A strong case can be made that George Bush's Appeasement remarks, delivered in Israel's Knesset last week, were a warning directed at Ehud Olmert on behalf of Bibi Netanyahu.
It's difficult to figure out just whose speeches Bush plagiarized in the Knesset last week; Netanyahu has used the lines; so has John Hagee, John McCain's religious go-to guy. There's also the possibility that Bush's repetition of the outrageous tho oft-used statement had a dual purpose: it was aimed at Ehud Olmert as well as at Barack Obama.
If not to issue a warning to Olmert, why did George Bush roll out an ugly old chestnut in Israel's house of government?
The "Ahmadinejad is Hitler/talking to Iran is equivalent of Chamberlain's appeasement" screed has been played before; it's a stock line emanating from Netanyahu's camp and disseminated by his Israeli- and American-based cronies. In a conference shortly before the Annapolis conference, Netanyahu support group The Israel Project deployed the statement to gin up the demonization campaign against Iran.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The Israel Lobby that
"John Hagee, who heads Christians United for Israel, was invited to address the 2007 AIPAC conference. He had told the Jerusalem Post in 2006 that
" 'I would hope the United States would join Israel in a military preemptive strike to take out the nuclear capability of Iran for the salvation of Western civilization.'"
He did not disappoint the attendees at the March 2007 conference, telling them,
" 'It is 1938, Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.'"
Glenn Greenwald essayed the phenomenon last October; Iran expert Trita Parsi has repeated the explanation of why the concept is so insidious in numerous talks accompanying Stephen Kinzer on Just Foreign Policy's February 2008 Folly of Attacking Iran book tour.
Perhaps Bush's purpose was to warn Ehud Olmert that he was not sufficiently hawkish on Iran, and if he didn't change his tune, Bibi Netanyahu would soon occupy Israel's seat of power.
About ten days ago, reports surfaced that Olmert may be indicted in Israel for accepting illegal campaign contributions from "an American businessman," the latest in a series of accusations of corruption leveled against Olmert, this one coming at the very embarrassing time of Israel's 60th anniversary and at a time when Olmert's distraction from his job may threaten Bush's putative push for peace with Palestine.
According to a BBCreport,
New York-based financial {sic} Morris "Moshe" Talansky is said to have given hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to Mr Olmert at a series of meetings in the 1990s.
and Olmert has said,
"I will resign from my job if the attorney general decides to issue an indictment against me"
In comments on C-Span's Washington Journal on May 11, Prof. Robert Lieber stated that Olmert has "nine political lives," but if he was removed from his position, it was likely Netanyahu would succeed him. In responding to the question, "What is the situation that Olmert is possibly facing indictment?" Lieber said,
Well, these are very esoteric aspects. Just as with foreign audiences it was almost impossible to explain to them what Watergate was all about... for non-Israelis to try to follow the ins and outs of Israeli law on this issue of whether or not Olmert actually took money that he shouldn't have from a wealthy American businessman remains to be seen.
Mr. Talansky, Olmert's patron and partner in the New Jerusalem Fund, a New York- and Jerusalem- based charity whose mission is to raise money for projects in Jerusalem.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Talansky is also party to a lawsuit on behalf of his investing firm against Israeli satellite company ImageSat. The July 2007 suit complains that ImagSat
ImageSat reportedly turned down a lucrative sale of satellite imagery to a number of countries, including Venezuela, allegedly due to that country's close ties with Iran, resulting in a decision by its investors - including Talansky - to sue the company.
In other words, while Bibi Netanyahu is running around the US, Europe, and Great Britain twisting arms to coerce foreign nations not to invest in Iran, and while groups such as the United Jewish Fund in Pennsylvania are urging State Teachers' Pensions fund managers to divest from highly successful investments in foreign companies that do business with Iran, Israel's Prime Minister is collaborating with a financier who invests in Iran.
This too is not a new phenomenon, this ploy of forcing American and/or other foreign nations into economically disadvantageous positions while Israel takes advantage of plum investment opportunities. For example, as Walt and Mearsheimer note in Israel Lobby, as far back as 1994,
at the behest of the Israeli government, AIPAC drafted and circulated a 74-page paper arguing that Iran was not only a threat to Israel, but also to the United States and to the West....AIPAC and the Israelis screamed for sanctions on Iran....
and succeeded in forcing Clinton to sign two executive orders banning all trade and financial investments with Iran, and to make those orders permanent through the agency of Sen. Alfonso D'Amato's Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, legislation dictated by AIPAC. "Ironically," Walt & Mearsheimer write,
although Israel lay behind the American decision to cut economic ties to Iran, Israel did not pass any laws barring Israeli-Iranian trade and Israelis continued to purchase Iranian goods through third parties. p. 288.
Actually, Prof. Lieber, Israeli law is not so "esoteric...impossible for non-Israelis to follow the ins and outs..." Just Follow the money.