Netanyahu Invite by Congress May End the World

 

If one listens to the Liberal, Progressive, Socialist political fronts from both sides if the American-Israeli divide one might get the opinion that a great transgression had occurred as the Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to appear before the United States Congress. The hue and cry from these corners over the timing of the invitation claiming that it is a sneaky ploy by Netanyahu to appear on the world stage to make points immediately before the coming election might originate from an actual and very valid complaint providing there is proof that Prime Minister Netanyahu actually had a hand in arranging this invitation. There have been calls from both nations for an invitation to also be extended to the Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog to speak before the United States Congress. This manufactured end of the world scenario, if one is to believe the claims that there are some underhanded maneuvers arranging a stage to exhibit Netanyahu before the world leading into the coming elections. The problem is that there is another reason for the invitation and its timing which explains everything, makes perfect sense and provides the reason that only Prime Minister Netanyahu received this invitation. Unfortunately, it is not exactly simple.

 

The Democrat leadership of Senator Harry Reid and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi echoes the complaints from some of the Labor Party ministers in Israel decrying this supposedly blatant misuse of their power by the Republicans inviting the Israeli leader this close to the Israeli elections. But what if the reasoning behind inviting Prime Minister Netanyahu has nothing to do with the Israeli elections and would have been extended even if there were no Israeli elections on the horizon. The reason behind the invitation of Prime Minister Netanyahu is due to the intransigence promised by United States President Obama. The reason for this invitation is to be given a second and opposing opinion on Iran and their nuclear weapons programs along with any pertinent information and developments in the Iranian missile and ICBM development programs such that any steps the Congress might wish to press forward with they would have the necessary details which thus far have not been forthcoming from the White House, State Department or the Pentagon as all are keeping to the pretense that all is just fine following the President’s lead. The person who has been most vocal on the world’s stage and has challenged President Obama’s position is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. One reason for not also inviting Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog is that his position has been consistently to claim that Netanyahu has alienated the American President and that Herzog’s claim is that he will repair the relations with President Obama and stand with the President particularly in reaching a peace with the Mahmoud Abbas and also back the President in his wise course in negotiating with Iran as Herzog claims to have complete faith that President Obama knows exactly what he is doing and is the sole best hope for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been invited more for holding question and answer sessions with the key people as well as before various Congressional committees and as many Representatives and Senators as time permits. Most of the work which will be accomplished at this set of meetings will be done in private beyond the bright lights of the cameras and beyond the hearing ears of the media and will be more of a planning and working session for a bipartisan approach to Iran armed with the information which Prime Minister Netanyahu can provide.

 

The real reason is the promise from the White House to veto any and every bill which reaches the President’s desk which includes placing stronger sanctions on Iran even if the sanctions are scheduled for after the current deadline for an agreement to be negotiated between the P5+1 and Iran whether that turns out to be March 1, 2015 or July 1, 2015. One of the people who most likely played a large role in pushing for the meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was New Jersey Democrat Senator Robert Menendez who has authored legislation which would reapply many of the sanctions that he and others believe were prematurely lifted by the White House and has stated in the legislation that the reapplication of those sanctions would only take place were there no progress in the negotiations with Iran on their nuclear weapons program. There will also be many members of Congress who will want to know what the Israelis know about the newest rocket which Iran has on the launch pad outside of Tehran which was just pictured by an Israeli intelligence satellite. The fact that this was set up out on a launch pad just as an Israeli intelligence satellite passed overhead allowing it to be pictured implies that the Iranians desired to make this new rocket known without necessarily having to launch it such that it would have delivered a payload somewhere in the Atlantic or Pacific spending the rocket in the process. This way the Iranians have left the properties such as range and payload up to those people assigned to make such assessments for the military by the Israeli government. There will probably also be questions seeking Israeli insights on the new Saudi Arabian King Salman, age seventy-nine and also not in the best of health. King Salman has promised a smooth transference of power and a continuation of King Abdullah’s reign for the immediate future. Additionally, the events in Yemen will likely be another front where Iran will have extended reach and should the Houthis be capable of ousting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), things will worsen as this would place Iran perched over the straight named Bab el Mandeb which basically grants control over sea lanes passing from the Red Sea including to and from the Suez Canal and from the Israeli port of Eilat, to and from the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and beyond.

