Schmuck With Earflaps Goes Nuclear On Netanyahu

[superbeets]

Iran's Revolutionary Guard attacks mock US aircraft carrier in naval drills

• Drill meant to ‘send a message of might’ ahead of nuclear-deal deadline

• Drill meant to ‘send a message of might’ ahead of nuclear-deal deadline

With rockets roaring and guns blazing, more than a dozen swarming Iranian speedboats assaulted a replica of a US aircraft carrier on Wednesday during large-scale naval drills near the strategically vital entrance of the Persian Gulf.
The nationally televised show of force by the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard comes just weeks ahead of a deadline for Iran and world powers to forge a historic deal on the fate of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Iranian live-fire war games are not uncommon. But by simulating for the first time an attack on the ultimate symbol of American naval power, hardliners hoped to send a message that Iran has no intention of backing down to the US – whichever way talks over its contested nuclear program go.
“American aircraft carriers are very big ammunition depots housing a lot of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and everything else,” the Guard’s navy chief, Admiral Ali Fadavi, said on state television. A direct hit by a missile could set off a large secondary explosion, he added.
Fadavi last month boasted that his force is capable of sinking American aircraft carriers in the event of war. He previously called carriers easy targets and said Iran naturally wants to sink them.
The drill, named “Great Prophet 9”, was held near the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil passes. Iran’s regular army carried out naval drills near the strait in December.
Tensions near the strait have caused oil prices to spike in the past – good news for producers like Iran. But traders seemed to take Wednesday’s maneuvers in stride, with benchmark US crude dipping slightly and continuing to hover below $50 a barrel by mid-morning.
State TV showed footage of missiles fired from the coast and the fast boats striking the ersatz American carrier, which appeared to be a replica seen in a shipyard in the southern port of Bandar Abbas last year. The drills also included Guard forces shooting down a drone and planting undersea mines.

 

[SheriffJoe]

 

[The Guesser]

Wrong on Iran Nukes for 20 years. But let's believe EVERYTHING he says now. Yeah, that's the ticket.

 

[JDeuce]

Even the Saudis wanted Netanyahu to address Congress:

“I am very glad of Netanyahu’s firm stance and [his decision] to speak against the nuclear agreement at the American Congress, despite the Obama administration’s anger and fury,” wrote the Saudi. “I believe that Netanyahu’s conduct will serve our interests, the people of the Gulf, much more than the foolish behavior of one of the worst American presidents.” -- Dr. Al-Faraj - Saudi daily newspaper Al-Jazirah on Monday

What struck me the most is the contrast in leadership.

Bibi probably gave the most impressive and masterful speech the White House has seen since the days of Ronnie. He spoke with conviction, confidence, determination and strength. In contrast, our current leader is a weak appeaser who is just going to hope this problem goes away. He's so desperate to add anything positive to his failed legacy that he's willing to risk the security of Israel and the U.S. as a bargaining chip. Any dimocrap who skipped the speech or criticized Bibi can feel free to dig their own graves and fall into them.

As a matter of fact, the Stuttering Clusterfuck's comments on Netanyahu's speech were very angry. I've never once seen him get that angry about any ISIS beheading, about Iran stating they intend to wipe Israel off the map, about Iran building weapons that could land within American borders...

Lou Dobbs was right. The free world may have a new leader after today.

 

[SheriffJoe]

What struck me the most is the contrast in leadership.

Bibi probably gave the most impressive and masterful speech the White House has seen since the days of Ronnie. He spoke with conviction, confidence, determination and strength. In contrast, our current leader is a weak appeaser who is just going to hope this problem goes away. He's so desperate to add anything positive to his failed legacy that he's willing to risk the security of Israel and the U.S. as a bargaining chip. Any dimocrap who skipped the speech or criticized Bibi can feel free to dig their own graves and fall into them.

As a matter of fact, the Stuttering Clusterfuck's comments on Netanyahu's speech were very angry. I've never once seen him get that angry about any ISIS beheading, about Iran stating they intend to wipe Israel off the map, about Iran building weapons that could land within American borders...

Lou Dobbs was right. The free world may have a new leader after today.

It does indeed.

I had forgotten what a real 'leader' sounds like...

 

[SheriffJoe]

 

[The Guesser]

The Gross Hypocrisy of Benjamin Netanyahu

Don’t pretend Bibi didn’t mean to offend Obama. He is a bully and a liar.

