Known unknowns in Israel, Iran, USA


September 14, 2013
Sarah Benton

This posting has these items:
1) Washington Post: Israel divided over best course on Syria;
2) Tikkun: War with Syria Would Fulfill Neoconservative Plan for Middle East Regime Change;
3) Al Arabiya: To bomb or not to bomb? Obama’s threat is butt of Syrian jokes;
4) Palestine Chronicle: Israel’s Lobbyists Pushing Hard for another War in the Middle East;


Syrian caricature shows U.S. President Barack Obama smile and pluck the petals of a daisy, as he wonders, “Should I bomb? Or shouldn’t I bomb?” Photo courtesy: Facebook/ Nancy al-Jouni) See 3rd item, To bomb or not to bomb?

Israel divided over best course on Syria

By William Booth and Ruth Eglash, Washington Post
September 12, 2003

JERUSALEM — Israel’s diplomatic and defense establishment appears to be divided over the best course of action to take on Syria, security analysts and former military commanders here said Thursday.

It has been no secret that some of Israel’s political leaders and generals were initially disappointed that President Obama sought congressional approval for missile strikes, saying it showed weakness that would embolden Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and boost Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

An analysis in the Times of Israel, citing unnamed sources, said that Obama’s decision to hit the pause button had “privately horrified” Jerusalem.

But that was 12 days ago. Now, many Israelis have begun to identify some advantages in a Russia-brokered diplomatic deal to secure Assad’s stores of chemical weapons, especially if it succeeds.

“Israel was watching the reaction of the international community, especially the United States, as a kind of test case on how they would react to the Iran situation,” said Oded Eran, former deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

“But now there are more Israelis who are looking at the possible deal between Russia and United States on the chemical arsenal of Syria as an interesting precedent,” Eran said. “If the international community, through the U.S. and Russia, is able to put its hands on, to monitor or collect all the arsenal of Syria, this could be some sort of a precedent concerning Iran.”

Israel maintains that Iran is seeking to build a nuclear weapon, a development it has described as “an existential threat.” Iran says its nuclear program is limited to research and energy production.


Israel Ziv, before retirement

Israel Ziv, a retired major general and former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ operations directorate, said that from a strategic standpoint, a U.S. missile strike might not have achieved much and would have posed risks.

“I don’t see anything positive coming from an attack,” Ziv said. “I see more positive results, potentially, on addressing Syria’s chemical weapon stockpiles.”

Ziv said it took guts not to attack Syria.

Security analysts added that if the Russian initiative fails and Syria balks, it might make Obama’s case for striking Syria easier to sell.

With regard to Iran, Ziv said that Washington and Tehran are engaged in a kind of psychological warfare and that threats and sanctions from the United States can act as deterrents, if they are backed up by actions.

So, if Syria does allow outsiders to inspect and even decommission its chemical arsenal, “then a political process with results might be turn out to be stronger than attacks alone,” Ziv said.

Benjamin Netanyahu, however, stressed a different message Wednesday when he spoke at a graduation ceremony for Israeli navy cadets.

The Israeli prime minister cited a saying by the Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Netanyahu said the maxim “is more relevant than ever these days in guiding me, in my key actions as prime minister.”

He added, “Israel must always be able to protect itself, and will protect itself, with its own forces, against all threats.”

Netanyahu warned that “the message that is received in Syria will be clearly understood in Iran.”

Shlomo Brom, a retired brigadier general and former chief of the Israel Defense Forces’ strategic planning division, said Thursday that Israel’s initial reaction to Obama’s decision to turn to Congress had been “infantile,” with political and military leaders acting “like a kid that was given a toy, and then it was taken away.”

“There is also complete distrust by Israel of Syria and Russia,” Brom said. “In the Israeli perception, those are the bad guys and you can never trust the bad guys. They are always up to mischief, and this is just a bluff and nothing will come of this new plan.”