 

There are quite a few questions on events, predictions, assessments and pure conjecture which the members of Congress could desire to pry from Benyamin Netanyahu as well as promising him their support should anything fester and explode into any manner of a war. There are currently threats being made by Hezballah which are rather doubtful unless demanded of them by Iran, Syria which has at the least the two reasons they could use to launch an attack on Israel with the recent airstrike which killed a number of Hezballah fighters as well as some five Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) troops with one senior Hezballah officer and an Iranian General, and, of course, there is the threat from Iran who has threatened to strike Israel with lightning bolts unlike anything Israel has ever experienced and will be completely defenseless against such an attack. The Congressional leadership and many members will vie for some personal time with Prime Minister seeking more information than the time will allow even should they manage some one-on-one.

 

If anything, this working visit with the members of the two houses of Congress and meeting those willing from both parties will prove to be more of an anti-campaign event than it would prove as a positive part of his campaign. Already President Obama has stated that neither he nor any member of his administration will be meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister and has threatened that the Israeli leader will be made to pay dearly for this visit and his not clearing the visit with the President before accepting the invitation from Speaker Boehner. The fact that President Obama is targeting the Israeli Prime Minister and not targeting the Republican Speaker of the House for not informing the President of his plans to invite a foreign dignitary to speak before Congress means he believes the Israeli Prime Minister is cowed as he has likely misinterpreted Netanyahu’s civility in the past for timidity, a view which is about to be corrected. The refusal of President Obama to meet with a visiting head of state says more about the American President than it does Prime Minister Netanyahu. President Obama could have made more points with the liberal socialist progressives from the Israeli Labor Party and his fellow democrats as by simply inviting Yitzhak Herzog along with Hatnua Party head Tzipi Livni who would share the Prime Minister position should their combined ticket allow for them to be chosen and succeed in forming a ruling coalition. Instead the President simply acted almost childishly doing virtually the same thing as stomping one’s feet and threatening to hold one’s breath until they turn purple. It will be interesting for all to see how this melodrama plays out though I doubt seriously it will have any bearing on the election. What may have an unimaginable effect on the election would be an attack by Syria, Hezballah, Iran or any of the Iranian proxies on Israel. I can only hope and pray that there not be any kind of assault on Israel, both in Israel or outside her borders. If I were a supporter of the Prime Minister I would also hope that President Obama would do everything within his powers to resist and fight Netanyahu while he is present in the United States making as big a scene as possible as these activities would only serve to press Israelis to vote for Netanyahu.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Can We Trust the Government Alphabet Agencies?

It seems every other week we read of yet another breach in security or illegal program spying on individuals, companies, foreign leaders of both friendly and not so friendly nations, and even agencies monitoring other agencies or even Congress. Then there have been the reports of the Administration using the IRS, OSHA, EPA and NSA among other agencies to spy on, impede operations of, obstruct functions in, intervene in daily operations or investigate personnel, personal, intimate and other sensitive information on organizations, businesses and people who they suspected might oppose or otherwise threaten the aims and objectives of their programs or even interfere with campaigning and electioneering that might oppose the President. The breadth, width and depth of these invasive policies have definitively proven that even if you have done nothing wrong or illegal you still might have much to fear and worry about from a government which appears to stop at nothing to compromise personal privacy of those they suspect of any opposition or even simply disagreeing with policies and intended programs. This past week we learned that the NSA not only has the capability to monitor and record every phone call and electronic communication of an entire nation and store the information for review for as long as a full month. Of course this revelation refused to identify the nation the Administration has chosen for such special consideration and inspection though I have a pretty good idea which nation has such a level of interest for such a deep and total level of spying and penetration into even the daily lives of every citizen and it is not the Russians, Chinese or any of the other nations which many American citizens would consider to be adversaries.

