US Military Demanded Netanyahu Smackdown

[dkf]

An amazing story in Foreign Policy today by Mark Perry, the Middle East expert and security consultant. (Note: the military denies Perry's report which is, of course, to be expected. It would never admit to this kind of involvement in policy. I am relying on Perry's account).

Perry reports that the startling and unpredicted US -Israel smackdown did not really start in Jerusalem this week. It began months ago when CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team to brief the Joint Chiefs and the White House on the danger continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict posed to US troops in the Middle East.

The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Admiral Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

The White House was also stunned by the report and decided to act. Its first move was to dispatch Vice President Biden to Israel and Palestine to announce the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Prime Minister Netanyahu''s government tried to abort the US policy shift (and avoid negotiations) by announcing the new settler units in East Jerusalem. But the attempt blew up in Bibi's face when Obama, Biden, and Clinton reacted with public fury at the unprecedented public diss of the US by an ally and #1 foreign aid recipient.

Perry concludes that the "lobby" that argued for the policy shift is even more powerful than AIPAC.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/us-military-demanded-neta_b_498593.html