Netanyahu Speech Raises Burden for Obama

[bobalot]

Netanyahu Speech Raises Burden for Obama on Iran Nuclear Talks

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s task of selling a potential nuclear agreement with Iran to a skeptical Congress became far harder on Tuesday after an impassioned speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to lawmakers already nervous about the deal.

“The president has a very heavy burden of persuasion here,” said former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, a Democrat and the onetime chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who now directs Indiana University’s Center on Congress. “That task is made much more difficult when a powerful case is stated against the emerging deal, as the prime minister has done.”

Although Mr. Hamilton said he doubted many minds were changed by Mr. Netanyahu’s words, he said that “what a speech like this does is reinforces and intensifies the opposition at a critical point.”

To be sure, others argued that Mr. Netanyahu’s address would have an effect opposite to the one he intended — prompting lawmakers undecided about the deal to chalk up Mr. Netanyahu’s message as raw politics and discount it.

“If anything, today’s speech pushed moderate Democrats into more of a wait-and-see approach, because it was such a rare event to see a sitting prime minister come over and take issue with a U.S. president on a matter of foreign policy importance,” said John Ullyot, managing director of the High Lantern Group and a former top Republican foreign policy aide in the Senate.

Mr. Netanyahu’s hotly disputed address constituted a remarkable moment in Washington: a foreign leader taking the podium before members of the House and Senate to argue strenuously against the policies of the sitting American president. In doing so, the Israeli leader was essentially urging lawmakers to trust him — not Mr. Obama — when it comes to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Mr. Netanyahu’s address was the third he has given to a joint meeting of Congress. He also spoke in 1996 and 2011.

Visibly irritated by Tuesday’s speech when asked about it in the Oval Office afterward, Mr. Obama dismissed the pressure from his Israeli counterpart, pledging to take his case “to every member of Congress once we actually have a deal.”

But as he makes that crucial sales job — which will involve persuading lawmakers to go along with the easing of a complex set of sanctions against Iran, some put in place by Congress — Mr. Obama must now overcome not only the animosity of Republicans but also the words of the leader of Israel, whose powerful speech will serve as the counterpoint to a president they already distrust.

“It gives the far right on the Hill live ammo and firms up their view, especially in the House,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group consulting firm and an Iran specialist. “That’s going to make a hard sell a really hard sell for President Obama on a final deal.”

If nothing else, the speech accelerated the timetable for Congress to debate a forthcoming nuclear deal scarcely one month after Mr. Obama and his team succeeded in persuading restive Democrats to hold off temporarily on teaming with Republicans to push for new Iran sanctions. Ten Democrats signed a letter to Mr. Obama in January pledging not to vote for such a bill until after March 24, when negotiators from seven countries are aiming to reach a tentative agreement on stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Warning of what he called the “countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare,” Mr. Netanyahu sought to use the fear that Iran would cheat on any deal, and ultimately escape constraints on its nuclear program altogether, to galvanize United States lawmakers from both parties against Mr. Obama’s position. He appealed to their commitments to Israel as a bulwark against their support for the American president.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, moved quickly after Mr. Netanyahu’s address to put the president on notice that lawmakers intended to have their say in the matter.

“Congress and the American people need to be part of this discussion, too,” Mr. McConnell said as he moved to schedule debate on legislation that would make any Iran agreement subject to congressional approval. “Congress must be involved in reviewing and voting on an agreement reached between this White House and Iran.”

More than a dozen Senate Democrats, including Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, have indicated that they support legislation to impose more sanctions or to give Congress approval power over an eventual deal. That raises the prospect that opponents of an Iran agreement could cobble together a large enough bipartisan coalition to block it — and override a presidential veto if necessary.

Mr. McConnell’s move on Tuesday cleared the way for a procedural vote as soon as Monday on the congressional review bill, which Mr. Menendez has co-sponsored.

But Mr. Menendez objected angrily on Tuesday to speeding up the timetable for the Iran debate, saying he would oppose taking up his own bill if Republicans insisted on doing so before March 24. “There’s no reason — no reason — to accelerate this process in this way,” he said on the Senate floor.

In the longer term, Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been pushing for a harder line on Iran, said that Mr. Netanyahu might have persuaded “a good number of moderate Democrats that Congress should at the very least have a say” on any deal.

For Democrats who have long viewed themselves as supporters of Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s speech sought to impress upon them the likelihood that they will eventually need to make an awkward, painful choice between the president of their country and their loyalty to the Jewish state.

It would be up to Democrats in Congress to make sure that lawmakers do not override Mr. Obama’s veto, a rebuke that would embarrass the president at home and overseas. That task would fall in part to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader in the House, who issued a blistering condemnation of Mr. Netanyahu’s address, calling it an “insult.”

Some Democrats who are strong supporters of Israel praised Mr. Netanyahu’s speech.

“Many members of Congress are still hoping to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. “I certainly think that the prime minister raised some valid points. The question to me is: Are we safer because of the deal? Do we prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon because of the deal, or is there a better alternative?” He added: “You can’t really know until you see what’s in the deal.”

Source

[Flagg]

Boehner should be charged with sedition.

[NoXion]

For Democrats who have long viewed themselves as supporters of Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s speech sought to impress upon them the likelihood that they will eventually need to make an awkward, painful choice between the president of their country and their loyalty to the Jewish state.