But since then, Brom said, he and other analysts have pushed their argument that if the United Nations, at the behest of Russia and United States, can begin to dismantle Syria’s arsenal of chemical arms, “then another state will be giving up their weapons of mass destruction, and another country will have reached the conclusion that these kinds of weapons are not usable.”


War with Syria Would Fulfill Neoconservative Plan for Middle East Regime Change

By William Beeman, NAM, Tikkun daily
September 11, 2013

There is great division of opinion regarding potential U.S. military action in Syria. However, one group is ecstatic over President Obama’s endorsement of a military attack on Damascus. These are the Neoconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration, and who still hold tremendous influence in Washington. An attack on Syria would be one step in fulfilling “stage two” of a longstanding neoconservative plan to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East in three stages: Iraq, Syria and finally Iran.
The pattern for this plan has been to wait for an event that can be sold to the world public as justification for military attack, and then to push forward, pressuring the military and government officials to move forward with the next stage of regime change.

President Obama is, perhaps unwittingly, fulfilling this plan, conceived in 1996 by an informal organization, the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, headed by Richard Pearle and including well-known neoconservatives, Douglas Feith, Meyrav Wurmser, David Wurmser, Robert Loewenberg, Charles Fairbanks, Jr. and James Colbert. All are connected with organizations favoring right-wing extremist Israeli policies toward Palestinians and other Middle East nations. The Study Group plan, titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The “clean break” refers to their advice that Israel break from the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

The 1996 plan explicitly calls for attacks on Iraq, Syria and eventually Iran. It states: “Israel can shape its strategic environment . . . by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

Many of the same figures carried this plan forward two years later under another rubric, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In a letter to President Clinton and House Speaker Gingrich in 1998, the members of the PNAC, including Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Zoellick called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, carrying out the first stage of the agenda of the “Clean Break” plan.

Once George W. Bush was elected president, many of these figures took up prominent positions within his administration. Following the tragic destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the removal of Saddam Hussein became a policy objective for the United States.

The PNAC wrote a letter to President Bush in 2001 stating: “…even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

It was at this time that Iran came more clearly into focus for the neoconservatives. The theory they promulgated was that Iran was the prime mover in all anti-Israeli activity in the region through Iran’s purported support for Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. Syria was seen as complicit in this, and was regularly identified as a “client state” for Iran. However, neither legislators nor the public could be incited by this theory, for which there was, and continues to be, no credible evidence.

In 2003, the neoconservatives, working through right-wing think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were able to convince the Bush administration that Iran’s 40 year old nuclear energy program was really a plot to develop nuclear weapons to be used against Israel. This theory eventually became accepted as gospel in Washington, notwithstanding that American and International intelligence agencies asserted there was no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. However, based on this baseless assertion, these same players called for military action against Iran.

Following the “Arab Spring” popular revolts against standing regimes in the Middle East the longstanding tension between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Alawite ruling minority in Syria exploded in resistance against Syrian ruler Bashar Al-Assad. This conflict had been festering for two generations. In 1982, armed resistance from the Sunni population resulted in a massacre in the city of Hama under orders from Hafiz al-Assad, Bashar’s father. Bashar retaliated to the more recent revolt with unprecedented cruelty, and has been accused of using chemical weapons against Syrian rebels. Whatever the United States or other nations might do to remove the Assad regime, the civil war there will continue unabated.

However, neoconservatives have seized on this more recent revolt against the Assad government as justification for military action to carry out regime change there, but not just because the Assad regime is objectionable, but rather because in an attack on Syria they see an opportunity to strike a crippling blow against Iran. As conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks stated on the PBS News Hour on September 6, “this isn’t really about Syria. . . . the real issue is the broader credibility of the President, the international credibility of the United States, especially vis-à-vis Iran. This is really about Iran more than Syria.”

Brooks’ widely held view is a miscalculation. Even if the Assad regime is removed from power, Iran will not be significantly damaged in its foreign, nuclear or economic policy.

