This is not a sexy or juicy topic for a commentary, but it is a subject an informed reader should know about. Because, you're not going to hear about it on the nightly news.
Many have pointed out, and rightly so, that it’s hardly unheard of in geopolitics for friends to spy on each other. We all know the U.S. and Israel have done this to each other for years, which is why Jonathan Pollard spent so many decades behind bars.
But when it comes to how you treat your allies, not all spying is the same. We may very well spy on the Israelis, or the Brits, or the French, or the Canadians, in order to make sure we know everything there is to know – and to make sure our own interests are protected in the context of the alliance. It’s messy business but it’s often necessary, and we don’t use the information we gather for the purpose of compromising our allies’ security.
Then there’s the spying that Barack Obama’s NSA recently perpetrated against Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may be a friend of America but is clearly an enemy of Obama. (Think about that.) The NSA was seeking very specific kinds of information, which was anything Netanyahu might be doing to undermine the nuclear deal Obama was pursuing with Iran. That’s because Netanyahu strongly (and correctly) believes that the deal is a threat to Israel’s security, and usually that’s the sort of thing an ally cares about.
But not when your “ally” is Barack Obama, whose spying on Netanyahu included his conversations with Republican members of Congress also opposed to the deal. Obama’s purpose in conducting this spy activity was expressly and specifically to undermine an effort by Netanyahu to protect Israel’s strategic interests.
Contrast that with John Kerry’s horror at the thought that the Congress might defeat the Iran deal, which he said would be a disaster because the mullahs in Iran would never ever trust the United States again. In our dealing with one country, the Obama Administration insists we never do anything that might cause them not to trust us. In our dealing with another country, we spy on them for the purpose of undermining their ability to protect their own national security.
You’d think the former would be an ally and the latter would be an enemy. Whether that’s actually true depends who you are. If you’re Obama and Kerry, I’d say it’s true that Iran is your ally and Israel is your enemy. If you’re the American people, the opposite is true.
Back when Obama first ran for president in 2008, he said it was ridiculous to require conditions before the president of the United States would talk to countries like Iran – and didn’t buy the idea that it was punishment for them not to have America talk to them. Obama’s own presidency is proof that he didn’t really believe that. Iran’s former punishment was that there was no U.S. president coming to them and bearing the gift of lifted sanctions, entry into the nuclear club and the complete abandonment of our commitments to Israel. Obama very much wanted to be the president who would go to Iran bearing those gifts, and he did.
And he was willing to spy on the friend we used to appreciate in order to make sure no one could stop him.
Obama promised change. He delivered. Friends are now enemies, and enemies are now friends – at least as far as he’s concerned. If the rest of America finds this appalling (as it should), all we can really do is to be careful not to make an even worse mistake this year.
This is not a sexy or juicy topic for a commentary, but it is a subject an informed reader should know about. Because, you're not going to hear about it on the nightly news.
Many have pointed out, and rightly so, that it’s hardly unheard of in geopolitics for friends to spy on each other. We all know the U.S. and Israel have done this to each other for years, which is why Jonathan Pollard spent so many decades behind bars.
But when it comes to how you treat your allies, not all spying is the same. We may very well spy on the Israelis, or the Brits, or the French, or the Canadians, in order to make sure we know everything there is to know – and to make sure our own interests are protected in the context of the alliance. It’s messy business but it’s often necessary, and we don’t use the information we gather for the purpose of compromising our allies’ security.
