Last year, my book Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle To Take America Back 2009-2041, predicted a liberal sellout of Israel. The prediction was wrong only in terms of who led the betrayal. In reality it was Barack Obama, while in the book it is President Hillary Clinton. The following scenario is adapted from that chapter. All of the military and other information is based on open sources.
On a warm September day in 2015, the United States Senate failed to override Obama’s veto of the measure rejecting his Iranian nuclear agreement. Every one of the 54 Republicans voted against the agreement, which would deliver to the mullahs $150 billion, lift the conventional weapons embargo, and validate Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for vague promises not to go nuclear for 10 years. Twelve Democrats, coincidentally the Democrats holding the 12 toughest seats, were allowed to vote against the bill. Because Congress had surrendered its treaty power, 67 votes were required to stop the agreement instead of the 67 required to enact a treaty under the increasingly irrelevant Constitution.
The promised money flowed into Iran and, as predicted, the money flowed out again to America’s enemies – Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, the Houthis, and even the Taliban. Their services included a massive surge in advanced IED attacks on the dwindling U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Dozens of Americans died, hundreds were maimed.
The Iranians, from the beginning, cheated on a massive scale, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government immediately redoubled its efforts to ensure the Iranians could not cross the line from aspiring to actual nuclear power. Israeli cyber warriors worked to slow the program remotely, but the NSA – on President Obama’s orders – assisted the Iranians in hardening their computer systems pursuant to the nuclear deal’s notorious “
But it was not the Israelis who discovered the secret Iranian parallel program that Netanyahu revealed to the world in March 2016. It was the Americans who discovered it; the Israelis found out from sources within the U.S. intelligence community who were horrified that the Obama administration knew the Iranians were steadily advancing toward completing their first bomb but was keeping it secret.
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Ignoring the Iranians’ actions, President Obama lashed out at Netanyahu after the Prime Minister revealed the program in a press conference.
“These kind of inflammatory statements harm the cause of peace and drive a wedge between allies,” Obama said, his rage unhidden. “This kind of behavior is, frankly, dangerous to Israel’s safety.”
Obama’s barely-concealed threat was clear; he would not tolerate any challenge to his legacy regardless of the risk to the Jewish state.
With the Mossad’s assessment in hand that the Iranians were just weeks from not only building an atomic bomb but of placing it atop one of the advanced Russian cruise missiles the lifting of the embargo had allowed them to buy, Netanyahu prepared to act. It would take much of the Israeli Air Force, most of its commandos, its submarine fleet, and its formidable cyber forces to execute the plan. Saudi Arabia agreed to allow overflights and the use of its remote bases. But Operation Masada would have to be conducted in total secrecy.
On July 5, 2016, with one hour to go before launch, Netanyahu received a call from Vice President Joe Biden. U.S. intelligence had seen the preparations and anticipated the strike; Biden, as the conversation transcript later revealed, was clearly frightened.
“Benjamin, we’ve known each other a long time. You’ve got to believe me. If you launch, he’ll warn the Iranians and he’ll order American forces to shoot down your jets. I can’t talk him out of it. He’s serious. He’ll do it. Please, please call it off.”
At that moment, Netanyahu was handed an intelligence update. There was increased aircraft activity on the USS Reagan afloat just outside the Persian Gulf, and Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries were alerting. President Obama was preparing to launch fighters and had already warned the Iranians.
With a heavy heart, Netanyahu called off Operation Masada. A week later, news of the fiasco was leaked by “an anonymous White house source” to the New York Times. In the resulting uproar in Israel, Netanyahu resigned. His place was taken by an elderly Laborite who proclaimed, “This is an opportunity for peace!” and vowed to work closely with the Obama administration. He was welcomed to Washington the next week and treated with respect in return for his obedience.
Israelis were going to breakfast on August 30, 2016, when the bomb went off above Tel Aviv. There was an unfathomably bright flash in the cloudless sky at about 1515 feet, calculated precisely to be high enough to maximize the thermal and blast effects but low enough to churn up substantial fallout. It detonated over the Jaffa area of southern outskirts of the city instead of where it was aimed, the government center – only the Iranians could manage to miss a city with an A-bomb. Ironically, Ground Zero was heavily populated by Israeli Arabs.
Those within two miles who were in the open and exposed were charred by the heat; those closer who survived the heat received a fatal blast of radiation but, mercifully, few at those distances survived the subsequent blast wave to die a lingering death from radiation sickness. Fallout began to rain from the sky, poisoning the earth for miles downwind.
