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U.S. and Israel: The Manufactured Crisis

(Weekly Standard) Elliott Abrams - Building a crisis up or down between the U.S. and Israel is well within the administration's power, and it has chosen to build it up. Clearly more is behind the conduct of the Obama administration than mere pique over the speech. The administration is desperately seeking a deal with Iran on terms that until recently were unacceptable to a broad swath of Democrats as well as Republicans. One after another, American demands or "red lines" have been abandoned. Clearly the administration worries that Israeli (not just Netanyahu, but Israeli) criticisms of the possible Iran nuclear deal might begin to reverberate. So it has adopted the tactic of personalizing the Israeli critique. Arguments that are shared across the Israeli political spectrum - that the likely Iran deal says nothing about Iranian ballistic missile development, says nothing about Iranian warhead development, does not require that Iran meet IAEA demands that it account for past warhead work, allows Iran thousands of centrifuges, will allow Iran to escape all monitoring and limitations after perhaps ten years - are attributed solely to Netanyahu. Clever, in a way, but of course completely misleading. And irresponsible when it comes to the deadly issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. The writer is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2015-03-03 00:00:00
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