Judging by the rousing applause and the frequent standing ovations Prime Minister Netanyahu received during his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, the Obama administration’s strenuous efforts to discredit Mr. Netanyahu’s appearance, and promote the notion of possibly adverse consequences for U.S.-Israel relations, fell flat on its face.
There could be no mistaking that Mr. Netanyahu was in room full of friends eager to underscore the warm relationship between the two countries. And the reception accorded the prime minister was evidence of the growing sentiment in Congress that Mr. Obama simply cannot be trusted on maters related to Iran and that Mr. Netanyahu was justified in dramatically forcing the issue by going to Congress. And it’s about time.
The president, for example, hardly paid a political price for claiming – falsely, it turned out – during the run-up to the enactment of Obamacare that Americans would be able to keep their existing health plans.
He also escaped unscathed after issuing certain immigration regulations after earlier saying he had no power under the Constitution to do those very same things.
Nor were there repercussions stemming from the administration’s transparent prevarications over the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi.
And despite the president’s initial assurances that Iran would be unable to develop nuclear weapons under the terms of any finalized agreement, it’s become increasingly clear that U.S. policy is on a decidedly less ambitious track and that the U.S. is considering a deal with few restrictions on uranium enrichment – such that Iran could indeed emerge with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.
So we were intrigued by Secretary of State Kerry’s recent plea on ABC’s “This Week” that President Obama should be given “the benefit of the doubt” on the Iran talks. Mr. Kerry also said that Israel’s insistence on a strong U.S. stance in the Iran negotiations shouldn’t be
turned into some great political football…. Israel is safer today because of the interim agreement that we created. Now, I guarantee you, we have said again and again, no deal is better than a bad deal. We’re not going to make a bad deal…. [G]iven our success on the interim deal, I believe we deserve he benefit of the doubt to find out whether or not we can get a similarly good agreement with respect to the future.
In testimony before Congress in late February, Mr. Kerry was even more emphatic that the nuclear negotiations shouldn’t be criticized prior to a deal being struck:
The president has made clear – I can’t state this more firmly – the policy is Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. And anybody running around right now, jumping in to say, “Well we don’t like the deal,” or this or that, doesn’t know what the deal is. There is no deal yet. And I caution people to wait and see what these negotiations produce.
Also, White House spokesman Josh Earnest flat out denied last week that the U.S. was considering a nuclear deal that would expire in 10 years and which would leave Iran free of sanctions and free to develop nuclear weapons.
And earlier this week U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told an AIPAC audience,
The United States of America will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Period…. Maybe the president has made this point so often that it isn’t heard in the same way anymore. But we have to keep repeating it: Talks, no talks. Agreement, no agreement. The United States will take whatever steps are necessary to protect our national security and that of our closest allies….We believe diplomacy is the preferred route to secure our shared aim, but if diplomacy should fail, we know the stakes of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as anyone here. We will not let it happen. There will never be a sunset on America’s commitment to Israel’s security. Never.
But then, on Monday this week, President Obama said during an interview with Reuters:
If, in fact, Iran is willing to agree to double-digit years of keeping their program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist…if we’ve got that, and we’ve got a way of verifying that, there’s no other steps we can take that would give us such assurances that they don’t have a nuclear weapon…. [I]f they agree to it, it would be far more effective in controlling their nuclear program than any military action we could take, any military action Israel could take and far more effective than sanctions will be.
A little noted byplay between Secretary Kerry and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper is also instructive. On February 25, Mr. Kerry said this to a Congressional committee:
Our citizens, our world today is actually, despite ISIL, despite the visible killings that you see and how horrific they are, we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally – less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century.
The very next day, Mr. Clapper testified to the committee as follows:
When the final accounting is done, 2014 will be the most lethal year in global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. About half of all attacks including fatalities in 2014 occurred in just three countries, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
How to explain the difference? Here’s our take.
Mr. Kerry’s testimony was not delivered under oath as is usually the case with a secretary of state appearing before Congress. But Mr. Clapper was indeed sworn in, and his remarks were subject to the laws of perjury, and therein lies the tale.
On March 12, 2013, in sworn testimony to Congress regarding U.S. government agency spying on Americans, Mr. Clapper responded to a question posed by Senator Ron Wyden:
Wyden: Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
Clapper: No sir. Not wittingly.
The short of it is that there were serious calls for prosecuting Mr. Clapper for perjury since the Snowden revelations painted a picture of a vast NSA program of spying on Americans.
Once was apparently more than enough for Mr. Clapper, who obviously was reluctant to play games with the truth in his sworn testimony last month. Not so with Secretary Kerry, who was under no such restraints.
When all is considered, prudence dictates that anything coming out of the Obama administration can only mark the beginning of the inquiry rather than the end. And there’s no doubt that Americans and their elected representatives have begun parsing statements by administration officials much more carefully than before.
Prime Minister Netanyahu performed an invaluable service in putting U.S. policy makers on the defensive by dramatically flushing out their deceptive and dangerous word games.