President Obama Is Doing Right By America And The World By Distancing His Regime From The Extremists At AIPAC

AIPAC's decline into madness began years ago. Now they're just being called out on their lunacy by the most powerful man in the world. And it's about damn time. Photo Source.

An excerpt from, "Fears of Lasting Rift as Obama Battles Pro-Israel Group on Iran" by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, The New York Times, August 7, 2015:

WASHINGTON — President Obama had a tough message for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel group that is furiously campaigning against the Iran nuclear accord, when he met with two of its leaders at the White House this week. The president accused Aipac of spending millions of dollars in advertising against the deal and spreading false claims about it, people in the meeting recalled.

So Mr. Obama told the Aipac leaders that he intended to hit back hard.

The next day in a speech at American University, Mr. Obama denounced the deal’s opponents as “lobbyists” doling out millions of dollars to trumpet the same hawkish rhetoric that had led the United States into war with Iraq. The president never mentioned Aipac by name, but his target was unmistakable.

The remarks reflected an unusually sharp rupture between a sitting American president and the most potent pro-Israel lobbying group, which was founded in 1951 a few years after the birth of Israel.

An excerpt from, "How Iran Deal Could Change the Middle East" by Benjamin Tua, JuanCole.com, August 9, 2015:

The profound changes occurring in the Middle East have led to exaggerated estimates of a decline of U.S. influence in the Middle East.

There is a sense that the U.S. ability to “call the shots” has been diminished, and concern that the United States is likely to withdraw from the region. In fact, the U.S. standing is likely to increase as Washington repositions itself.

This shift in U.S. policy has been signaled by statements over a period of years by senior active and former U.S. officials.

During 2010 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, for example, then Central Command chief General David Petraeus remarked on the damage to U.S. interests generated by “insufficient progress towards a comprehensive Middle East peace.” Petraeus said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-American sentiment. He added that Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits partnerships with governments and peoples in the region, weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world, allows militant groups to exploit that anger to mobilize support, and gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients.

More recently, senior officials have explicitly acknowledged that the situation in the Middle East is deteriorating and have stressed that a course correction by Washington is in order. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen recently argued that Washington needs to re-examine all its relationships in the Middle East, primarily with Sunni-dominated countries, and that a rapprochement with Iran will better balance U.S. diplomacy in the region.