Pelosi: ‘US must condition friendships on efforts to stop Iran’

Mattes

16 years ago

Washington must assert to the rest of the world that if they want to be friends with America, they need to do more to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, visiting US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Sunday in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post.

Nancy Pelosi holds talks on security in Israel

Pelosi said the US needed to be more “proactive” in saying to the countries of the world – including Russia, China and the Muslim countries in Asia – that “one of the pillars of US foreign policy is to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to anyone.”

The US needed to make it clear to everyone, including the Europeans, that their polices on this issue would be a term of friendship with the US, and a measuring stick of benefits they could derive from that friendship, she said.

Pelosi said that to stop Iran’s nuclear march, short of a military strike – something she did not rule out as a last resort – “you have to go all the way. And people have to know you are deadly serious that if you want to be our friend, if you want the benefit of our friendship, a central pillar of our foreign policy is to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

This can’t just be a “conversation,” she said, “it has to be seriously enforced and sanctioned, because the alternative is one that has a tremendous downside – and that would be to use military force.”

While saying that a military option should not be taken off the table, and adding that an attack by Teheran on Israel certainly “cannot go unanswered,” Pelosi said that a preemptive strike on Iran would have consequences that needed to be considered. Among the consequences she listed were the effect such an attack would have in rallying Iranians around their current leadership, what it would do to the price of oil, and the response of the rest of the Muslim world.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668665810&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

So we are prepared to alienate China, Russia and the Swiss for their oil contracts with Iran??

Just how much appeasing of Israel do we have to do?

AND IS THIS THE JOB OF THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE?????

Israel’s ‘American problem’

When the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, arrived at a Jerusalem ballroom in February to address the grandees of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, he was pugnacious, as is customary, but he was also surprisingly defensive, and not because of his relentlessly compounding legal worries.

These Jewish leaders, who live in Chicago and New York and behind the gates of Boca Raton country clubs, loathe the idea that Olmert, or a prime minister yet elected, might one day cede the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to the latent state of Palestine.

snip
When I spoke to Olmert a few days after his meeting with the Conference of Presidents, he made only brief mention of his Diaspora antagonists; he said that certain American Jews he would not name have been “investing a lot of money trying to overthrow the government of Israel.” But he was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine – a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine – Arabs under Israeli control will outnumber the country’s Jews.

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Sharon and Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/18/opinion/edgoldberg.php

The Jewish elite would rather overthrow the government of Israel than cede E. Jerusalem or West Bank.

JUST WOW.