{"id":200908,"date":"2015-11-17T19:37:42","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T19:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=200908"},"modified":"2015-11-17T19:38:13","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T19:38:13","slug":"no-payoff-netanyahu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/no-payoff-netanyahu\/","title":{"rendered":"No Payoff for Netanyahu"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to collect his<br \/>\npayoff for being disgruntled over the agreement limiting Iran\u2019s nuclear program,<br \/>\nwhich was signed by that country and the world\u2019s great powers. Although President<br \/>\nObama and Netanyahu seem to personally dislike each other, because of Israel\u2019s<br \/>\nclout in the American domestic political system with a presidential election<br \/>\nyear approaching, Obama feels he needs to kiss and make up with Netanyahu and<br \/>\nslather Israel with even more military aid and hardware to compensate it for<br \/>\nits supposedly eroded security. Really?<\/p>\n<p>Netanyahu doesn\u2019t seem at all red-faced about the fact that the United States<br \/>\nalready provides Israel, a wealthy country, with an annual largesse of more<br \/>\nthan $3 billion in military aid. And Obama will likely need to increase this<br \/>\nmartial welfare to compensate Israel for actually enhancing Israeli security<br \/>\nby at least delaying its major rival from getting a nuclear weapon! (This whacky<br \/>\nsituation is as bad as the U.S. borrowing money from China and giving trade<br \/>\nconcession to U.S. East Asian allies, so that the allies will allow the U.S. military<br \/>\nto incur the costs of protecting them from\u2026well\u2026 China.) Most of Republican<br \/>\ncriticisms of Obama\u2019s weakness in foreign policy are rubbish, but he could be<br \/>\nrightly pilloried for letting the Israeli client state extort even more cash<br \/>\nfrom the debt-ridden American Empire, which is already irrationally overextended<br \/>\noverseas and $18 trillion in debt.<\/p>\n<p>Alliances are supposed to be mutually beneficial for the security of their<br \/>\nmembers and should not become an end in themselves. The American founders were<br \/>\nagainst permanent and entangling alliances, because they could drag an intrinsically<br \/>\nsecure United States, which was and still is far away from the centers of world<br \/>\nconflict, into needless wars. Always unclear has been how U.S. security is enhanced<br \/>\nby slavishly supporting Israel against oil-bearing Iran and Arab states.<\/p>\n<p>And such unflinching U.S. genuflecting toward Israel to satisfy the domestic<br \/>\nelectoral needs of both American political parties gives a foreign power undue<br \/>\ninfluence over the American political system. If China, Russia, or Iran baldly<br \/>\nattempted such blatant influence on U.S. elections, American politicians, pundits,<br \/>\nand the public would be outraged. However, when Israel is the foreign power,<br \/>\nall is swept under the rug.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/eland\/2015\/11\/16\/no-payoff-for-netanyahu\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to collect his payoff for being disgruntled over the agreement limiting Iran\u2019s nuclear program, which was signed by that country and the world\u2019s great powers. Although President Obama and Netanyahu seem to personally dislike each other, because of Israel\u2019s clout in the American domestic political system with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-200908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}