A quick examination of all of these efforts – the pretext based on the 9/11 tragedy for ousting Saddam Hussein, weak justification for U.S. involvement in a longstanding and ongoing civil war in Syria, and the claim that Iran is not only directing all anti-Israeli action in the Middle East, but is also a nuclear threat show that the neoconservative agenda is a tissue of fantasy designed to convince the world, episode by episode, to completely reshape the region with U.S. military firepower.

Americans should not be listening to these neoconservative voices. They have been responsible for a debilitating and useless conflict in Iraq already. Their “advice” to President Obama and his administration will only drag the United States into another useless and debilitating conflict in the Middle East that will accomplish nothing, and will exacerbate violence rather than bringing the world closer to peaceful resolution of the tensions in the region.

William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He has worked in the Middle East for more than 40 years.



To bomb or not to bomb? Obama’s threat is butt of Syrian jokes

By AFP, Damascus/Al Arabiya
September 10, 2013

As Obama delays a strike against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime thought imminent just over a week ago, Syrians on both sides of their civil war are resorting to black humour, sharing jokes and cartoons via mobile phone and the Internet.

After saying he had the authority to act on his own to strike Syria for its deadly use of chemical weapons near Damascus on August 21, Obama then referred the matter to Congress for a vote.

Now, with the prospects of a quick congressional vote diminishing and Obama cautiously welcoming a Russian initiative that would see Assad hand over his chemical arsenal, an imminent decision by the president is even less likely.

That apparent hesitation to act has given both pro- and anti-Assad Syrians a field day.

One Syrian posted a picture of Obama on Facebook with a biting caption that reads: “When Congress gives me the green light to strike, I will ask my wife Michelle and my in-laws. If they say it’s alright, I’ll go ahead!”

Meanwhile, an Assad opponent said on the Internet he wants to “sue Barack Obama for spreading false information and for breaching the peace,” 10 days after announcements were made of what seemed to be an imminent strike.

Another joke making the rounds on anti-regime Facebook pages was much darker, more than two years into a conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead.

“Mr. President, you are right. We should wait another three years until the Syrian people are extinct,” it read.

Cartoons mocking Obama’s “indecision” made the rounds, with one depicting the U.S. president as Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse.

Another joke makes fun of the U.S. secretary of state, calling on Syrians to sign up for an imagined mobile phone service called John “Kerry, inform me at any cost” of when a strike would take place.

Some shared a joke about a man using unconventional means to propose to his fiancée: “Honey, let’s wait till after the strike. We’ll see what happens then.”

Others told of a man who tried to convince his wife they needed to find a new home before the strike, while she replied: “Let’s wait. Rent will be cheaper afterwards.”

While the regime appeared not to have put in place any exceptional measures ahead of a possible, some commentators mocked the panic stirred in neighbouring countries.

“The Israelis have distributed gas masks, the Jordanians are on alert, the Turks are deploying anti-aircraft missiles day and night, the Lebanese are nervous, the Iraqis are lost and the Egyptians are following up on our news more than their own…”

“Are we sure there’s a strike against Syria?” quipped one Facebook user.

Another imagined Syrians gathering, as they would to watch a football match, around “giant screens in public places, to watch the military strike live.”

“An evening with shisha and drinks,” the Internet surfer joked.

The football theme ran through other jokes, as a cartoon mocking the idea that Obama’s strike would hit sensitive targets showed players covering their groins with their hands.

“Hide them well. We want to continue having children,” the caption reads.

With some 60 percent of Americans opposed to a strike, according to a survey published on Monday, Obama has placed both the United States’ and his own credibility at stake over the matter.



Israel’s Lobbyists Pushing Hard for another War in the Middle East

By Jeremy Salt, Palestine Chronicle
September 08, 2013

Ankara–Two million refugees out of Syria, some of them Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 and some Iraqi refugees from 2004. They are the consequences of war and yet the raging beast that is devouring the Middle East is still not satiated. Another war looms. Another country already devastated is to be shattered by missile attacks. Who wants this war: who could want it? Who could even think of avenging the dead by calling for more killing?

