Vance to Israel: Remember Who Pays Your Bills
Vice President JD Vance told Israeli officials today that they might want to behave themselves even if they don’t like the U.S.-Iran peace deal signed yesterday in France.
The reason: American taxpayers are the reason — the only reason — Israel can defend itself. And American tax dollars foot the bill for the war against Iran.
He said much the same thing in an interview with The New York Times.
Coincidentally, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Israel never stopped hectoring the United States about attacking Iran during her time in that Cabinet post. Clinton confirmed what former CIA agent John Kiriakou said in March.
While Clinton supported the attack on Iran’s putative nuclear weapons facilities last year, she did not support Trump’s kowtowing to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and starting a war on February 27.
White House Briefing
At the White House, Vance unloaded on the top Israeli officials who attacked President Trump and the memorandum of understanding that has, at least temporarily, opened the Strait of Hormuz and ended the U.S. naval blockade there.
Those officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, say Iran is not bound by its terms.
“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world superpower,” Vance said:
If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.
Vance reminded the ungrateful Israelis that “over the last three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.”
”The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump. And anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in,” Vance said.
NYT Interview
Vance was equally brutal during an interview with the Times’s housebroken token conservative Ross Douthat.
As for Ben-Gvir and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who more than any Israeli officials certainly knows how much loot his country fleeces out of the United States — Vance asked a simple question:
What is your exact proposal? And you’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.
“They’re proposing an endless conflict,” Vance told Megyn Kelly before the peace deal went public. “They want this to go on until every bomb is dropped or until every Iranian is dead.”
Trump Said Yes
In March, former spook Kiriakou told podcaster Michael Franzese that every Israeli prime minister going back four decades had asked every U.S. president to bomb Iran. And every president, he said, said no.
Trump said yes.
“There was this constant drumbeat of pressure from the Israelis that we’ve got to bomb Iran, you gotta bomb Iran,” Kiriakou said:
Well, we didn’t bomb Iran until Donald Trump. And I have friends at the White House. I have friends in the administration. And they all tell me the same thing. They say that Trump agreed to bomb Iran because Benjamin Netanyahu threatened him and told him, “If you don’t bomb Iran, we’re going to use nuclear weapons against Iran.” Of course, the Israelis have never admitted that they have a nuclear program, but analysts believe that they have between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads.
Clinton: Israel Never Stopped Begging for War
Hillary Clinton confirmed that claim in the interview with The New Yorker’s Remnick.
“When I was Secretary, it was a constant theme by Netanyahu and his then government, the then Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. It was relentless. It was a constant push,” Clinton said:
He would basically say, “You need to support us in attacking Iran.” And back then — this was 2009 to the end of 2012 — we had more capacity than Israel did, on several fronts, to do that. And so there was a constant argument that we would have. I remember, one day, I was on the phone for hours with Ehud, with Bibi, with others. And they would say things like, “Our planes are on the tarmac.” And I’d say, “Well, good luck. I mean, great. Why are you doing this?”
Remnick: So you’re saying you were being played?
Clinton: All the time. All the time.
Remnick: By an ally that receives an enormous amount of aid.
Clinton: Well, of course. Bibi’s been obsessed, as long as I’ve dealt with him, with two things: Iran, as you know, and his desire to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. The first formal meeting I had with him in 2009, probably March, at the State Department, it was absolutely “How can we get normalization with Saudi Arabia, and how do we totally decapitate Iran?” And he had this view that I think has become very clear in his dealings with Trump. No. 1, decapitate the regime, it will fall. No. 2, disable the military insofar as possible, the people will rise up.
Clinton said the Obama administration didn’t believe regime change was possible because the Iranian regime is “ruthless” and “theocratic,” and willing to watch tens of thousands of Iranians die.
Remnick asked if Netanyahu “bamboozled” Trump, noting that the president “ignored not only the advice of his Vice-President and Secretary of State but the intelligence community telling him, on the ground, that this would be a terrible idea.”
Clinton: Well, I can’t speak to that. I don’t know what was presented to him. I also think, coming off the attacks of last June, which I supported — I supported the very specific, surgical attacks on the known nuclear-weapons sites — I believed that that was a clear mission with very achievable goals. I didn’t know whether you could eliminate the program, but I thought you could certainly set it back.
Regime Change “Farcical”
Clinton couldn’t speak to it, but two New York Times reporters did when they revealed that Netanyahu briefed Trump in the Situation Room in the White House and claimed that toppling the Iranian regime would be easily done.
The analysis of Netanyahu’s briefing didn’t take long. Broken into four parts, it was ready the next day. The intelligence analysts briefed some senior officials before Trump joined them in the Situation Room. “First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah,” the Times reported:
Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country.
The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from reality.
When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios: “farcical.”
At that point, [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio cut in. “In other words, it’s bullsh*t,” he said.
Mr. Ratcliffe added that given the unpredictability of events in any conflict, regime change could happen, but it should not be considered an achievable objective.
Several others jumped in, including Mr. Vance, just back from Azerbaijan, who also expressed strong skepticism about the prospect of regime change.
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned Trump that war against Iran “would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel,” the Times continued.
That is exactly what happened, as The New American reported today, citing the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS reported in May that rebuilding the inventory of Americans will take years.
