This is getting kind of tired isn't it?

A senior US defense official has told The Jerusalem Post that an Israeli strike on Iran could be profoundly destabilizing and would affect US interests. Israel needed to take its relationship with America into account in contemplating any such attack, he warned... In his interview with the Post at the Pentagon, the senior US defense official also suggested that Syria might be ready to "fundamentally" reorient its position toward the United States, which would include restarting talks with Israel, at a time when Hamas and Hizbullah have been put "on the defensive" by Obama administration policies and events in Iran.

Those events, said the official, who insisted on anonymity, hadn't been seen to affect Iran's timeline on developing nuclear weapons. What was clear, he indicated, was the negative effect an Israeli strike would have. "A unilateral third-party attack on Iran's nuclear program could have profoundly destabilizing consequences, and it wouldn't just affect the general level of stability in the region. It would affect Israel's security and it would affect our interests, and the safety of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere," the official said, when asked if the US expected Israel to inform it of any decision to strike Iran. "It's a pretty big deal, and given the closeness of our relationship with Israel, I think we would hope that they would take those strategic calculations into account."

At least when the administration trotted out surrogates like Brzezinski and Gates and Biden to threaten Israel, they did it in terms of raw power politics: Obama is determined to have talks with Iran and if Israel screws that up by defending itself there's going to be hell to pay. It's an unseemly way to treat an ally in pursuit of a fundamentally naive and morally unjustifiable policy - but it's not dishonest. Conservatives insisted that Obama was selling out Israel for a plan that would never work and the election proved the administration was misguided - but still, the argument wasn't dishonest.

Now that it's become undeniable that conservatives were right, Obama's anti-Israel team needs a new set of excuses for keeping Israel on a leash. So now it's "Syria might be willing to reorient itself," which is false. And it's "Hamas is on the defensive," which is also the opposite of true. And it's "Iran will attack our forces in Iraq," which is already happening.

An obnoxious, dishonest regression from the administration's earlier vacuous realpolitik. Change!

Not that any of this matters. Another couple months and there won't be a US-Israel relationship to shred, which will free up Netanyahu to act in Israel's self-interest. Of course Israel will unblinkingly be blamed for detonating the alliance anyway. But only someone like Roger Cohen would be willing to write about a break in relations one week and then pretend that Israeli self-defense caused a rift the next.

I'm pretty FP blogger David Rothkopf just came to the same conclusion, which is what caused him to tell liberal foreign policy specialists to "be careful what [they] wish for." Sure it feels good to come out of an 8 year exile in think tanks and departments to slap around Israel for a while. But maybe someone should consider the consequences of putting a nuclear-armed erstwhile ally in a do-or-die position.

References and previously after the jump...