The political fireworks over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress next week are a distraction from two larger truths:
1) Netanyahu’s opposition is every bit as leery of the rumored Iranian nuclear deal as Bibi is.
2) That deal looks ever less like an accord that will stop Tehran from becoming a nuclear power — and more and more like a glide path to exactly that result.
It’s no longer clear that President Obama’s diplomacy is even trying to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but only to (maybe) delay it.
If leaked outlines of the looming agreement are correct, it’s a prescription for disaster — and sure to launch a nuclear-arms race in the world’s most volatile region.
Fine, Secretary of State John Kerry contends that the details are yet to be finalized. “The policy is: Iran will not get a nuclear weapon,” Kerry said in a congressional hearing Tuesday.
He added, in an apparent barb at Bibi, “Anyone running around right now, jumping to say ‘we don’t like the deal,’ or this or that, doesn’t know what the deal is. There is no deal yet.”
Problem is, word keeps leaking out on just what the administration is seeking in the talks — namely, to assure that Iran doesn’t immediately “get” a bomb, while agreeing that it can have the capability to be a year from getting it.
Sorry: Letting Tehran reach even that “threshold” stage would launch a mad arms race in the Mideast.
More important: How would this deal truly stop Iran, anyway? President Obama assures us that as long as we keep Tehran one year away, there’d be enough time to deal with any Iranian decision to dash to a bomb.
Wait, one year?
“The question is whether there is a deal that rolls back Iran by two to three years from the bomb,” a former Israeli chief of military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, told the Jerusalem Post Monday.
Yadlin, mind you, is no Netanyahu fan. He’s the designated defense secretary for Netanyahu’s chief opposition, the center-left Zionist Union.
Polling puts the ZU, led by Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, neck-and-neck with Netanyahu’s Likud in the runup to Israel’s March 17 election.
So, yes: The ZU fiercely opposes Netanyahu’s speech next week, calling it a partisan gesture that threatens America’s tradition of bipartisan support for the Jewish state. But Bibi’s foes won’t blindly endorse any Obama deal with Iran.
“My concern is that the [Obama] administration will reach a bad deal, and will define it as acceptable,” Yadlin said, adding “In this case, the [Zionist Union] will say: ‘This is unacceptable.’ ”
Nevertheless (and Kerry’s protests aside), a deal — any deal — is exactly what Washington’s looking for.
The Obama-Kerry team has already accepted Iran’s argument that eliminating its entire uranium-enrichment program is “unrealistic.”
Instead, we sought to limit enrichment, at first, to 2,000 centrifuges. That number keeps growing. According to leaks from Geneva over the weekend, we’re now talking about a limit of 6,500 centrifuges.
Then there’s the fact that Iran only got this close to the bomb by repeatedly breaking all its previous agreements not to try to go nuclear.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency is complaining that Tehran continues to bamboozle its inspectors — who’d be charged with preventing Iranian cheating on its promises in any Obama deal.
And that’s only in facilities that the IAEA knows of.
The Iranian dissident group known as the Mujahadeen e-Khalq on Tuesday released a 10-page report alleging that since 2008 Iran has conducted secret experiments in new-generation centrifuges at Lavizan-3, a military base outside Tehran.
If true, that’s yet another violation of every pact Iran ever signed — including the Joint Plan of Action of November 2012 that set the rules for the current negotiations, which the Obama administration waves around as the most significant success of its diplomacy.
Yet Kerry is still on track to complete an outline of a final agreement by next month, and sign the whole thing by the summer.
Netanyahu may have been pushy. But the debate in Israel is simply over how effective he’d be in preventing a bad Iran deal.
A recent poll found that three out of four Israelis don’t trust Obama to stop Iran from going nuclear.
And Israelis are merely the ones most threatened by an Iranian nuke. America’s vital interests in the region would suffer plenty, too.
Obama, Kerry and their negotiating parners may believe their diplomacy is working, but it’s looking more and more like they’re the only ones who do.