By William Saletan

Benjamin Netanyahu says his speech against President Obama’s Iran policy, delivered on the floor of Congress, shouldn’t be taken as an affront. “My speech is not intended to show any disrespect to President Obama,” Netanyahu told AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, on Monday. In his remarks to Congress on Tuesday morning, the prime minister brushed aside those who “perceive my being here as political.”

William Saletan Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

But back home, Netanyahu shows no such tolerance. He claims to represent not just all Israelis, but all Jews. When critics question his policies, he purges them from office, challenges their patriotism, and accuses them of serving foreign masters. If anyone were to do in Israel what Netanyahu has just done here—walk into the nation’s parliament at the unilateral invitation of an opposition party and deliver a speech against the government’s foreign policy—Netanyahu would have cried treason.


Let’s get a few excuses out of the way. First, the indisputable purpose of this speech was to enlist Congress as a weapon against Obama. Two weeks ago, according to Haaretz, Israel’s ambassador to the United States—the Netanyahu protégé who negotiated the speaking engagement—told officials in Jerusalem that Netanyahu was going to Congress because Israel “has almost no ability to influence the negotiations through other channels.” Last Friday, campaigning in Israel, Netanyahu said he was coming here to lobby “the only body that may prevent” the Iran deal. The gist of both statements is obvious: Netanyahu doesn’t like Obama’s policy, so he’s trying to use Congress to block it.

Let’s be clear: Netanyahu came to defy Obama.


Netanyahu says he’s doing this only because Iranian nukes are an existential threat to Israel. But this isn’t the first time Netanyahu has publicly challenged Obama. The last time he did it—lecturing Obama in the Oval Office, in front of television cameras, for seven minutes in May 2011—the subject wasn’t Iran. It was peace talks with the Palestinians.

In Israel, Netanyahu is exploiting his fight with the administration. He accuses his rivals in the center and on the left of “groveling to the international community” while he stands up to foreign pressure. A Likud campaign ad casts Netanyahu in the tradition of past Israeli leaders who, according to the ad, defied “the American secretary of state” and “the American State Department.”

So let’s be clear: Netanyahu has come here to defy Obama. He has done so because confrontation is in his nature. And he’s politicizing it. You can dismiss all his protestations that the speech shouldn’t be taken as an assault on the authority of our head of state. Because that’s exactly how Netanyahu treats criticism of his own policies back home.


Two years ago, Netanyahu formed a coalition government with several smaller parties. He got to be prime minister. In exchange, leaders of the other parties got jobs in the cabinet. Israel has a parliamentary system, so the other leaders are members of Israel’s congress. Two of them criticized some of Netanyahu’s policies. So, in December, Netanyahu fired them. “I will not tolerate opposition anymore within the government,” he declared.

Netanyahu didn’t just dissolve the government and force new elections; he demanded greater authority. He announced plans to pass a new law that would strip dissenting parties of their power to check the prime minister by withdrawing from the government. Under the new law, said Netanyahu, “the head of the largest party will automatically be installed by the government, and will be ensured a four-year term,” unless a supermajority of parliament votes to remove him.

In January, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, France organized a massive march against terrorism. The French government asked Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to attend. France didn’t want Israeli-Palestinian issues or Netanyahu’s election campaign to cloud the message of the march. Netanyahu attended anyway. In a direct challenge to the national solidarity and pluralism France wanted to convey, Netanyahu urged “all French Jews” to move to Israel. He worked his way up to the front row of the march and plugged his own biography in a speech. “I am personally familiar with the wounds of terror,” he recalled. “As a soldier, I was wounded in an operation to free hostages who had been kidnapped on a Sabena airplane.”

Having sown division in France, Netanyahu used his trip to quash dissent in Israel. He portrayed his participation at the march—which he had decided to attend only after discovering that two other Israeli politicians would be there—as glory for Israel, since Netanyahu represented the nation. “There is great significance in what the world saw, the prime minister of Israel marching with all the world leaders in a united effort against terrorism,” said Netanyahu. In fact, he asserted, “I came to Paris not only as prime minister of Israel, but as a representative of the Jewish people.”

