To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace between the US
and Iran is an existential threat. By now, it should be clear to all:
It's not an Iranian nuclear bomb he fears, but a US-Iran deal.
In a tweet
earlier this morning, the Prime Minister said as much: "We are strongly
opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and
Iran that could endanger Israel's very existence."
So we have gone
from Netanyahu declaring an Iranian bomb an existential threat to
Israel, to a deal between the world powers and Iran an existential
threat.
And it's not the specifics of the deal that is the
problem, but the very notion of a deal involving the US and Iran. In
fact, his Minister of Defense declared that any deal would be a threat.
Netanyahu's hypocrisy is astounding. As I describe in A Single Roll of the Dice -- Obama's Diplomacy with Iran,
Netanyahu has always opposed diplomacy with Iran.
Not because he feared
it would fail, but precisely because he feared it would work. When
President Obama took office in 2009 and began his outreach to Tehran,
Netanyahu launched a campaign to undermine Obama centered on four key
areas.
First, he pressed Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran
before talks began, presumably to ensure that the escalatory measure
would ensure that diplomacy never took off at all.
Second, he pressed
Obama to adopt the Bush administration's completely unrealistic goal to
eliminate all Iranian uranium enrichment.
Again, such a measure would
ensure that diplomacy never took place -- the breakthrough in diplomacy took place once the US dropped that demand.
Third,
Netanyahu wanted Obama to continue Bush's rhetoric of insisting that
the military option remained on the table. Obama had famously stated
that the conflict with Iran could not beresolved by issuing threats.
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