Obama Tells Israel's Netanhayu that He Has a Timetable for Iran; CIA Chief Leon Panetta Finds Airstrikes Against Al Qaeda in Pakistan "Very Effective"

by Damozel | Obama told Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US isn't prepared to jolly Iran along forever if Iran won't end its nuclear program. (NYT)  Israel wants the "unwavering support" it got from George W. Bush.  I'm sure it does.  Sadly for Israel, the American people -- i.e., the people who pick the president -- no longer have unwavering faith that Israel is always right or will always do the right thing. See the video here.

Obama, as usual, temporizes. 

“We’re not going to have talks forever,” Mr. Obama told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after a two-hour session in the Oval Office.

The president added that he did not intend to foreclose “a range of steps” if Iran did not cooperate....

The more hawkish Mr. Netanyahu thanked Mr. Obama for keeping “all options on the table” with respect to Iran. This is language that Mr. Obama rarely uses, but that was invoked frequently by Mr. Bush, typically to imply that the United States might use military force against Iran if its nuclear program progressed too far.  [New York Times]

I somehow doubt that's what Obama really means -- even though we can definitely afford to open another war on yet another front and our military and economy are not at all overstrained --  but only Obama knows at any given time what Obama means.  

But whatever Obama said or implied about Iran, he made it clear that he has some differences with Netanhayu.

Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly embrace a two-state solution, as Mr. Obama had hoped. Rather, he said, “I want to make it clear that we don’t want to govern the Palestinians; we want to live in peace with them.”

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, pressed Mr. Netanyahu to freeze the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

“Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that. But it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed.”

The chief negotiator for the Palestinians, Saeb Erakat, said afterward that the Palestinians welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks as a sign of “the active re-engagement of the United States” in the Middle East peace effort. [New York Times]

Meanwhile, Obama's  CIA Chief Leon Panetta thinks the airstrikes in Pakistan have been "very effective" and that civilian deaths have been few. (CNN)  I'm prepared to believe that the airstrikes have been effective against the specific baddies they've actually killed, but I'm seriously bothered about the airy waving away of civilian deaths, such as the 100 or so who died last week (including many women and children).  But there's a reason for Panetta's defensiveness.

Two leading former advisers on counterinsurgency warfare, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, wrote in The New York Times over the weekend that the strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders in the past three years -- but Pakistani sources say the civilian death toll could be as high as 700....

While U.S. officials dispute that ratio, Kilcullen and Exum wrote, "Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased."

"The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people's deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government and contributes to Pakistan's instability," Kilcullen and Exum said. They compared the tactics to British bombardment of the same region in the 1920s and French airstrikes on Algeria in the 1950s, arguing that the strikes were likely to remind Pakistanis of colonial rule.  (CNN)

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