By all appearances it looks as if Israel is promoting war against Iran. This is total insanity.
On September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu — then a private citizen — was invited to Congress to give “an Israeli perspective” in support of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Netanyahu issued a confident prediction: “if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” adding, “and I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
WRONG!
In 2015, Netanyahu returned to Congress — this time as Israel’s prime minister — to undermine the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) negotiations led by the Obama administration along with key U.S. allies the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. After a tepid acknowledgement of President Obama’s support for Israel — Obama ultimately gave Israel $38 billion, the largest military aid package in history — Netanyahu spent the remainder of his speech attacking what would become one of the sitting president’s signature foreign policy achievements.
In both cases, Netanyahu’s advice was catastrophically wrong. America’s invasion of Iraq was a bloody disaster that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more, creating massive instability in the region and paving the way for ISIS’s rise.
Meanwhile, Obama’s deal with Iran had succeeded in rolling Iran’s nuclear program back and blocking its pathways to a bomb — that is until the Trump administration followed Netanyahu’s advice and backed out of the deal in 2018, thus forfeiting our capability to contain Iran’s nuclear program while torpedoing prospects for productive engagement with Tehran on reducing regional tensions.
Tomorrow, Netanyahu is set to address Congress again — this time, as he prosecutes a campaign of mass carnage and destruction in Gaza that has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians — to ask for continued support for his efforts to “defeat Hamas.” Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces themselves call Netanyahu’s pursuit of “total victory” against Hamas impossible and “misleading to the public.”
By now, Netanyahu is used to coming to Washington, telling U.S. leaders what to do, and seeing them oblige. The consequences of abiding his arrogant approach have been nothing short of disastrous. So will Washington allow itself to be bullied by Bibi again? Will Congress and the administration put his selfish demands ahead of the American people’s interests in avoiding a regional war, and ending our complicity in the destruction of Gaza?
3 replies on “Bibi’s bullying visits to Congress never end well”
Hi Penny:
U.S. leaders are controlled by those who fund them. Of those who fund the leaders, are there any that have in interest in supporting Israel?
oops, should have been “an interest”
Hi Gary
Sadly, yes. US leaders, like Canadian leaders are controlled by who funds them.
Covid and pharmaceutical influencers is a shining example of that control.
I know the AIPAC lobby is very big and very influential- they will fund a specific candidate that will do their bidding- I’ve read about this time and time again in the US.
It goes on here in Canada as well.
None of this is beneficial to the average citizen. It’s all special interest groups being catered to because they can pay and pay.