It is not the people of the world. All polls show they are against it. Not just the people of Latin America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia and China but the American people, the British people, the French people and the Turkish people. It is only the politicians who want this war: Obama, Kerry, Hagel, McCain and others in the US; Cameron and Hague in Britain; Hollande in France; and Erdogan in Turkey. None of them has any proof of their accusation that the Syrian army used chemical weapons around Damascus, but proof is beside the point. Their Muslim contras have failed to destroy the government in Damascus and now in the chemical weapons attack they have their pretext for doing the job themselves.

The US administration is now deciding how long this attack should last. Should it be a few days, or a few months? Should it be aimed at just punishing the ‘regime’ or should it be aimed at destroying it altogether, which seems to be the emerging consensus? They are talking this over confidently, almost nonchalantly, McCain playing poker on his mobile phone because he is so bored, as though their missile attacks on other countries have lulled them into thinking that their military power is so great they could not possibly be hurt themselves.

Erdogan wants a ‘Kosovo-style’ aerial campaign. In 1999, NATO aircraft flew more than 38,000 ‘sorties’ over Yugoslavia, of which number 10,484 were strike attacks. Operation Allied Force lasted for 78 days, not the 30 days claimed by Kerry when being questioned by the Senate committee which finally voted for war on Syria. In 2011 NATO launched Operation Unified Protector against Libya ‘to protect the people from attack or threat of attack.’

This particular ‘operation’ lasted for seven months, during which 26,500 ‘sorties’ were flown, 9700 of them strike sorties. Even the National Transitional Council, the incoming government after the destruction of the government in Tripoli, said 25,000 people had been killed. A similar operation over Syria, a country much better able to defend itself, and with powerful allies besides, would cause enormous further destruction and the death of many thousands of people. This is the meaning of ‘Kosovo-style’ aerial warfare. In fact, what is shaping up is even worse, an air war that will have more in common with Iraq than the bombing of Yugoslavia. The targets and objectives are being expanded all the time.

Saudi Arabia has no politicians and no public opinion polls which would tell us what the Saudi people think of their government and its role in the destruction of Syria. The only country in which the government and the people are clearly united in their support for an attack on Syria is Israel. Polls show that nearly 70 per cent of Jewish Israelis – Palestinians are fully against it – are in favor of the US striking Syria, while thinking that Israel should stay out unless Syria or Hezbollah retaliate with strikes against Israeli targets.

The British vote against war and Obama’s hesitation forced Israel and its lobbyists in the US to break cover, ending the silly pretense that Israel is not involved in Syria and does not really care who wins. David Horowitz, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote an infuriated piece about ‘how a perfect storm of British ineptitude and gutlessness sent the wrong message to the butcher of Damascus and left Israel more certain than ever that it can rely only on itself.’(1) The novelist Noah Beck accused Obama of being spineless(2). Others in the media called him weak and unreliable. By ‘blinking’, he had sent a dangerous message to ‘cruel regimes’ and terrorists everywhere. Debkafile, an outlet for disinformation and other scrapings from the floor of Israeli intelligence, echoed this line. Obama’s ‘about turn’ had let Iran, Syria and Hezbollah ‘off the hook ’, creating a ‘military nightmare’ for Israel, Jordan and Turkey. (8)

The same lines of attack and support were duplicated by Israel’s formal and informal lobbyists in the US. Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post sneered at Obama for hesitating: ‘Perhaps we should be publishing the exact time the bombs will fall lest we disrupt dinner in Damascus’. Wrote William Kristol in the Weekly Standard: ‘Is President Obama going wobbly on Syria? No. He’s always been wobbly on Syria – and on pretty much everything else … the worst outcome would be for Obama not to call Congress back or not to act at all but to falter and retreat. For his retreat would be America’s retreat and his humiliation America’s humiliation.’ Kristol’s stablemate, Thomas Donnelly, thought Obama content ‘‘to see Assad kill his own people – which he has done in the tens if not hundreds of thousands – as long as Assad doesn’t use chemical weapons’. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that the most likely option for Syria was partition, ‘with the pro-Assad, predominantly Alawite Syrians controlling one region and the Sunni and Kurdish Syrians controlling the rest.’ The fragmentation of Syria on ethno-religious lines, of course, has been a Zionist objective for decades. No mention by Friedman of the Druze, but never mind that: in the interim, America’s best option is not the launching of Cruise missiles ‘but an increase in the training and arming of the Free Syrian Army – including the antitank and antiaircraft weapons it’s long sought.’ Friedman thought this might increase the influence on the ground of the ‘more moderate groups over the jihadist ones.’

