Israel: America's loose cannon ally

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has announced the long awaited joint military manoeuvres with the US has been postponed. Originally conceived as a massive display of naval, air, and army might to frighten Iran in giving up its nuclear programme, the Obama administration, learning that the right wing Netenyahu Likud dominated government might speed up the timetable to go it alone in attacking Tehran's deep earth nuclear facilities, has sent stern messages of warning to it trigger happy Zionist ally, to scotch any such plans.

Hence the quashing of the joint military exercises.

President Obama is not interesting in another war in west Asia, certainly not one in an election year. Israel knows this but wild poker player that it is, it is willing to play 'chicken'.

It now turns out that Israel's Mossad agents have been posing as CIA agents in Pakistan, recruiting 'Taliban like' elements to sabotage Irani nuclear plans by any means necessary. With this nugget of information, Iran's claim that Israel cum America has had a hand in the assassination of its nuclear scientists. Wily Mossad is playing on the Sunni Shia hostility to achieve its ends.

Curiously enough by pushing for a hit on Iran, the Zionist state has stirred a feeling of great discomfort among its own citizenry. A recent poll showed that a growing number of Israelis think that Israel should give up its own nuclear weapons if that will induce Iran to cease its 'rush' to developing nuclear weapons. The turn in public opinion reveals a realisation inside Israeli that a war with Iran can 'destroy' Israel as we know it for aggressive political and military symmetries which more oft than not turn out to be based on false presumptions.

In a way, Israel as an ally is America's worst nightmare. The Zionist state can and has played the world's only 'superpower' for a chump when it can get away with it. It did attack the USS Ashland, killing 34 and wounding 171; it got off with a slap on the wrist. It spies on the US, playing on American Jews religious identity: Jonathan Pollard is languishing in prison for more than 20 years.

America tends to forget Israel does not share views up and down the column of state interests with the US. An incident involving North Korea has been conveniently swept under the carpet: to buy off Pyongyong from supplying DPRK scud missiles to Iran, no other friend of the US Shimon Peres was willing to pay more than a billion dollars, as well as help the North develop its mineral industry, at a time the US was yet once more threatening the DPRK with attack. In the end, Washington slapped the Israel hand so hard Peres dropped the deal.

Iran's threat of closing the Straits of Hormuz sent Israelis back to its nostalgic hope chest of plans to 'destroy' it enemies one way or the other. And what do we find, the Zionists dusted off a plan that they tried and failed at a time Nasser's Egypt closed the access to Eilat by sea in the 1950s. Egypt's move sparked the 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal by Israel, England, and France which ended in failure and threats both from Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev. Israel's mad design brought the Soviet Union into the Middle East, and gave the push to bury the British and French colonial influence in the regional. Israel got away with the occupation of the Sinai peninsula, though.

What did not work in 1956, will not do in 2012. Nevertheless, the Obama administration has to tread lightly since as GuamDiary has posited, Israel is a domestic issue in US elections.

By refusing to handle more roughly and rudely Israel, the US is perceived in some quarters as helpless in stopping Israel. Its inability to stop illegal seizure of Palestinian land and implantation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is an excellent case in point.

Among America's many worries, the US should show little tolerance for an ally that has run amok and may in the end bring the pillars of the temple down on its own head, and perhaps justifiably so.