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America in the Middle East

'Iranian attack on Israel will NOT be seen as attack on US'


By Stan Goodenough
June 12, 2009

One year after declaring - as a presidential candidate - that an Iranian attack on Israel would be regarded as an attack on the US, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this week revealed that this was certainly not the policy of the Obama administration.

While the Iranians could expect 'retaliation,' America was not committing itself to come to Israel's defense.

Clinton was being interviewed on ABC TV's 'This Week' show by the station's White House Correspondent George Stephanopoulos, who reminded her of what she had said in 2008.

Before playing a video recording in which Clinton emphatically states: "I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States," Stephanopoulos told her that this "was your position during the campaign."

"Is it US policy now," he asked the woman who repeatedly describes herself as a staunch friend of the Jewish state.

Instead of sending the unequivocal and reassuring message Israel wants to hear on this critical existential issue, Clinton, um'd and ah'd.

"I think it is US policy to the extent that we have alliances and understandings with a number of nations," she said, then added, "I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that, were Israel to suffer a nuclear attack by Iran, there would be retaliation."

Stephanopoulos pressed her: "By the United States?"

But she would not commit. "Well, I think there would be retaliation," she said.

Observers wondered whether Clinton was simply adopting a more pragmatic position on the issue now that, as The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick wrote last week, the Obama “administration has made its peace with Iran’s nuclear aspirations" and was preparing to live in a world with "a nuclear-armed mullocracy."

Even if the US was to fire weapons of mass destruction against Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike on Israel, the Jewish state is so small, with the majority of its population centered in a strip of land along the Mediterranean Coast, that it would not benefit at all from such a response.

Israel would be no more.

Clinton's readiness to publicly back her country off from a position she said she would hold were she president is in line with the recently-revealed shift in America's alliances in the Middle East.

In a major foreign policy speech delivered in Cairo last week, President Barack Obama came out strongly in support of historically-illegitimate Arab aspirations, while effectively undermining the legitimacy of Israel's claims and rights.

Israelis have reacted to the betrayal with shock and disbelief.

  • The transcript of the Stephanopoulos-Clinton interview is available here. But to see and hear Clinton's vacillation you really have to watch and listen to the online video here. The clip is entitled: "Clinton: Iranian attack on Israel is attack on US."
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