Netanyahu and Obama: The Two Realities

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to Congress on Tuesday to scuttle current nuclear diplomacy with Iran.Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty

Benjamin Netanyahu took command of Congress—and, at least temporarily, the locus of U.S. foreign policy—in an evocative appeal today to scuttle the current nuclear diplomacy with Iran. “This deal won't be a farewell to arms. It would be a farewell to arms control,” he told the joint session. The terms are expected to have a lifespan of about a decade. “We’re better off without it,” he said.

The speech could prove crucial—not to the negotiations themselves (which are now in their home stretch) but to the harder task of selling a deal afterward to Congress. The Prime Minister received twenty-three standing ovations for his portrayal of Iran as a villainous country now “gobbling up” four other Middle Eastern countries—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. “How many more countries will Iran devour when sanctions are lifted?” he asked. “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation, and terror.”

As Netanyahu addressed Congress, Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with his Iranian counterpart—their eighth round of talks in this year alone—four thousand miles away, in the Swiss resort city of Montreux, to try to nail down a framework for an agreement within the next three weeks. “We’re working away. Productively,” Kerry told reporters. In Washington, the White House noted that President Obama was not watching Netanyahu’s speech—he was participating in a video conference with his British, French, German, and Italian counterparts on the Ukraine crisis. He read a transcript of Netanyahu’s remarks later.

Officially, the White House says that it did not want to invite Netanyahu to Washington just now because it didn’t want to be seen taking sides in Israel’s elections, which will take place on March 17th. Susan Rice, the President’s national-security adviser, has said that Netanyahu’s decision to speak to the Hill was “destructive,” because it injected political partisanship into diplomatic relations. In private meetings and media appearances over the past month, the tone of American and Israeli officials has verged on confrontational.

The schism between the White House and an Israeli government has not been so deep since the dispute between the Reagan Administration and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in the nineteen-eighties, over the sale of American AWAC intelligence aircraft to Saudi Arabia, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told me. “It’s tragic and sad,” he said. Tensions are even reminiscent of President Eisenhower’s confrontation with Israel during the 1956 invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis.

The chemistry between Netanyahu and Obama has never been good. It’s not a matter of personalities. It’s a clash of realities—the two men see the world differently. Obama believes the best way to protect Israel—and broader American interests—is to get a deal that will curtail Iran’s uranium enrichment, cut its stockpile of fuel, convert its facilities, and require intrusive daily inspections. In hastily organized comments to reporters in the Oval Office this afternoon, the President said that he saw “nothing new” in the Prime Minister’s speech. “The alternative the Prime Minister offers is no deal, in which case Iran will immediately begin once again pursuing its nuclear program, accelerate its nuclear program, without us having any insight into what they’re doing,” Obama said.

In contrast, Netanyahu believes that Tehran’s theocrats will never be reliable partners, and that the world would be better off with regime change—a policy that the United States abandoned during the George W. Bush Administration. Netanyahu told Congress that the tactics of the (Shiite) Islamic Republic are no different than the terrors of the (Sunni) Islamic State.

“Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire, first on the region, and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire,” he said. The only difference is their arsenals. “ISIS is armed with butcher knives, captured weapons, and YouTube, whereas Iran could soon be armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs.

The comparison was reminiscent of George W. Bush’s attempt to link Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. There was no link then, of course, and there is no link between Iran and ISIS today. They are bitter rivals.

Netanyahu has made a career out of crusading against Iran. In 1992, as a member of parliament, he predicted that Iran was three to five years away from producing a nuclear weapon, and appealed for its program to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” He cited the same time frame three years later, in his  book “Fighting Terrorism.”

Iran was actually more than a decade away from acquiring the technology and expertise to approach the threshold.  “It was not until the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that American experts concluded that Iran had developed a range of technologies, including uranium enrichment, nuclear-warhead mechanics, and delivery systems, that would give it the option to launch a nuclear-weapons development effort in a relatively short time frame “ ‘if it so chooses,’ ” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me today.

Netanyahu has long supported American military intervention. In 2002, he testified before Congress in favor of invading Iraq, and predicted that ousting Saddam Hussein would have “enormous positive reverberations on the region” and ripen Iran for revolt against the theocracy. “It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran but how to achieve it,” he said. Today, Iran holds more sway over Iraq than any other country.

Last week, before departing Washington for nuclear talks with his Iranian counterpart, Kerry reminded the House Foreign Affairs Committee of Netanyahu’s 2002 testimony in support of invading Iraq. “The Prime Minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision,” Kerry said. As for Iran, Kerry went on, “He may have a judgment that just may not be correct.”

A majority of Americans seem to agree with Kerry. According to a poll released today by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation and the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, sixty-one per cent of Americans surveyed now support a nuclear deal that would limit Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium and allow intrusive inspections of Iranian facilities in exchange for partial sanctions relief. As Steven Kull, the polling organization’s director put it, the American people may find both sides’ arguments convincing—whether for ending negotiations and ramping up sanctions or for making a deal. “But when asked to finally decide,” he said, “a clear majority breaks in favor of a deal.”