When Netanyahu’s point man negotiates a congressional speech behind Obama’s back, it’s just a disagreement among friends. But when a former Obama campaign operative meddles in Israeli politics, Netanyahu treats it as an invasion. A month ago, Netanyahu’s political party, Likud, found out that an Israeli peace organization had hired a strategist who had previously worked for Obama’s 2012 campaign. The strategist also worked for like-minded groups in other countries. Likud demanded that Israeli election officials prohibit the group from participating in the election. Likud accused the group of using “foreign funding” and said its overseas connections “raise a red flag ... regarding the true allegiance” of Netanyahu’s rivals.





When Israelis question the wisdom of Netanyahu’s hard line on Iran, or his plan to speak in Congress, he dismisses them and purports to speak for the whole nation. Two weeks ago, he told Israelis that he would come to Congress “representing all the citizens of Israel.” On Sunday, he went further: “I am the emissary of all Israelis, even those who disagree with me, of the entire Jewish people.” A statement from Likud accused dissenters of betraying national security: “On such a crucial existential … issue for the citizens of Israel, opposition leaders should rise above political and personal considerations and stand alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

So please, Mr. Prime Minister, don’t pretend we shouldn’t take offense at what you just did. If anybody did the same to you, you’d never stand for it.

 

[superbeets]

 

[superbeets]

444 Days.

Lest we forget.

 

[superbeets]

"

Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we'll read the Book of Esther. We'll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies.
The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.


Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred, the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology. He tweets that Israel must be annihilated -- he tweets. You know, in Iran, there isn't exactly free Internet. But he tweets in English that Israel must be destroyed.


For those who believe that Iran threatens the Jewish state, but not the Jewish people, listen to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran's chief terrorist proxy. He said: If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of chasing them down around the world.

 

[The Guesser]

[h=1]A lifetime achievement – destruction of the State of Israel[/h] [h=2]Netanyahu the coward is sometimes even more dangerous than the diligent fool. After all, his speech to Congress showed he has the ‘courage’ to endanger Israel-U.S. relations.[/h] By Niva Lanir 06:00 04.03.15

0

Are you still concerned about what’s happening here? Angry? Insulted about being treated like idiots? Here’s another reason, which is concealed in the item “The Israel Electric Corporation once again cut off power to Jenin and Nablus” (Haaretz, February 26, Jack Khoury and Barak Ravid). It reported that after the company cut power two days in a row, National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen convened an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis of the Palestinian debt to the IEC. Participating in the discussion were representatives of the ministries of defense, finance and energy, and the chairman of the IEC.
Does it seem logical to you to convene a discussion after cutting off the electricity rather than before? In that case, note what came next: The Prime Minister’s Office said that the Electric Corp.’s decision to cut off power “was not under our instructions,” and that the Electric Corp. operated “without instructions from the political leadership.” The defense minister’s office said “they were surprised by the company’s step and are opposed to it.” The next day there was another report, to the effect that a sum from the frozen Palestinian tax money held by Israel will be transferred to the Electric Corp. to partially cover the debt.
I have only a few questions: If there are no instructions from above, where did the blackout come from? Whose company is it, for God’s sake? Who granted powers to the Electric Corp. chairman, Yiftah Ron Tal, to cut off power and perhaps to heat things up, while the national security adviser, the defense minister and the coordinator for government activity in the territories were vehemently opposed? How does that happen? And how is it that the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Lands Authority also act as though there is no government in Israel?
In the past, politicians and media people used to speak in praise of the great advantage of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has difficulty making decisions. And not only on political issues. It’s lucky, whispered senior members of the defense establishment who spoke to senior members of the media, that he’s a coward. If not, we would long ago have been in deep trouble.
That’s a problematic formula that doesn’t contain even the slightest solution to our problems. Because Netanyahu the coward is sometimes even more dangerous than the diligent fool. The thousands of words that have been said and written about his speech to Congress attest that the coward has demonstrated courage deserving of a medal of honor in endangering relations between Israel and the United States. His constant tendency to refrain from taking responsibility – and not only on the issue of housing prices – and fobbing it off on his predecessors, his rivals and the media, attests that the coward demonstrates great courage when it comes to creative solutions for handling crisis situations. See the case of former chief caretaker of the Prime Minister’s Residence, Meni Naftali. And see his courageous refusal to get involved in the issue of the dismissal of Israel Chemicals employees.
Fear has strong legs. They reside in Jerusalem, but they do a lot of walking. On some days they walked from the Western Wall to Washington. From David Ben Gurion to Levi Eshkol. From the War of Independence to the Six-Day War. I have suggested that Netanyahu be awarded the Israel Prize for Theater, or the “prize for Zionist creative work,” or both. But if he wins the election and serves for another term, Netanyahu will receive the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement, not for the longest ever tenure as prime minister, but for his contribution to the destruction of the State of Israel. What did they used to say in the Palmach? “Don’t waste your despair, we will need it.”
Very funny. But behind it lies profound sorrow. Isn’t it a shame? The efforts of generations are invested in this country. Isn’t it a shame to destroy what still remains of the tremendous effort that our parents made, that we made, and that our children are making? Will we continue to place our lives in the hands of the worst prime minister in Israel’s history? Or perhaps we should ask whether we will continue to forfeit our lives by doing so.

