Von “Freunden” informiert / von Thomas von der Osten-Sacken
Es waren offenbar die Saudis, die Israel informierten, daß in den vergangenen Monaten geheime Gespräche zwischen den USA und dem Iran stattgefunden haben. Mehr über Obamas Nahostpolitik braucht man eigentlich nicht zu wissen:
Israeli officials knew they were being kept in the dark as the U.S. conducted secret talks with Iran, and the knowledge that the White House was “going behind Israel’s back” was one of the key sources of tension between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, according to a senior Israeli minister and other Israeli officials.
“We did not know from the beginning, but we knew, we had intelligence that these meetings were happening,” said the Israeli minister, who spoke to BuzzFeed by phone from his Jerusalem office. He said that a “friend in the Gulf” shared intelligence with Israel that the meetings were taking place, and urged Israel to find out more. “I would like to say we knew the content of the talks, but we didn’t. What we knew was that the U.S. was choosing not to tell us about them and that was very worrying.”
That “friend,” one foreign ministry official said, was Saudi Arabia, which along with Israel has most strongly objected to the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the West over the weekend.
“There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran,” he told me, with a directness that would make Benjamin Netanyahu blush. “We’re really concerned – Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East countries – about this.”
Warum die anderen Staaten im Nahen Osten unter anderem so “concerned” sind, erklaert Jonathan S. Tobin:
Instead of avoiding war, what Kerry has done is to set in motion a chain of events that may actually make armed conflict more likely. It’s not just that Israel must now come to terms with the fact that it has been abandoned and betrayed by its American ally and must consider whether it must strike Iran’s nuclear facilities before it is too late. Saudi Arabia must now also consider whether it has no choice but to buy a bomb (likely from Pakistan) to defend its existence against a deadly rival across the Persian Gulf. The Western stamp of approval on Iran will also embolden its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries and make it even less likely that Tehran’s ally Bashar Assad will be toppled in Syria. (…)
The choice here was not between war with Iran or a weak deal. It was between the U.S. using all its economic power and diplomatic influence to make sure that Iran had to give up its nuclear program and a policy of appeasement aimed at allowing the president to retreat from his promises. The Middle East and the rest of the world may wind up paying a terrible price for Obama’s false choices