Coming just a few hours before tonight’s Obama-Romney foreign policy debate, this interview with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy is probably not what Camp Willard wanted. On the other hand, they richly deserved it for their idiocy, warmongering, and Bush/Cheney neoconservative recklessness. Here are a few highlights from Halevy’s interview:
…What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said. […]
Obama does think there is still room for negotiations. It’s a very courageous thing to say in this atmosphere.
In the end, this is what I think: Making foreign policy on Iran a serious issue in the US elections – what Romney has done, in itself – is a heavy blow to the ultimate interests of the United States and Israel…
[…]
Romney has been very costly on Russia […] If you want to create a situation, where the only way to go about things is to go back to the Cold War, that is what is being done here. It’s very dangerous.
I don’t think the US public wants to go to another world war over values in this way. If it persists, it will be a slide down a very slippery slope.
[…]
Romney has said, Anybody could have decided to finish bin Laden. Even [Jimmy] Carter. This again was a mistaken concept. President Obama didn’t just decide [one day to kill bin Laden]. The operation to end the life of bin Laden necessitated multiple points of decision by him. I know from operations I have been involved with on a smaller scale.
They are very intricate. You don’t just give the order and wait in your office for commanders to come three months later and say it’s done. No. This kind of operation, which is accident prone, hands on operation, one has to make one decision after the other […] It took courage and cool headedness and leadership. Anyone who says it was an easy thing to decide, doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. [Such comments] show a total lack of understanding of what this kind of operation means.
[…]
The Libya story, the way it’s being used, is a sordid manipulation.
By the way, Efraim Halevy is not some peacenik or something. From his bio, for instance, we learn that: a) he believes we’re in “‘the midst of a Third World War’ with radical Islam, and predicted that it will take at least 25 years for the West to win;”; b) he served under super-hawks Yitzhak Shamir and Arial Sharon, among others; c) he served in the Mossad for 28 years, “heading three different branches; and d) he doesn’t oppose a military strike on Iran, just that it shouldn’t be done prematurely, and that if it’s done, “we should mean it.” The guy’s not exactly a wuss, in other words.
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