Guest Blog: Is McCain good for the Jews?

Over the years Israel has tended to favor Republican over Democrat presidents. This is not the place to analyze this phenomenon and I raise it only as backdrop to the present question: which, if either of the two candidates for the US presidency, is more likely to benefit Israel over the next four to eight years? Each was clearly addressing Jewish voters in proclaiming, when refering to the nuclear Iran issue, that he would never allow another Holocaust. But rhetoric aside, how can we assess how each might be expected to exercise the levers of power available to the president should a crisis, such as dealing with a more critical Iranian threat, arise?

McCain makes issue with the relative newness of Obama to national politics, and certainly this means also that the Democrat has a relatively smaller record by which to be judged (as did John F. Kennedy in 1960). One factor worth noting is that if President Clinton, judged by his eight years effort to broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and having focused almost exclusively on that effort during his final months in office; if this qualifies Clinton as a "friend" of Israel then Obama's choice of almost the entire Clinton team of Middle East advisors suggests that Obama also may be intending a more active administration policy in the Levant than has Bush over the past eight years.

As McCain himself points out, his own record goes back two decades and more, a record generally considered favorable to Israel. But his decisions in support of eight years of Bush Middle East policy opens questions of his judgment, and this issue will occupy the remainder of this article.

George W. Bush's overall performance as president has left him highly unpopular to the general voting public, so much so that McCain is forced to frequently make a point of distancing himself from the Republican president. Except on the issue of Iraq. McCain proudly points to his support of the war, first by promoting the decision in the run-up to the invasion, and today as defender of that decision. As events stand five years into the war, Iraq's social, political and military infrastructures are in far worse condition than under the dictatorship, having never recovered from the effects of the invasion. The monetary cost to the American taxpayer is estimated at more than $10b per month, more than $600b since the invasion. And five years into the war, President Bush stood on the deck of that carrier in the Persian Gulf and declared victory whereas America's generals responsible for the war's conduct are far more gloomy in their assessments.

The original rationale for war, weapons of mass destruction (wmd), Iraqi complicity in the World Trade Center outrage, have both long since been discredited. The only remaining justification was to remove and bring to justice the tyrant of Baghdad. But whatever the rationale, by decapitating the Iraqi regime Bush-Cheney-McCain introduced a power vacuum into the already unstable Gulf region, an event they should have been able to anticipate; a power vacuum into which Iran, previously contained by the threat of her only credible enemy, Sadam Hussein's Iraq, nimbly stepped. Taking advantage of a US military distracted by fighting two wars, Iran seized the opportunity to clandestinely provide Shi'ite insurgents with IED'S (improvised explosive devices) and other weapons and training, then openly supporting the Iraqi insurgency against US troops in Iraq. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian mouse that roared, brazenly called Bush's bluff of preemptive military action should Iran not end its nuclear program. In the end, as Ahmadinejad expected, Bush demurred, the strike never took place, and Iran's nuclear program continues today unchecked.

What was and should have been anticipated by Bush and those supporting the decision to invade, was the impact of even the implicit threat posed by an aggressive and radical Islamist regime across the gulf from the Arab oil producers. What should have been anticipated before deciding to go to war was the risk an unbound Iran would pose both to the production and the transport of oil to an energy dependent world. What should have been obvious to Bush and his policy supporters planning that war was how freeing Iran from the threat of its only credible regional enemy would impact the overall security of the region, the security of oil  and resulting price inflation, and the impact of skyrocketing oil prices on the world economy. Was the invasion of Iraq and the resulting consequences the reason for the current crisis engulfing the world today? Probably not by itself. But it certainly set the economic and psychological stage for the disaster following the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

At the very least the failure to anticipate these outcomes points to a dangerous lack of foresight, an absence of strategic awareness on the part of the Bush Administration and its supporters. If Bush is known to place dogma over data, to pride himself on following instinct over the advice of policy experts (including the CIA), how can we judge John McCain in his rush to support the Iraq invasion; how does his participation in this tragic policy-making debacle reflect on his much vaunted strategic military and diplomatic judgment?

Republicans, and particularly the current president have, and continue to enjoy, widespread popularity in Israel. But how warranted is that approval, that popularity? Can anyone say that Israel is better off today than it was eight years ago; is it likely to be better off in another eight years should another Republican administration under a President McCain succeed Bush in the White House?

Hanging the dictator of Baghdad may have served justice as a human rights issue, but from a national and world interest, as an example of "strategic" planning it can only be judged an unmitigated disaster. Israel (and the Gulf oil dependencies previously protected by a credible US defense umbrella) now has a new and serious military threat to deal with from a radical, missionary and hegemonic Iran, an Iran possibly going nuclear. The much-vaunted US defense shield of the oil fields and the region which Bush inherited from previous administrations back to Eisenhower is today, thanks to an overextended US military fighting two failing wars, in tatters. Which leaves to Israel with the burden not only of immediate self-defense against Iran and her proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, but of responsibility for what had before Bush been an American defense shield covering Israel and the oil producers. It is now on Israel's shoulders to protect those previous US dependencies, the Saudis and other Gulf states now facing the Iranian threat under the cloud of an uncertain US protector.

Because the Saudi coast of the Persian Gulf is Israel's front line in any future war with Iran, it is a strategic imperative for Israel to deny that beachhead to Ahmadinejad. But it doesn't stop there.

Should Israel find it necessary to defend its national interests, should the United States continue to distance itself from the threat posed by a nuclear Iran on its strategic interests, should it fall to Israel to deal with the Iranian threat unilaterally then take the blame for the tragic consequences resulting from that action, the economic fallout from the increased threat to the world's oil supplies will not fall on the country and president that created the problem, but on the state of the Jews and, since the reflexive reaction of the west to social stress is to blame the Jews, "world Jewry" can anticipate yet another cycle of traditional anti-semitism.

Whatever similarities or differences in social philosophy and international politics, at the very least a President Obama offers a change of political party. And after eight disastrous Republican years in the White House, any change is better than four more years.