Politics
How to Build a Nuclear Bomb Scare

How to Build a Nuclear Bomb Scare

Though U.S. intelligence agencies have never produced evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, the U.S. government has a long history of punishing Iran for doing it. ...
Jack Kenny

Two days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-anticipated March 3 speech to a joint session of Congress, a commentary by Fareed Zakaria appeared in the Washington Post under the headline “Netanyahu Enters Never-Never Land.” Some of our nation’s lawmakers might have taken that as an unflattering description of the Congress of the United States, but Zakaria was directing the Peter Pan analogy not at members of Congress, but at Netanyahu himself and the prime minister’s strategy, as he described it in the House chamber, for bringing Iran to heel by forcing Tehran to dismantle nearly its entire nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s appearance, arranged by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) without consultation with either the U.S. president or secretary of state, was, to say the least, extraordinary. The Israeli prime minister stood in the U.S. Capitol and denounced, as everyone knew he would, an agreement under negotiation between the U.S. president and the leaders of Iran and, in so doing, received 40-some ovations. Indeed the Republicans were jumping to their feet and applauding so much that some likened the event to an aerobics class.

While some Democrats boycotted the speech, most attended and joined in at least some of the ovations, despite the fact that Netanyahu was pushing them toward what the New York Times called “an awkward, painful choice between the president of their country and their loyalty to the Jewish state.” MSNBC talk-show host and Democratic partisan Chris Matthews was more blunt: “This was a takeover attempt by Netanyahu with his complying American partners to take American foreign policy out of the hands of the President.”

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