Russia provides an effective money transfer service and does it without the intimidation that the US employs, it’s predictable that other countries would flock to the new system, in preference to SWIFT. Once other countries are fully on board, the US would have no choice but to interface with the new system or lose trade with those countries.
In creating all of the above entities, the BRICS will, in effect, have created a complete second economic world.
In the latter days of the British Empire, we Brits seemed to be under the illusion that, even as our power base crumbled, we might somehow retain control by threats and bluster. The UK was utterly wrong in this and only succeeded in alienating trading partners, colonies, and allies by doing so.
The same is happening again today. China, Russia, and the rest of the world, when faced with American threats and bluster, will not simply fold their tents and accept that the US must be obeyed. They will, instead, create alternatives. And they are doing so exceedingly well and quickly. At this point, the overreach of the US is not only enabling other powers to rise, it is forcing their hand to literally create the next full-blown empire.
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