Netanyahu’s has an audience of one — Trump
Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, May 1 2018
The good news from Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Iran’s “secret atomic archive” yesterday is that it was so cheaply theatrical that it is being widely dismissed as vaudeville. He used the word secret 15 times, and in the encore pulled back a black curtain on his evidence, proclaiming:
I just revealed something the world has never seen before.
The bad news is that the world doesn’t matter. Netanyahu obviously pitched his message to one person, Donald Trump, who is moved by cheap theatrics. Lobbying Trump to go to war against Iran looks to be a far better bet than lobbying his predecessor Obama. Under similar pressure three years ago, Obama said that only one country in the world was against the deal, Israel, and that it would be an “abrogation of my constitutional duty” to defer to Israel rather than the Pindo sheeple. Trump isn’t so fussy. The overnights on the speech were almost all negative. Reuters:
Intelligence experts and diplomats said he did not seem to have presented a “smoking gun” showing that Iran had violated the agreement, although he may have helped make a case on behalf of hawks in the Pindo administration who want to scrap it. Most of the purported evidence Netanyahu unveiled dated to the period before the 2015 accord was signed, although he said Iran had also kept important files on nuclear technology since then, and continued adding to its “nuclear weapons knowledge.”
The concern is that Netanyahu is whispering in Trump’s ear for a war on Iran in Syria, even as Israel has struck Syria again, killing 26 people, and is preparing to carry out another massacre on Israel’s border with Gaza.
One anonymous foreign policy observer wrote:
The bogus pretext for war: Iran lied about their nuclear program before the nuclear deal, therefore the nuclear deal should be scrapped, even though inspections are ultra-invasive and foolproof.
J Street tweeted out Netanyahu’s last successful push for war, the invasion of Iraq:
"It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel…" https://t.co/6tNUrzgELG—
Dylan Williams (@dylanotes) April 30, 2018
Netanyahu told Congress in 2002:
If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region … I think people sitting right next door in Iran will say the time of such regimes, such despots is over … There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing toward the development nuclear weapons.. No question whatsoever … Once he acquires them, history shifts immediately.
This time Netanyahu is missing some of his neocon consort. One soldier who’s absent this time is Jeffrey Goldberg. The Atlantic calls the Netanyahu presentation “strange” and says it’s all based on old conduct.
Another unimpressed warhorse, Richard Haass of CFR, is retweeted by Daniel Shapiro:
Unfortunately the NYT is parroting Netanyahu. It publishes a wheedling page 1 article by David Halbfinger, David Sanger, and Ronen Bergman in which you have to wait until paragraph 17 to discover it’s all about the past, nothing new at all, on a par with Netanyahu’s cartoon bomb diagram at the UN. The foreign minister of Iran reminds us of that stunt:
Today Netanyahu has released more of the magic act, this one where he pulls black curtains on loose leaf binders and CDs. He says in that performance: “Iran lied through its teeth.” This comes two days after telling Pompeo: “Iran is trying to gobble up one country after another.” Netanyahu now promises to lobby Merkel and Macron, just days after they met Trump.
Few are pointing out what should be noted: Netanyahu is under investigation at home for corruption, with many expecting indictments. James North writes:
The NYT article doesn’t mention Netanyahu’s fears of investigation until the 33rd paragraph, right near the end. The WaPo never mentions it. It’s springtime for neocons. The FDD is pushing the Netanyahu line.
Simple takeaway from Netanyahu presentation: Iran regime conducted nuclear weaponization activities, lied to the IAEA and to the world & hid 100,000+ documents, videos, photos with the instructions to restart a nuke weapons program at a time of its choosing.
FDD cites Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, currently working with them, Jacob Nagel. Sort of like Ronen Bergman, the promoter of the Mossad, working for the NYT. This pinball machine never Tilts.
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