At the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the entire stable was off and running. ‘Forget the red line and engage in Syria,’ wrote David Schenker, as if the US has not been intensely engaged in Syria for the past three years, fomenting the violence which has built up to the present catastrophic situation. Wrote Robert Satloff: ‘Given the strategic stakes at play in Syria which touches [sic.] on every key American interest in the region, the wiser course of action is to take the opportunity of the Assad regime’s flagrant violation of global norms to take action that hastens the end of Assad’s regime … this will also enhance the credibility of the president’s commitment to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability.’(3)

Michael Herzog thought the US could learn from Israeli air attacks on Syria: ‘In Israel’s experience Assad has proven to be a rational (if ruthless) actor. He was deterred from responding to recent and past strikes because he did not want to invite the consequences of Israeli military might. Therefore, the United States has a good chance of deterring him as well.’

In Commentary, Max Boot called on the US to use air power in cooperation with ground action by ‘vetted’ rebel forces to ‘cripple and ultimately bring down Assad’s regime, making impossible further atrocities such as the use of chemical weapons.’ (4) How these forces are to be ‘vetted’ and how they, rather than the Islamist groups who are doing most of the fighting, could bring down the ‘regime’ Boot does not say, most probably because he doesn’t know. Daniel Pipes, the long-term advocate of Israeli violence in the Middle East, writing in National Review online, wanted not a ‘limited’ strike but something that would do real damage and brings the ‘regime’ down.(5)

Outside these journals and the think tanks, former ‘government advisers’ and ‘foreign policy experts’ signed a petition calling for ‘direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime’.(6) Many of the names will be familiar from the Project for the New American Century and plans laid long ago for a series of wars in the Middle East: Elliott Abrams, Fouad Ajami, Gary Bauer, Max Boot, Ellen Bork, Eliot A. Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Thomas Donnelly, Douglas Feith, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Bernard-Henri Levy, Michael Makovsky, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Peretz, Karl Rove, Randy Scheunemann, Leon Wieseltier and Radwan Ziadeh.

AIPAC and the Jewish organizations piled the pressure on Congress and the White House. AIPAC’s statement on Syria stressed the sending of a ‘forceful message of resolve to Iran and Hizbullah’ at a time ‘Iran is racing towards obtaining nuclear capability.’ The Politico website quoted unnamed AIPAC officials as saying that ‘some 250 Jewish leaders and AIPAC activists will storm the halls on Capitol Hill beginning next week to persuade lawmakers that Congress must adopt the resolution or risk emboldening Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon … they are expected to lobby virtually every member of Congress’ (7). Their ‘stepped-up involvement’ comes at a welcome time for the White House, wrote the Politico correspondent, given its difficulty in securing support for the resolution. The two top Republican leaders in the Senate, minority leader Mitch McConnell and minority whip John Comyn, had already been urged ‘by top Jewish donors and AIPAC allies’ to back the war resolution.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations called for an attack that would demonstrate ‘accountability’ to ‘those who possess weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Hezbollah.’ Morris Amitay of the pro-Israel Washington Political Action Committee thought that ‘for our [United States] credibility we have to do something.’ Bloomberg reported the Republican Jewish Coalition as sending an ‘action alert’ to its 45,000 members ‘directing them to tell Congress to authorize force.’ (9) The same message of support for an attack was sent out by the National Jewish Democratic Council and Abe Foxman of the so-called Anti-Defamation League, who stressed that while ‘he’s not doing this for Israel,’ the attack may have serious consequences for Israel.

