All Republicans know that President Obama is an anti-Semitic Islamist Marxist who wants to throw Israel into the sea; after all, Bill Kristol has been saying so for years. So it is quite amazing that the Wall Street Journal reported this the other day, concerning Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. The Bush Administration rejected the system as impracticable, but
Iron Dome got a significant boost soon after President Obama came to office in 2009. Mr. Obama visited Sderot as a presidential candidate and told his aides to find a way to help boost Israel’s defenses from the makeshift rockets, his aides said, although defense officials at the time still doubted Iron Dome was the way.
As president, Mr. Obama tapped Colin Kahl to run the Pentagon office overseeing U.S. military policy in the Middle East. Mr. Kahl found the Iron Dome request on his desk, decided to take another look and had what he later described as a light-bulb moment. “Ding, ding, ding. It just made sense,” Mr. Kahl said.
At the direction of a White House working group headed by then-National Security Council senior director Dan Shapiro (who today is the U.S. ambassador to Israel), the Pentagon sent a team of missile-defense experts to Israel in September 2009 to re-evaluate Iron Dome. The decision raised eyebrows in some Pentagon circles. Iron Dome was still seen as a rival to the Phalanx system, and previous assessment teams had deemed Iron Dome inferior.
In its final report, presented to the White House in October, the team declared Iron Dome a success, and in many respects, superior to Phalanx. Tests showed it was hitting 80% of the targets, up from the low teens in the earlier U.S. assessment. “They came in and basically said, ‘This looks much more promising…than our system,’ ” said Dennis Ross, who at the time was one of Mr. Obama’s top Middle East advisers.
Now, of course this could not possibly have happened, because we all know that Obama is an anti-Semite. More recently, the Administration made the (terribly wrong) decision to oppose Palestine’s move for state observer status at the United Nations. But of course that did not happen either, because Obama hates Israel.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]