 

[superbeets]

"

The people of Iran are very talented people. They're heirs to one of the world's great civilizations. But in 1979, they were hijacked by religious zealots -- religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship.

That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world."

I'm standing here in Washington, D.C. and the difference is so stark.

America's founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Iran's founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad.

And as states are collapsing across the Middle East, Iran is charging into the void to do just that.
"

 

[superbeets]

"Iran's goons in Gaza, its lackeys in Lebanon, its revolutionary guards on the Golan Heights are clutching Israel with three tentacles of terror.

Backed by Iran, Assad is slaughtering Syrians. Back by Iran, Shiite militias are rampaging through Iraq. Back by Iran, Houthis are seizing control of Yemen, threatening the strategic straits at the mouth of the Red Sea. Along with the Straits of Hormuz, that would give Iran a second choke-point on the world's oil supply.

Just last week, near Hormuz, Iran carried out a military exercise blowing up a mock U.S. aircraft carrier.

That's just last week, while they're having nuclear talks with the United States.


But unfortunately, for the last 36 years, Iran's attacks against the United States have been anything but mock. And the targets have been all too real.
"

 

[The Guesser]

[h=1]The Iranian nuclear deal looks like a reasonable compromise[/h] [h=2]There is only one alternative: continued sanctions, renewed enrichment and in the end military conflict.[/h] By Avner Cohen 19:12 02.03.15

1

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Tuesday is a loathsome political event that America can’t remember the likes of. It was born of a conspiracy of sin between House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican who despises his president, and an arrogant foreign leader who two weeks before an election is using Congress as a prop for his electoral needs.
The two bridesmaids of this scandalous affair are using one another with boundlesscynicism for their political needs while spewing filth on the rules of what is done and not done. This goes both for American politics and relations between allies.
And the content is no less worrying than the form. It’s amazing to see how the entire Israeli public sphere, including Netanyahu’s rivals, has accepted as holy writ Netanyahu’s conviction that a nuclear agreement with Iran is "bad, very bad" — and all this even before the final text is ready. Is it really that bad? Is the agreement really as bad for Israel as Netanyahu portrays it? Is another kind of agreement at all possible?
True, the deal is not optimal for Israel, far from it, but overall there are potential advantages. True, a few matters may need improving and explaining here and there, but in general it’s a reasonable compromise. As with every compromise, there are risks and prospects, disadvantages and benefits.
The devil of course is in the details, and some of them have notyet been finalized. But from what is known, in the opinion of most experts, not only is the compromise fair — a better one will be very hard to reach. There is only one alternative: continued sanctions, the collapse of the interim agreement, renewed enrichment, and in the end military conflict. It should be clear to everyone: America (including the Republicans) clearly prefers a reasonable compromise over a military conflict.

For Israel, the biggest disadvantage of the agreement is that it does not strip Iran of its nuclear assets. Netanyahu has repeatedly demanded “no enrichment,” but everyone knows this is just rhetoric with no political horizon or legal foundation. There is no source for such a demand in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Despite this disadvantage, the agreement still reduces and limits Iran’s nuclear assets to a lower level than in the interim agreement.
True, the agreement also grants Iran legitimacy as a nuclear threshold state. But we must remember that Iran was already a nuclear threshold state before it signed the interim agreement. In any case, the question of a threshold state is the original sin that derives from the ambiguity in the Nonproliferation Treaty itself. The treaty bans the development of nuclear weapons but does not explicitly ban member nations from becoming threshold states.
The agreement also contains unique advantages barely discussed in Israel. It clearly distances Iran from a nuclear bomb — from a few weeks as was the case in 2012 to about a year. Most importantly, it establishes a regime of safeguards and transparency for almost a generation. After that, Iran’s nuclear status will be the same as for any other nonnuclear state under the Nonproliferation Treaty. True, this may not be ideal, but that’s a problem for the very distant future, almost a generation away.

