November 26, 2012--Iron Dome

One of the things Barack Obama was accused of during the recent campaign was that he wasn't a faithful friend of Israel. To quote Mitt Romney, he threw our only true ally in the Middle East "under the bus."

In a speech delivered days before he departed for his ill-fated, pre-election trip to Europe and Israel, Romney said, "The people of Israel deserve better than what they have received from the leader of the free world."

Things were allegedly so bad between Obama and Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly supported Romney. This attack was potent enough that Obama received "only" 70 percent of the Jewish vote, whereas Democrats running for president traditionally secure about 10 percentage points more.

But that was then and this is now. Before Obama and Hillary Clinton last week got Egypt to broker a ceasefire between Hamas in Gaza and Israel.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer aired on CNN on Saturday, Israeli president Shimon Peres, when the 90-year-old, who still has all his marbles, was asked about Obama's support for Israel--was it as equivaical as claimed--with a smile slowly lighting his face, Peres, who intimately knows every American president since at least Ronald Reagan, said, "When I look at the record of President Obama concerning the major issue, security, I think it's a highly satisfactory record from and Israeli point of view."

Forget the hot rhetoric about Obama not supporting Israel. Look, instead, at the actual record. Specifically at one of many examples of how Obama has been quite a good friend of Israel, again, especially when it comes to security--the so-called Iron Dome missile defense system.

It is a very high-tech approach to defense with a very industrial-sounding name. Developed mainly by Israel with the active support of the United States, it was designed to protect Israel's population centers from Hamas rockets--those homemade in the Gaza Strip and, more threatening, technically advanced Iranian rockets smuggled into Gaza.

Anticipating such an attack, during the first four years of the Obama presidency, the U.S. shared anti-missle technology with israel and, with Barack Obama's personal advocacy and sign-off, paid the hundreds of millions of dollars required for its deployment.

The system was put to a severe test the past two weeks when the Palestinians bombarded Israel with thousands of missiles, some for the first time reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Because of American funding, Iron Dome was deployed extensively since Hamas had at least 1,000 Iranian-made rocket in its arsenal and fired nearly all of them into Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reports that the Iron Dome system had a success rate of about 90 percent, shooting down nearly all the Iranian-supplied rockets; and Israeli political leaders, including Netanyahu, are no longer reluctant to say publicly that if it weren't for the U.S.'s very real support this would not have been possible.

Of course we are unlikely to hear anything similar about this from either Mitt Romney (who was last seen pumping gas in La Jolla) or John McCain, who is still fulminating about Susan Rice.