Such a choice should never be awkward or painful at all. For all the talk of US-Israeli friendship it should be obvious that the relationship is one of convenience for both sides. Although arguably Israel gets more out of it than the US does, receiving billions in aid in return for being a surly and fair-weather ally in the Middle East, with more or less free reign to destabilise their neighbours.

[Metahive]

Is Netanyahu seriously claiming that citizens of another sovereign country, jewish and non-jewish alike, "owe" loyalty to Israel? That's pretty darn brazen I must say.

Of course, all the right-wing Israel fanwhores in the US only consider Israel worth keeping around because its existence is necessary for the dispensationalist End-times to occur upon whom all Jews are slaughtered by Jesus and send to hell so I guess they and Netanyahu deserve each other.

[Flagg]

Alternet

What Was Missing From the Mainstream Media's Coverage of Netanyahu's Speech

It's striking what prominent U.S. papers left out of their articles.

By Jim Naureckas / FAIR

March 5, 2015

Reading the lead stories on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress about Iran in five prominent US papers–the New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today(all 3/3/15)–what was most striking was what was left out of these articles.

None of them mentioned, for example, that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. Surely this is relevant when a foreign leader says that it needs the United States' help to stop a rival state from obtaining nuclear weapons: The omission of the obvious phrase "of its own" changes the story entirely.

Another thing largely left out of the story is the fact that Iran has consistently maintained that it has no interest in building a nuclear weapon. There was one direct statement of this in the five stories–the New York Times' reference to "Iran's nuclear program, which [Iranian] officials have insisted is only for civilian uses." The Washington Post alluded to the fact that Iran denies that it has a nuclear weapons program, referring to "a program the West has long suspected is aimed at building weapons," Iran's "stated nuclear energy goals" and "the suspect Iranian program." Elsewhere the military nature of Iran's nuclear research was taken for granted, as when the LA Times said that the issue under discussion was "how to deal with the threat of Iran's nuclear program."

Entirely absent from these articles was the fact that not only does Iran deny wanting to make a nuclear bomb, the intelligence agencies of the United States (New York Times, 2/24/12) and Israel (Guardian, 2/23/15) also doubt that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. Surely this is relevant to a report on the Israeli prime minister engaging in a public debate with the US president on how best to stop this quite possibly nonexistent program.

Instead, these articles generally seemed content to cover the subject as a debate between Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama, perhaps with some congressmembers thrown in–as if these were the "both sides" that needed to be covered in order to give a complete picture of the controversy. When Iranian officials were quoted for a few lines in these pieces–which some neglected to do altogether–it seemed an afterthought, despite the fact that Netanyahu's speech was mainly a long litany of allegations and threats against their country.

(Though I'm confining my analysis to what seemed to be the most prominent and comprehensive article on the speech on each paper's website, it's worth mentioning that the New York Times' website featured a piece by Iran's ambassador to the UN, Gholamali Khoshroo, rebutting Netanyahu's speech. Reading it one is struck by how different the news pieces would read if Iran's perspective on Iran's nuclear program were given equal weight with Israel's and the US's views.)

None of these news articles mentioned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by both the United States and Iran but not by Israel, which guarantees"the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes."

One article–the New York Times'–had a reference to Netanyahu's decades-long record of making false nuclear predictions about Israel's enemies. And even that was framed in partisan terms: Netanyahu "did not succeed in mollifying all Democrats, who recalled a history of what they deemed doomsday messages by him." A reporter, of course, could look up Netayahu's previous projections to see if they came true or not–as Murtaza Hussain of the Intercept (3/2/15) did–but holding officials accountable for what they have said in the past is not something an "objective" journalist is likely to do.

Another striking omission from these articles, about a speech in which Netanyahu talked about Iran's "aggression in the region and in the world," were words like "Palestine," "Palestinian," "occupation" or "Gaza"; none of these came up in any of the five articles. USA Today headlined its piece "Netanyahu: Stop Iran's 'March of Conquest'"–as though it were Iran, not Israel, that hasconquered, occupied and in some cases annexed its neighbors' territory.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthy magazine.

Remember the IvP moratorium please.

I find it interesting that all 3 parties seem to be in agreement that Iran is, in fact, not building a nuclear weapon at this time. It's actually doing it to be able to construct nuclear power plants. Not to say this will always be the case (and I'm sure Israel will just bomb the facility or facilities just like they did in the '80s to our good ally Saddam Hussien).
So I would suggest that President Obama hold a Joint Press Conference with the Iranian President to refute Bibi's ridiculous, unproven, and war mongering claims.
Then arrest the entire Republican Congressional leadership and charge them with sedition, as that's one of the many crimes they committed by going behind the executives back and inviting a foreign leader to speak before a joint session of congress in order to undermine the Presidents foreign policy.

[Gandalf]

Of course, all the right-wing Israel fanwhores in the US only consider Israel worth keeping around because its existence is necessary for the dispensationalist End-times to occur upon whom all Jews are slaughtered by Jesus and send to hell so I guess they and Netanyahu deserve each other.

To be fair, some secularist right wing guys just like Israel so they can play REALPOLITIK in the Middle East without having to risk American lives. Instead of deploying brave young virile American men whose flag draped caskets are bad for opinion polls, they can just fund someone else to do it.