 

One of the most threatening and freedom chilling revelations was the level of inspection and extraneous required paperwork, reports, queries and intensive inspection that were utilized by the Administration through challenging the tax status or approval to applications for tax exempt status of agencies, organizations and other political entities which the administration had singled out as possibly having intentions to work against the reelection of President Obama. When it became obvious that many of the particular groups had identifying information or names containing phrases which included Tea Party, Constitution, Freedom, Conservative, Liberty and other identifiers the Administration suspected would indicate largely conservative, libertarian and constitutionalist groups which they considered to be political adversaries. There have been claims by some conservative and Republican sources claiming that these attacks were largely responsible for the apparent disappearance in the last election of Tea Party groups and have even blamed these reputedly illegal actions for Mitt Romney’s loss in the Presidential election. Of course whether those claims are truly valid is something we can argue forever as nobody will ever be able to prove anything one way or the other. The one thing I hope we could all agree on is such abuse of powers and using the brute force of the government for politicized gains is something that must not be condoned no matter who is committing such actions. What makes these accusations even more frightening is that apparently fellow citizens who work presumably for the public good performed these actions without objection or complaint. But then again, the Administration under President Obama has prosecuted both a higher percentage and larger number of whistle-blowers than any previous Presidential Administration in American history. They have also garnered one of the top spots for resistance and outright refusal to release information when responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. In many ways President Obama has operated in one of the most secretive and least transparent Administration ever while also having unheard of levels of malfeasance by government agencies and the worst records on protection and respect of privacy rights of individuals.

 

If none of the above worries you, then perhaps a few other bits of information might place things in a different light. The United States government is working in conjunction with a number of internet companies, technology companies, university researchers and the military on artificial intelligence research with an emphasis on algorithms and programs which can be used to predict both general behavior of the society and to find ways of predicting individual behavior through methods of simple observational data which can be gleamed using current surveillance and other related information. Another threat comes thanks to the Patient Protections and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which will place all of people’s medical records and information in the hands of the most invasive department who already hold massive amounts of your personal financial information, as the IRS will now be tasked to handle your taxes and healthcare. Add to this the NSA and their abilities to record and analyze amounts of electronic data virtually beyond imagination and their working often at the behest of the FBI or the CIA through requests handled by Homeland Security Agency and couple these abilities and place them in the hands of an oppressive government and you are looking at the worst case combination of the most terrible predictions from the heart of political science fiction such as Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and throw in the idea of Carousel from Logan’s Run as the end treatment resulting from the use by Obamacare of a plan named the “complete lives system” for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others, as proposed and written by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama. The future which is approaching faster than many of us can realize will either be a place of unbelievable progress and freedom or the most oppressive government which is intrusive to the point where personal liberties and freedoms will be but a fleeting memory and we will fear even exhibiting the slightest unaccepted action and our every emotional reaction will be picked up and recorded for analysis by biometric surveillance possibly provoking government interventions for the slightest hints of thought crimes.

 

Where I have enormous hopes for the future, I also temper that with a healthy level of suspicion and respect for the potentials for misuse of coming technologies. When I worked as a production repair and test technician as well as an R&D technician with the engineers of a company which manufactured leading edge EEG and computer automated seizure detection systems using mathematical algorithms to detect and aid in diagnosing patients and which were used for sleep studies and treating and analyzing epilepsy and other disorders of the brain, I got a glimpse into how much we were able to determine about medical conditions and other systems simply through mathematical analysis of medical data. This was close to thirty years ago and the company had units which not only recorded up to sixty four channels of EEG but also did seizure detection and analysis in real time even with processors as slow and primitive as were available back them. I also had the pleasure and honor of working with the most intelligent person I have ever had the privilege to know, a gentleman who designed circuits and had an understanding of electronics as well as higher math that was astonishing. I was honored when he chose for me to work on any project and realized the full potential of monitoring and predictive analysis which was available at that time and cannot even begin to imagine where those areas of science, medicine and electronic monitoring have progressed to and attained. That is part of why I have a deep respect for the potentials for government to use technology in intrusive and subversive ways which can be turned against the people in order to control the population under the guise of working for the betterment of mankind. For one frightening example of such simply do some research and read about the “complete lives system” and take a few deep breaths and try to relax with that knowledge and knowing it is at the heart of the government’s healthcare plans for the United States.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Obama and the Middle East Dilemma

