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Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Real Subject of Netanyahu's Congressional Spectacle (It Isn't Nukes)

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/the-real-subject-netanyahus-congressional-spectacle-it-isnt-12337?page=show



The Real Subject of Netanyahu's Congressional Spectacle (It Isn't Nukes)

Benjamin Netanyahu will talk next week, as he has innumerable times before, about how an Iranian nuclear weapon is supposedly an extremely grave and imminent (he has been saying for years that it is just around the corner) threat to world peace and to his nation. There has been genuine concern in Israel about this subject, but Netanyahu's own behavior and posture indicate this is not the concern that is driving his conduct and in particular his diplomacy-wrecking efforts. He is acting out of other motives, ones that—quite unlike the objective of avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapon—are not shared with the United States and instead directly conflict with U.S. interests.
There have been plenty of reasons to doubt all along Netanyahu's alarmist rhetoric. There has been his history of wolf-crying on the subject, against the background of an Iran that has not even decided to build a nuclear weapon. There is the further background of Israel's overwhelming military superiority in the region, at not only the conventional level but also at the level about which Netanyahu is raising such alarm [4]. And there are the repeated indications that his alarmism goes beyond what even his own security services believe [5].

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/the-real-subject-netanyahus-congressional-spectacle-it-isnt-12337?page=show

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