With the exception of the Foxman statement, these organizations carefully kept any mention of Israel out of their public statements. In off the record discussions, however, it was the central concern. On August 30 Obama had a conference call with 1000 rabbis, with Syria, ‘at the White House’s request,’ according to Bloomberg, This time, at the White House’s request, [Syria was the topic of]the first question asked](9). Iran was not mentioned either but, said a leading rabbi from New York, ‘we have a strong stake in the world taking seriously our insistence that weapons of mass destruction should not proliferate’. Bloomberg quoted Obama as ‘arguing’ that ‘a military response is necessary to uphold a longstanding international ban on the use of chemical weapons use and to deter Assad from using them again on his own people or such neighbors as Israel and Jordan.’ Of course, this was not an argument at all but Obama telling the rabbis what they wanted to hear. In a separate approach, 17 leading rabbis ‘covering the religious and political spectrum’, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, sent a letter to Congress calling on it to authorize force against Syria. The language could scarcely be more Orwellian: ‘Through this act, Congress has the capacity to save thousands of lives.’ (10)

Another conference call was held between representatives of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and White House deputy national security advisors Tony Blinken and Ben Rhodes. The representatives waited until Blinken and Rhodes were ‘off the call’ before advising constituent organizations ‘not to make their statements ‘Israel-centric’,’ according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (11) A powerful figure wheeled out by the lobby is Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who funds settlements in Jerusalem and on the West Bank and spent (along with his wife) $93 million trying to see Obama defeated in the presidential election last year. Adelson is a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition and supports the pressure it is putting on Congress to authorize a military attack on Syria.

The carefully crafted outlines of this deceitful campaign are very evident:
1. This is not about Israel
2. This is about America’s national interest.
3. This is about punishing a government which has used chemical weapons on its own people.
4. This is about saving lives
5. This is about a government that has no respect for international law and norms.
6. This is about sending a ‘forceful message of resolve to Hezbollah and Iran.’
7. This is about showing that Obama’s red lines are not empty threats.

Obama’s own ‘full court press strategy’ includes interviews with six television anchors ahead of the congressional vote. The moment Obama said everything AIPAC wanted to hear during the primaries was the moment he took the first step into the tight corner in which he now finds himself. This is now a global confrontation with a lot at stake besides Israel’s interests, but it is pushing as hard as it can to make sure this war goes ahead. Like David Cameron, a congressional vote against war will allow Obama to back out of the corner by saying that the American people have spoken and he cannot take them into war against their wishes. Will he do that, or is really going to plunge his country into war irrespective of what Congress or the American people think? By the end of the coming week we should have the answer.

Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and is the author of Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896. In his latest book, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (UC Press, June 2008

References added by JfJfP postings
(1) Perfidious Albion hands murderous Assad a spectacular victory  Times of India, August 30.
(2) Obama: Spineless on Syria, American Thinker, September 2nd, 2013
(3) Bombing Syria: What’s the Goal?, Washington Institute, August 26th, 2013
(4) Obama Has the Authority to Act on Syria, Commentary, August 30th, 2013.
(5) Contrary to the author’s assertion, Daniel Pipes has consistently argued for non-intervention in Syria, but for attacking Israel’s real enemy, Iran.
Waiting Out the War in Syria : Four reasons why intervention is not in America’s interests, August 22nd.
Forget Syria, Target Iran , National Review, September 10th.
(6) This was a letter to the President signed on August 27th by 75 American foreign policy experts and government officials.
(7) AIPAC to go all-out on Syria, politico, September 5th.
(8) Obama’s climb-down on Syria attack spells “military nightmare” for allies Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Debkafile, September 1st.
(9) Adelson New Obama Ally as Jewish Groups Back Syria Strike, Bloomberg, September 4th.
(10) Rabbis urge Congress to back Obama on Syria, JTA September 4th
(11) How White House Push to Jews Spurred Shift on Syria, Jewish Forward, September 4th

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