The Obama administration and its supporters try to paint opposition to the Iran nuke deal as a Bibi Netanyahu problem.
That’s a convenient excuse, because it allows Obama to play the Democrat loyalty card among members still upset about Bibi’s appearance in Congress. It also plays into “Israel Lobby” demonization, the bogeyman of the left.
The opposition to the Iran nuke deal, however, is bringing together usual political enemies. Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic interviews Isaac Herzog, Bibi’s primary domestic political opponent, Israeli Opposition Leader: Iran Deal Will Bring Chaos to the Middle East:
Last December, when I interviewed the leader of Israel’s left-leaning Labor Party, Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, he said, in reference to nuclear negotiations with Iran: “I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal.”In a telephone call with me late last night, Herzog’s message was very different. The deal just finalized in Vienna, he said, “will unleash a lion from the cage, it will have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children.”Iran, he said, is an “empire of evil and hate that spreads terror across the region,” adding that, under the terms of the deal, Iran “will become a nuclear-threshold state in a decade or so.” Iran will take its post-sanctions windfall, he said, and use the funds to supply more rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon, more ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, and “generally increase the worst type of activities that they’ve been doing.”
A similar tone was taken by Saudi Arabia, normally Israel’s enemy (though the two seem to have some tacit understandings when it comes to Iran), Saudi Prince Bandar: The U.S. nuclear pact with North Korea failed. The Iran deal is worse:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States between 1981 and 2005, has written a damning column in which he compares the Iran nuclear deal to the failed nuclear deal with North Korea — and concludes it will have even worse consequences.Writing for the London-based Arabic news Web site Elaph, Badar suggests that President Obama is knowingly making a bad deal, while President Bill Clinton had made a deal with North Korea with the best intentions and the best information he had. The new deal will “wreak havoc” in the Middle East, which is already destabilized due to Iranian actions, Bandar writes.Writing about the failed deal with North Korea, which was agreed in 1994 and collapsed in 2003, Bandar says, “it turned out that the strategic foreign policy analysis was wrong and there was a major intelligence failure.” He added that if Clinton had known the full picture, “I am absolutely confident he would not have made that decision.”
Prince Bandar has this scathing critic of the Obama administration:
The Saudi prince says the new Iran deal and other developments in the region have led him to conclude that a phrase first used by Henry Kissinger – “America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more” – is correct.
With such disparate forces coming together against the nuke deal, it is hard for Obama to turn opposition into the Bibi Lobby, or even the Israel Lobby.
But I’m sure he’ll continue to try.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY