Yet Another Anti-Israel Obama Advisor

Hat tip: Mord

Via Israpundit

His name is Joseph Cirincione, and Obama has hired him as an advisor in the area of nuclear proliferation. And never mind that Iran is developing nukes, or that Pakistan already has them, and that Syria is cooperating with North Korea on WMD’s, Cirincione see Israel’s nuclear weapons as the problem.

Cirincione had written after Israel’s strike against the suspected Syrian nuclear plant that stories about it being a North-Korean designed and built plutonium reactor were a lie — a fiction being spread just as reports had been spread before the Iraq War that misled the press regarding Iraq’s program. Shcoenfeld writes:

Who was behind this nefarious manipulation? It appears, wrote Circincione, “to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted ‘intelligence’ to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda.” What exactly was that political agenda? “[I]t appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement.” There was also a dose of Zionist mischief thrown in: “Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.”

Based on evidence shown to Congress yesterday, there is now incontrovertible proof that the building bombed by Israel was a plutonium-producing reactor that was geared toward the production of material for nuclear weapons — exactly what Cirincionne had previously dismissed as lies, in part, cooked up by Israelis trying to influence America’s foreign policy.
This tendency to blame and castigate Israel was not the first time phenomenon for Joseph Cirincione. He seems to have a penchant for targeting Israel for opprobrium.

In 2002, he wrote that Israel’s possession of three diesel nuclear power submarines that can launch nuclear missiles complicates American efforts to restrain a nuclear arms race. He also claimed that the US Navy monitored the Israeli testing of a new cruise missile from a submarine in 2002 off of Sri Lanka, according to unnamed “former Pentagon officials”.

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In 2006, he declared that Israel’s raid on the Osirak nuclear reactor was a “failure”. This was despite the stunning success of the daring raid (only one man died) in derailing Iraq’s program. Years later, Dick Cheney thanked Israel for disabling Iraq’s nuclear program, for if Osirak had been allowed to be completed, Iraq might well have had a nuclear arsenal during the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, Cirincione held that it sped-up the Iraqi program and led to a more devoted effort to secretly build nuclear capabilities. This, of course, paradoxically conflicts with his other belief that Iraq did not have such a nuclear program and that America should not have invaded Iraq absent such proof!

He also is firmly against any type of strike against the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
He is in favor of persuading Israel to give up its nuclear program which, as noted above, might be the only thing that can prevent Israel’s destruction…

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He wants to put U.S. muscle behind a plan for seeking a nuclear-free Middle East region. This, of course, would be flexed against Israel. He wrote (in 2005) that Israel was never more secure from external threats and has less need for nuclear weapons than any time in its history. He calls for an “even-handed” approach toward nuclear weapons programs and calls for Israel’s nuclear program to be “put on the table” as part of a regional deal to prevent nuclear proliferation.