Despite its flaws, the proposed agreement is far from bad for Israel — the only nuclear power in the Middle East — but it is very bad for Netanyahu. The agreement offers Israel almost a generation, or even more if it succeeds, in which Netanyahu won’t be able to sow fear about Iran as an existential danger. It would leave Netanyahu as a leader whose raison d’être has been taken away from him.

Avner Cohen, professor of nonproliferation studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, is the author of “Israel and the Bomb.”

 

[superbeets]

"


In the Middle East, Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran's aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow.

So, at a time when many hope that Iran will join the community of nations, Iran is busy gobbling up the nations.
"

 

[superbeets]

"Iran's regime is as radical as ever, its cries of "Death to America," that same America that it calls the "Great Satan," as loud as ever.

Now, this shouldn't be surprising, because the ideology of Iran's revolutionary regime is deeply rooted in militant Islam, and that's why this regime will always be an enemy of America.

Don't be fooled. The battle between Iran and ISIS doesn't turn Iran into a friend of America.
"

 

[The Guesser]

Interesting take. Hope They're right.

Netanyahu Just Did Obama a Big Favor



Bibi’s speech inadvertently proved that the current negotiations are our best strategy for dealing with Iran.

By Matthew Duss


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did President Obama an enormous favor Tuesday. Given the opportunity, on perhaps the world’s biggest political stage, to articulate the best possible case against the nuclear deal currently being negotiated with Iran, Netanyahu came up empty. He whiffed. His shot sailed so wide of the rim that it went up into the bleachers and struck a small child in the face.


Given how much buildup the speech received—and how much of America’s time has been wasted with the controversy surrounding it—it’s simply amazing that Netanyahu didn’t use the chance to offer any new or interesting ideas, any viable path to achieving the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon—which he insists is a shared goal with the United States—other than the one we are on now.


From the first moment, the speech rang false. Netanyahu declared himself “deeply humbled” to be speaking before the Congress. Upon leaving Israel, he described his trip in wildly grandiose terms, declaring it a “historic mission.” Netanyahu may be many things, but humble isn’t one.


He then voiced his “regret that some perceive my being here as political. That was never my intention.” Can Netanyahu really have not understood that an invitation planned in secret between his ambassador and the Republican House speaker would be seen as political?


Aside from the initial ceremonial throat-clearing, however, the speech resembled those Netanyahu has given countless times before.

It’s simply amazing that Netanyahu didn’t use this chance to offer any new or interesting ideas.

Once again we heard Netanyahu’s view that the Iranian regime is irretrievably hostile to the West, dismissing the notion that the current administration of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani represents any sort of change for the better. “Two years ago we were told to give President Rouhani and Foreign Minister [Mohammad Javad] Zarif a chance to bring change and moderation to Iran,” he said. “Some change! Some moderation!” It’s worth pointing out here that, as on much else, Israel’s own security chiefs disagree with their prime minister. In late 2013 a leaked report from Israel’s military intelligence revealed that Israel’s “[e]xpert analysis does not view Rouhani’s election as a deception by Khamenei intended solely to mislead the West, but rather as an authentic leader who is creating an independent power center,” and that “a deep strategic change was being played out in Iran, expressed in [Rouhani’s] election victory.”

Once again we heard that there is no meaningful distinction between Shiite Iran and Sunni ISIS, despite the fact that the two are currently at war. “Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world,” Netanyahu said. “They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.” If the last decade should have taught us anything, it’s that it’s far wiser to disaggregate our adversaries than treat them as a monolith.

This isn’t to disregard the threat posed by Iran, which is quite real. It is clear that Iran has been able to exploit regional instability in a bid to increase its regional influence, but we should remember that one of the main triggers of that instability was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an invasion that Netanyahu himself supported, in testimony before Congress in 2002 when he insisted that the invasion “will have enormous positive reverberations in the region.”


