Obama's Fool and His Errand

Dan from New York:

Column One: Biden’s lost cause

By CAROLINE GLICK

US Vice President Joseph Biden’s job is about to stop being easy. Indeed, it is about to become impossible.

On Monday, he will arrive in Israel for a three-day visit. Biden, who will meet with Israel’s leaders, will be the most senior official in the cavalcade of senior US officials who have descended on Israel in recent weeks. He will replace Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was here this week. Kerry himself replaced Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was here two weeks ago.

In his press conference in Jerusalem on Monday, Kerry explained the purpose of these visits. “...I am here and other people were here and Vice President Biden is coming shortly... to make sure we are all on the same page and that we are all clear about [Iran].”

Although Biden is just the latest senior US official to visit Israel to try to coerce the government not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, his visit is novel in one respect. In addition to his meetings with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s senior officials, Biden intends to make a case for the Obama administration’s policies towards Iran, the Palestinians and Israel directly to the Israeli public. During his trip he will give what is being billed as a major policy speech at Tel Aviv University.

In light of the gaping disparity between the Obama administration’s policies and those of the Israeli government, the apparent goal of Biden’s address is to shore up the position of the Israeli Left as an alternative to Netanyahu. Apparently, the picture emerging from all of the senior US officials’ meetings with Netanyahu is that Israel’s leader still feels comfortable defying them. Presumably, they now believe that the only way to force him to toe their line is by making him believe that the price of defiance will be his premiership.

This of course is a difficult task. The Left after all was roundly defeated in last year’s election. Making it a credible alternative is no mean task.

...The Left’s hope of forming a coalition with Obama against Netanyahu was given its most explicit expression last July in an op-ed by Haaretz’s editor-at-large Aluf Benn in The New York Times. After expressing his support for Obama’s policies, Benn bemoaned the fact that due to Obama’s low approval ratings among Israeli Jews (at the time they stood at 6% and they later plunged to 4%), it would be hard for him to convince the Israeli public to abandon its support for Netanyahu in favor of Obama’s – that is the Israeli Left’s – policies. To improve this dismal state of affairs, Benn suggested that Obama simply needs to make his case to the Israeli public, which “will surely listen” to him.

...Biden was selected for the job because he is widely perceived as the most pro-Israel senior member of the administration. The fact that before becoming vice president Biden had one of the most pro-Iran voting records in the Senate has done nothing to mitigate this perception. Indeed, despite the fact that Biden voted repeatedly against sanctions on Iran, claimed that Iran’s quest for nuclear bombs was understandable and called for the US to sign a nonaggression pact with the mullocracy while threatening to move for president George W. Bush’s impeachment if he were to order a military strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons programs...

[But the] Israeli public is not interested in a change of tone – from Obama or from the Israeli Left. It is interested in a change of policy. Until it gets it, the public will in all likelihood remain loyal to Netanyahu.

Joe Biden, 2001: "Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran."