Thomas Wictor

I’m shocked that people believe this hoax. It’s another lie designed to discredit Israel and present President Obama as a champion of peace who will defend innocent nations against evil warmongers.

Report: Obama Threatened to Shoot Down IAF Iran Strike

Kuwaiti paper claims unnamed Israeli minister with good ties with the US administration ‘revealed the attack plan to John Kerry.’

The Bethlehem-based news agency Ma’an has cited a Kuwaiti newspaper report Saturday, that US President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

Following Obama’s threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reportedly forced to abort the planned Iran attack.

According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel’s back.

The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister who has good ties with the US administration revealed the attack plan to Secretary of State John Kerry, and that Obama then threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

There’s so much wrong with this story that I almost don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with geography.

If the Israelis were going to launch airstrikes against Iran, they’d have the full cooperation of the surrounding Arab nations, with the exception of Iraq. Therefore the Israelis could use Arab airspace to get to Iran. In the map above, the red “X” is the Persian Gulf.

Due to our withdrawal from the Middle East, the only way the US could shoot down Israeli jets would be with naval aviation assets from a carrier battle group of the US 5th Fleet. The area of responsibility (AOR) of the 5th Fleet is The Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. However, the US can’t attack aircraft inside Jordanian, Saudi, or Kuwaiti airspace, so the American naval aviators would have to wait until the Israeli jets crossed the 20-mile (32-kilometer) expanse of water at the northernmost tip of the Persian Gulf.

See where it says “Fao” at the southernmost point of Iraq (the green nation)? That’s the only place where Israeli jets wouldn’t be inside friendly airspace. The IAF jets would be flying about 1300 miles per hour (2092 kilometers per hour), so the Americans would have about 56 seconds to engage.

Guess what? The Israeli pilots would outfly them. It doesn’t bother me to admit that Israeli military pilots are better than American. And Israeli jets have all sorts of countermeasures for air-to-air missiles.

Now we’ll go into the political fallout of President Obama ordering the US Navy to shoot down an ally’s jets in order to protect a sponsor of international terrorism. The article linked above says this.

Former US diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who enthusiastically campaigned for Obama in 2008, called on him to shoot down Israeli planes if they attack Iran. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” said the former national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter in an interview with the Daily Beast.

“We have to be serious about denying them that right,” he said. “If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.’”

Israel mistakenly attacked the American Liberty ship during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Brzezinski was a top candidate to become an official adviser to President Obama, but he was downgraded after Republican and pro-Israel Democratic charges during the campaign that Brzezinski’s anti-Israel attitude would damage Obama at the polls.

If simply having an anti-Israel adviser would damage Obama’s prospects, what do you suppose would happen if the president actually gave the order to shoot down Israeli jets in order to protect Iran? He’d be forced to resign. Almost every member of his party would turn against him, if only to save their own hides.

But people are still not thinking the way Israelis think. See Azerbaijan? She’s an Israeli ally. And did you read this from 2013?

Netanyahu to meet foreign minister of Turkmenistan in message to Iran

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is set to meet with Turkmenistan’s Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov.

There are many aspects of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US this week that will interest the Iranians, not least of all his meeting on Sunday with Turkmenistan’s Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov.

The Iranians will obviously be watching carefully to see what emerges from Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Barack Obama on Monday and will listen carefully to what he says about the Iranian nuclear program on Tuesday. But the meeting with Meredov late Sunday afternoon in New York is also important for Tehran because it signals a strengthening of ties between Israel and the country to Iran’s north-northeast, with whom it shares a 1,000-km. border…

To the west, Azerbaijan’s warm ties with the Jewish state – including Azerbaijani oil sales to Israel and Israeli weapons for Azerbaijan – have provoked consternation among Iranian conservatives.

Tehran, according to the institute, has been working to prevent a similar friendship from happening in Turkmenistan.

However, Turkmenistan has charted a stridently neutral geopolitical course for itself and will not have its policies dictated to by others, which is one of the reasons for its being open to ties with Israel…

Turkmenistan is keen on developing its military, although the think tank said this might be too provocative a step at this time.

You know what everyone in the Middle East fears? Persian hegemony. Iran with nuclear weapons could do whatever it wanted. You know which nation nobody in the Middle East fears? Israel. That’s because Israel has no imperialistic dreams.

What are the odds that Turkmenistan—which doesn’t like to be told what to do by Iran and wants to improve its military—has already made a deal with Israel? If Israel wanted to attack Iran, there’s absolutely no way the US could prevent it.

Finally, let’s look at the person of President Obama.

In 2009 General Stanley McChrystal wanted 50,000 more troops sent to Afghanistan to replicate the success of the troop surge in Iraq. After three months of “deliberations,” President Obama authorized 30,000 troops but ordered that they stay only 18 months.

In 2011 it took President Obama sixteen hours to make up his mind on whether or not to authorize the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Other reports say that it actually took him months, and the decision to go ahead with the mission was made by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

In April of 2012 the US mission was attacked in Benghazi. President Obama didn’t send military help, even though at least one specialized unit called a Combatant Commanders in-extremis Force (CIF) was available. The CIF of United States European Command (EUCOM)—C110—was in Croatia, about 960 miles (1541 kilometers) from Benghazi. CIFs are US Army Special Forces whose weapons and equipment are always kept loaded on a C-17 Globemaster transport.

There are reports that another CIF was actually preparing to take off from Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy, near Naples, only 475 miles (764 kilometers) from Benghazi.

The C-17 cruises at 518 miles per hour (834 kilometers per hour). Therefore the first forty-man CIF could’ve been in Benghazi in under an hour, and the second could’ve arrived in less than two hours. However, the CIF in Croatia was never told to deploy, and the one in Naples was ordered to stand down. The chain of command goes from CIF to Combatant Commanders to the Secretary of Defense to the President. Both Leon Panetta and President Obama said that it would’ve taken nine to twelve hours to get troops to Benghazi, but this is a lie.

In August of 2013, President Obama said that if Syria used chemical weapons, it would be a “red line” that would “change his calculus” about ordering military engagement. After Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons multiple times, President Obama did nothing, leading former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to say that the president had damaged American credibility.

In June of 2014, President Obama took a month to approve the attempted rescue of reporter James Foley. As a result the mission failed, and Foley was murdered by the Islamic State.

Yet we’re supposed to believe that this same utterly indecisive, weak, paralyzed president will shoot down Israeli jets in defense of Iran?

We live in a golden age of mendacity.

It is lonely, me just doing stuff.

—President Barack Obama