People ran and screamed as air raid sirens tardily began to wail, barely audible over the noise of the fireball. It was not a big bomb – only 14 kilotons, about the same as the uranium-235 bomb that leveled Hiroshima – but it was enough to kill or condemn to death over 31,000 Israelis. That was about one in every 259 Israelis, the equivalent of 1,230,000 dead Americans.
Even as they focused on the injured and the fires, Israelis assumed that that the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) would retaliate with its own nuclear weapons. But again Obama intervened, ordering U.S. Air Force and Navy jets to stop any retaliatory Israeli strike. In the Pentagon’s situation room, as the admirals and generals gave the orders to prepare to defend Iran, the sole Marine among the Joint Chiefs looked around the room at his fellow four stars and said, “You’re a bunch of gutless cowards.” He ripped the stars off his uniform, threw them down on the table in from of the Secretary of Defense, and walked out.
Americans fighters shot down three of the Israeli planes flying the retaliation strike mission to Tehran while they were over Saudi Arabia. But luckily, within minutes, Israel’s brilliant cyberwarriors were able to locate and disrupt the command and control nodes for the other dozen Iranian cruise missiles the Iranians had planned to fire; this was the only reason there were no additional strikes.
Obama went on television and promised “accountability,” then asserted that, “Some here in America refused to support our quest for peace. Let me be clear. Today’s tragedy in Tel Aviv was a direct result of their choice to undercut diplomacy instead of support it.”
On CNN and MSNBC, Democrat “strategists” went on the air offering the carefully crafted talking points hurriedly drafted in the West Wing, accusing “warmongering Republicans” calling for retaliation against the mullahs of “playing politics with this tragedy.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton refused to take questions, and insisted that, “This is no time for the kind of hateful, incendiary language my opponent is using.”
Only Fox News showed footage of Iranians laughing and singing in the streets. Similarly, on several college campuses, students marched to demand that there be no humanitarian aid to “the Zionist entity.” There was also a video, widely shown on Fox and on conservative websites, but never on any mainstream media outlet, of a prominent Democratic Senate nominee high fiving some of her donors upon hearing the news.
Though the House and Senate quickly passed a massive aid bill, which the President signed without ceremony or comment after polling showed 78% of registered voters supported it and Hillary Clinton begged him to do so, the aid flowed slowly through Obama’s executive bureaucracy to the Jewish state. Seeing the dire need, evangelical Christians led the way in raising an unprecedented $10 billion in relief donations in just two weeks.
Israel eagerly accepted the help, but saw it was on its own except for its few dedicated friends. The Israelis redoubled their efforts on missile defenses and focused on long-term self-sufficiency in arms and technology. As long as America could fall prey to another liberal offering gauzy lies and apologies to the West’s enemies, it could never be trusted by any ally – least of all one that over half of one of the two parties did not support.
There would be no surrender – and no forgiveness. At about 1 p.m. Eastern time on January 20, 2017, an Iranian atomic bomb detonated within the nuclear weapons storage facility at Natanz, annihilating the entire facility, hundreds of nuclear scientists, several members of the Supreme Council who happened to be visiting, and all 15 of Iran’s atomic bombs. The Israelis denied any connection with the “mishap,” but Prime Minister Netanyahu – back in power – stated that, “It’s not, and will not be, unusual that unfortunate accidents like this happen to those who threaten the Jewish people.”
President Walker, who had just been inaugurated an hour before, issued a statement saying, “We regret the loss of innocent life. And we warn the Iranian government that the former agreement is now null and void. The United States will consider any attempt by the Iranian government to rebuild any nuclear capability as an act of war against the United States and its allies and will act accordingly using all means at our disposal.”
In the Pentagon that afternoon, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Marine general now called back from his self-imposed retirement, finalized and sent to America’s new Commander-In-Chief the draft of a presidential directive stating that the policy of the United States henceforth would be to react to a nuclear strike on any American ally as a strike on the United States requiring decisive thermonuclear retaliation. Copies of the directive would later be delivered to their hosts by U.S. diplomats in Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Karachi.
Israel rallied; the second Holocaust was averted but at a staggering cost. Tens of thousands of Israelis suffered burns from the bombing; the scars would come to be called “the new camp tattoos.” They would become a mark of resilience in the survivors and a mark of shame for those who allowed the atrocity to occur.
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