While everyone stares at the ever shifting, ever blurring Syrian Chemical Weapons red line which is now befuddling the White House, the Syrian civil war continues to wind on and on eventually to determine who will prove supreme, bad or worse. There is no good side to choose in this fight. It now comes down to Assad backed by Iran and Hezballah, the Syrian Free Army which is backed largely by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the al Nusra Front which represents al-Qaeda and even should Bashar Assad be toppled there will still be Hezballah allied with the IRGC guerilla forces attempting to preserve the influence of their Iranian masters. As far as the United States is concerned there is no actual good guy for them to back though President Obama has appeared to have a soft spot for the Muslim Brotherhood in the past.

 

The one democratic country which is very concerned over the eventual results and intermediate activities in Syria is, of course, Israel. While the Israelis are not particularly fond of any of the players, their previous knowledge of Assad may make him the least troublesome of the evils for Israel. Do not misunderstand that Assad would make Israeli leaders overjoyed as they have fought three conflicts against his forces; one in the Six Day War in 1967, once again when both Syria and Egypt launched the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and their final conflict was an air war over the Bekaa Valley in 1982 where the Israelis knocked sixty Syrian fighters from the skies in two days of dog fights losing absolutely no planes themselves. For the memory of these defeats Bashar al-Assad might be sufficiently gun shy that would make his remaining in power preferable to having to teach a new leader the perils of engaging the IDF from scratch.

 

Whatever the eventual result of the civil war in Syria the one thing Israel absolutely cannot allow is for Iran or anybody else to funnel new and more dangerous weapon systems to Hezballah in Lebanon. This is what spurred the recent air raids by the Israelis on Damascus and along the Syrian-Lebanon border over the past week. The Israelis were removing transports carrying new weapon systems which would have posed a serious increase in the threat potential of Hezballah. One can only imagine what such systems might have entailed as Hezballah already possesses at a minimum sixty-thousand rockets of various ranges with which to threaten Israel. Despite such a seemingly overwhelming threat potential, Iran has still decided it is worth the possible losses to attempt to further arm Hezballah in order to turn their threat into a certainty that Tel Aviv would be decimated in return for any actions taken against the Iranian nuclear program. Iran has made it very certain that it matters not who attacks their nuclear program, Israel will receive the brunt of the Iranian response through Hezballah and Hamas and Syria providing Syria is still a part of the Iranian Shiite Crescent across the Middle East.

 

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC President Obama is doing a number of pirouettes on the head of a pin trying to avoid being pinned down to his red line should Syria use chemical weapons threat. Syria has, according to Israeli, French, British and even most United States sources, already deployed Sarin nerve agent against the rebel forces and civilians. There have been reports of multiple usages yet President Obama continues to squirm and wrestle with these facts attempting to twist them into a cloud of doubts in order to back away from the precipice and avoid actually being forced to act. The problem President Obama is facing is that he really miscalculated when making a threat he never expected to have to ever face. Now that reality has not only caught up but has swept past his threat of action crossing over his red line, President Obama must now fudge the facts and blow enough smoke that he can claim that his red line was more flexible and has remained inviolate, but with his red line not only crossed but rather obliterated, President Obama has been left appearing completely toothless in all ways concerning Syrian use of chemical weapons.

 

There is one huge problem beyond the simple fact that President Obama has been rendered impotent concerning events in Syria; all of his threats and posturing over the Iranian nuclear program are now mute and meaningless. This can only serve to make the Iranian nuclear weapons threat even more potent as it is now obvious that President Obama never actually intended to ever take action in order to prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons. This leaves all of Europe as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the other nations within the GCC, and anyone else who Iran may see as an opponent directly in the crosshairs of a potential nuclear Iran. What makes things even more clouded is that now all of the intelligence information which originated with the United States or was heavily influenced by the United States now cannot be considered to be anything other than a ruse to prevent the appearance of a need to act. This is very likely to cause a complete reevaluation of the entire Iranian situation by Israel at the very least. The backing away from his red line by President Obama has resulted in the entire world now realizing that they are on their own when it comes to the Iranian threats. This can only lead to a more dangerous Middle East, like anybody thought such was even possible.

 

Beyond the Cusp