We heard the familiar “apocalyptic mullah” argument. Iran is ruled by religious zealots driven to “fulfill the ideological mission of jihad,” he said. The message here is that, under such a government, Iran is uniquely immune to cost-benefit analysis that underpins conventional theories of deterrence, something I refer to as the “martyr state myth.” Again, this view is at odds with a strong U.S. and Israeli intelligence consensus, which holds that Iran pursues its national interests rationally. It’s precisely Tehran’s rational cost-benefit analysis that the U.S. and its partners in the P5+1 have been attempting to influence through the nuclear negotiations.


After running down the list of Iran’s offenses, it came time for Netanyahu to offer his own alternative. And it was this: “The alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal.” That’s it. Negotiate harder, threaten more, and increase the pressure. Then Iran will capitulate. We talked about this speech for a month—for this?

A lot of us would love a perfect deal that dismantled Iran’s whole program and removed any possibility whatsoever of an Iranian nuclear capability, but that’s not one of the options here. The question is whether we want the United States and its partners to walk away from a good-enough deal that keeps Iran far away from a nuke and puts its program under the heaviest inspections regime ever in the hope that we could possibly get a slightly better deal later. In the meantime, Iran would continue to move its program forward. That’s not a good idea.
Netanyahu had the chance Tuesday to offer a better plan, with the whole world watching. He failed miserably, and in so doing demonstrated conclusively that there isn’t one. To the extent that this buttresses the Obama administration’s case for a deal—and it certainly should—the American people should be grateful to him.

 

[The Guesser]

[h=1]Democrats on Netanyahu’s Speech: Bibi’s Never Seen a War He Doesn’t Want the U.S. to Fight[/h]

By Betsy Woodruff A few minutes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up a speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski yelled, “Wooh, baby! That was awesome!”

Betsy Woodruff Betsy Woodruff is a Slate staff writer.

In a cramped, dark room in the basement of the Capitol, sentiments were very different. About a dozen liberal House Democrats—most of whom boycotted the prime minister’s speech—assembled to tear into Netanyahu’s address and Speaker John Boehner’s decision to invite him without the White House’s imprimatur.

Rep. Jared Huffman of California, who attended the speech, accused the prime minister of trying to push the United States into war.


“This is a prime minister who’s never seen a war he didn’t want our country to fight,” Huffman said, adding that diplomats negotiating with Iran shouldn’t be distracted by Netanyahu’s address.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Illinois Democrat, suggested Netanyahu’s credibility is suspect because he also backed the 2003 war in Iraq.

“What I heard today felt to me like an effort to stampede the United States into war once again,” she said.


Another Democrat compared Netanyahu to George W. Bush’s former vice president. “This speech was straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook,” said Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth. “It was fear-mongering at its ultimate.”


Yarmuth also said that Netanyahu’s requests were akin to those of a small child looking to visit an amusement park.


“Prime Minister Netanyahu basically said that the only acceptable deal was a perfect deal, or an ideal deal,” Yarmuth said. “It’s like the child that says, I want to go to Disneyland every day, eat ice cream and drink Coca-Cola every day, and not go to school.”



Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, sporting his trademark brightly colored bicycle lapel pin and bowtie, criticized Netanyahu for neglecting to discuss the Palestinian peace process in his address. He also said the Israeli prime minister is too pessimistic about the possibility of healthier U.S./Iran relations.

“All of my friends who visited Iran as private citizens are struck by how friendly and outgoing Iranians are,” he said.

The Republicans in the House chamber (and many of the Democrats) couldn’t have given Netanyahu’s speech a warmer welcome. But for the progressive Democrats who sat the event out and then assembled in the Capitol basement, the day felt like the run-up to the Iraq war all over again.

 

[superbeets]

​Would Iran be less aggressive when sanctions are removed and its economy is stronger? If Iran is gobbling up four countries right now while it's under sanctions, how many more countries will Iran devour when sanctions are lifted? Would Iran fund less terrorism when it has mountains of cash with which to fund more terrorism?

Why should Iran's radical regime change for the better when it can enjoy the best of both world's: aggression abroad, prosperity at home?

 

[superbeets]

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  Right now, Iran could be hiding nuclear facilities that we don't know about, the U.S. and Israel. As the former head of inspections for the IAEA said in 2013, he said, "If there's no undeclared installation today in Iran, it will be the first time in 20 years that it doesn't have one." Iran has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted. And that's why the first major concession is a source of great concern. It leaves Iran with a vast nuclear infrastructure and relies on inspectors to prevent a breakout. That concession creates a real danger that Iran could get to the bomb by violating the deal.
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