One of, if not the biggest, Republican talking points about the nuclear deal with Iran is that it’s bad deal because it’s bad deal for Israel.
We know this deal is bad for Israel, Republicans say, because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it is.
Now, there’s nothing the mainstream media likes more than regurgitating right-wing talking points, so this kind of thinking gets treated like gospel here in Washington, but in reality it’s just plain wrong.
And that’s because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Netanyahu is lying about the threat (or lack thereof) posed by the Iranian nuclear deal.
This isn’t some big secret, either.
It’s right there in the opinion pages of Haaretz, Israel’s version of The New York Times.
Earlier this week, Haaretz published a shocking editorial that accused the Netanyahu government of “silencing” a group of intelligence chiefs who disagreed with Netanyahu's position on the Iran deal
According to that editorial, “There are those in the Intelligence Corps, including those in the research division dealing with Iran, who have a very positive view of the nuclear agreement… but… they have been swallowed up as if they had never existed... [T]hese views," they concluded, "are being concealed from the public.”
In other words, Netanyahu is pulling a George W. Bush on Iran.
This raises the question: Why would someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, someone who claims to care about the health and safety of the Israeli people, put politics over policy?
Why wouldn’t he listen to his intelligence chiefs and go along with a deal that pretty much every single nuclear expert in the world says will stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?
The answer is simpler than you might think.
Despite all his talk about Israel and its safety, Benjamin Netanyahu is really only loyal to one cause: the neocon cause.
He’s always been a warmonger of the highest order, and his number one concern isn’t protecting Israel, it’s justifying the Next Big War in the Middle East.
He’s still the same guy he was in 2002 when he sat in front of the US Congress and told the elected representatives of the American people that invading Iraq would bring peace and prosperity to the Arab world.
Replace the words “Saddam Hussein” in that clip with “Ayatollah Khameini” and it could have been taken 13 days, not 13 years, ago.
And that’s a really important point because it gets to the heart of what’s really at stake as Congress continues to debate the Iran deal.
This isn’t about Israel versus Iran, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, America versus Israel, or Israel versus terrorism.
It’s about war versus peace, warmongering versus diplomacy, and neocons versus the rest of us.
Neocons like Benjamin Netanyahu want war at all costs, and will suppress the truth if they have to in order to get their way.
We’ve seen this script before with Iraq, when Netanyahu and the neocons lied their way into the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. And we saw it played out in the 1960s when neocons lied their way into the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, formalizing the Vietnam war.
Let’s not make the same mistake again..
