Netanyahu Speech Was
‘Very Dark Day For American Democracy’
-- Matthews
By Philip Weiss
March 07, 2015 "ICH"
- "Mondoweiss"
-
The Netanyahu speech is fostering
backlash, as such a shocking event ought
to. The good news is that it might even
solidify U.S. support for the deal with
Iran.
Chris Matthews
was excellent last night,
expressing
outrage at the congressional effort to
“displace” Obama with Benjamin Netanyahu
as the maker of U.S. foreign policy. He
said that Netanyahu was “behind” the
U.S. war in Iraq and that he is now
“treating us like rubes” on Iran and
wants a U.S. war against Iran. Some of
his comments on the Iraq war:
Here’s Bibi Netanyahu, he was
running us into Iraq. And it turns
out Iraq becomes the conquest of
Iran. Then he goes on the TV
yesterday, goes into the House of
Representatives and say, ‘Look at
the big hell that broke loose, Iran
got control of Baghdad.’ Well he
pushed that! He pushed the Shia
overthrow of the government there.
He was behind it all and saying it
was going to help bring down Iran,
cause an explosion there. An
implosion. Totally utterly wrong as
a visionary. Now he’s giving us
advice.
[Guest says, that was the
decision of the U.S. government]
He was pushing it!
Then Matthews said Netanyahu is
pushing war with Iran:
I’m afraid the issue here is war
and peace… I didn’t hear him once
offer a sound proposal besides war.
Because all he said was you can’t
cut a deal, any deal is bad. He
basically said that. You can’t get a
better deal! He treats us like
rubes. You don’t think we’re not
trying to get the best possible
deal, come on!…
Why would they [Republicans]
salute Iron Dome and vote down
Homeland Security. Help me out here…
Why would they vote against US
security and vote for the Iron Dome?
Their point of view is very strange
here. Security is OK for other
countries but not ours…
I think it was a terrible
precedent. I tell you, This is going
to be remembered. This is going to
be remembered as a very dark day for
American democracy when you bring a
foreign leader in to try and
displace the American leader. Obama
sets our foreign policy, not
Netanyahu.
For Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Israel always faces the
same enemy. Call it Amalek, call it
Haman, call it Nazi Germany – it
seeks the same thing: The
destruction of the Jewish people.
Beinart says it’s all about the power
balance: Israel faces a competitor in
the region that wants to break “Israel’s
nuclear monopoly.”
“Iran’s nuclear program seeks to
create a nuclear duopoly in the
Mideast that would reduce Israel’s
power,” writes [Aluf] Benn. “This is
why we’re fighting it.”But Iran is
doesn’t seek Israel’s destruction.
Here he quotes Trita Parsi on the
shifting dynamics of the two regional
powers’ relations:
In the 1980s, Iran was even more
rhetorically bloodthirsty than it is
now. And yet Israel sold Iran
weapons to fight Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, whose greater proximity to the
Jewish state made it – in Israeli
eyes – the greater danger.
In his book, “A Single Role of
the Dice,” Trita Parsi quotes David
Menashri, who runs the Center for
Iranian Studies at the University of
Tel Aviv, as saying, “Throughout the
1980s, no one in Israel said
anything about an Iranian threat –
the word wasn’t even uttered.”
As Parsi notes, Israeli leaders
began focusing on the Iranian threat
in the 1990s, not because of a
change in Iranian rhetoric or
behavior, but the Soviet Union’s
collapse and Iraq’s Gulf War defeat
left Saddam far weaker. Iran, and
its nuclear program, now represented
the primary danger on Israel’s
eastern front.
That danger is real. But it is
the danger posed by a nasty regional
competitor, not by what Bibi has
called a “messianic apocalyptic
cult.”
Gary Sick makes
similar realist argument urging the
U.S. to stay the course, and ignore
Netanyahu’s “unicorn” arguments:
All the major countries of the
world are co-negotiators with the
United States, so a U.S.
congressional intervention that
killed the deal will not only affect
us but all of our major allies. If
we stiff them, there is no reason to
believe the international sanctions
will hold for long. No mention…
Netanyahu … also claims that this
all-conquering regional power [Iran]
is also such a vulnerable state that
it will quickly concede if we impose
more sanctions. He carefully avoids
mentioning that we refused a deal
with Iran in 2003 that would have
capped its centrifuges at about 3000
and started imposing more and more
sanctions. Ten years later Iran had
20,000 centrifuges and a highly
developed nuclear power program.
Don’t mention that, and don’t
mention that Netanyahu predicted in
1992 — more than 20 years ago — that
Iran would have a nuclear weapon in
3-5 years.
He emphasized that Iran cannot be
trusted. Agreed. But when you make
an agreement with an enemy (think
SALT agreements with the USSR) you
do not trust, you verify. And that’s
what the current negotiations are
intended to produce.
His only alternative is the
unicorn option: walk away from the
table and Iran will cave in and
agree to eliminate its entire
nuclear capability. Our 36 years of
dealing with Iran suggest that this
is truly fantasy land. It may appeal
to politicians trying to look tough,
but there is no way that it will
actually get Iran to modify or
reduce its nuclear program.
Reality: We walk, Iran resumes
all of its previous enrichment
policies, we have to intervene
militarily, Iran builds a bomb. But
don’t say that. It detracts from the
message.
This was great political theater.
But it insulted the intelligence of
anyone who has been paying attention
to the issues.
Here’s a funny mashup video of the
speech that Ynet posted from the Israeli
journo Noy Alooshe.
And it looks like Ari Shavit
is praising Netanyahu speech but
saying the prime minister failed because
he used Jewish terms like the Purim
story rather than stories that would
appeal to “Joe the Plumber” in the U.S.
to get Joe to want to fight Iran. “When
it came to Iran, Netanyahu told the
truth and failed.”
(Shavit’s support for
Netanyahu’s view of Iran is no surprise
if you actually read his book, My
Promised Land, and read
Nathan Thrall and Jerome Slater on
the book, rather than listen to the host
of liberal Zionists falling over one
another to praise it a year back.)
Back to Matthews’s
dark day comments. David Bromwich made
the same point ahead of time in a great
piece at Huffpo describing the
speech as Netanyahu’s “takeover bid” and
saying he and his supporters represent
an “existential threat” to American
independence in foreign policy. I have
to believe this awareness is sinking in
with many Americans:
Brute loyalty
often plays reckless games with
morality, and an unsuspecting
confidence between separate nations
is ill-advised for exactly the
reasons George Washington gave in
his Farewell Address of 1796. We
ought, said Washington, to avoid
“permanent, inveterate antipathies
against particular nations, and
passionate attachments for others,”
because “the nation which indulges
towards another a habitual hatred or
a habitual fondness is in some
degree a slave. It is a slave to its
animosity or to its affection,
either of which is sufficient to
lead it astray from its duty and its
interest.”
As if he
anticipated the strange moment in
which we find ourselves — when a
foreign leader who asked us to fight
one disastrous war now commands us
to fight another on his behalf —
Washington said:
“A passionate
attachment of one nation for another
produces a variety of evils.
Sympathy for the favorite nation,
facilitating the illusion of an
imaginary common interest in cases
where no real common interest
exists, and infusing into one the
enmities of the other, betrays the
former into a participation in the
quarrels and wars of the latter
without adequate inducement or
justification.”
When Netanyahu
addressed Congress on May 24, 2011,
to embarrass President Obama and cut
down American criticism of the most
recent illegal Israeli settlements,
Congress gave him 29 standing
ovations. That was a gesture of
thoughtless servility, and a mistake
that should not be repeated. The
difference between George Washington
and Benjamin Netanyahu marks a real
choice. In the matter of the proper
judgment of American interests,
Washington and Netanyahu stand at
opposite poles. They cannot both be
right. On March 3, before awarding
Netanyahu another 29 standing
ovations, or 19 or even one, let the
members of Congress ask themselves
whose advice they will heed on the
danger of “passionate attachments”
and “inveterate antipathies.”
Netanyahu and his backers in
Congress are an existential threat
to the independence of American
foreign policy.
On that note, I’d
shift to the very heart of the Israel
lobby, Bill Kristol. He wrote a
very sincere piece about watching
the speech in the congressional gallery
“as a Jew.” You will see how the
demonstration of Jewish power and
sovereignty thrilled him and moved him
to an openness I have rarely seen in his
writing:
At the end, as I
joined in the sustained standing
ovation, I thought of one sentence
in the 1956 letter by the political
philosopher Leo Strauss, in which he
tried to convince the editors of the
recently launched National
Review that conservatives
should be pro-Israel: “Political
Zionism was the attempt to restore
that inner freedom, that simple
dignity, of which only people who
remember their heritage and are
loyal to their fate, are capable.”
One felt, watching the prime
minister of Israel speak, whatever
other challenges await, that in this
task political Zionism has been
successful.
I think Kristol is
wrong as to political outcomes. Zionism
created a polity that has never stopped
ethnic cleansing and that relies on the
dual loyalty of American Jews to corrupt
US foreign policy so that the Jewish
state is never held to account. But
notice how emotional Kristol is. For
him, cheering for Netanyahu is about
Jews’ recovering their dignity after the
helplessness of the Holocaust. Any
compassionate person must acknowledge
the profound injury to the collective
psyche even 70 years later — and yet
abjure Jews not to become so monstrously
self-involved.
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