Bibi Nails It

There were no surprises for me and, as President Obama suggested, nothing new in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, just all the moral clarity and proper identification of the enemy one would expect from a leader whose country daily faces an existential threat that is real and committed to its annihilation.  And how refreshing it was, given the steady stream of denial coming from Washington, particularly the Department of State, and the credulity in evidence in our negotiations with Iran over nuclear arms.  This was my favorite passage:

Iran’s regime is as radical as ever, its cries of “Death to America”, that same America that it calls the “Great Satan”, as loud as ever.  Now, this shouldn’t be surprising, because the ideology of Iran’s revolutionary regime is deeply rooted in militant Islam, and that’s why this regime will always be an enemy of America.

Don’t be fooled.  The battle between Iran and ISIS doesn’t turn Iran into a friend of America.  Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam.  One calls itself the Islamic Republic.  The other calls itself the Islamic State.  Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world.  They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire……………

So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy………..I’ll say it one more time—the greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons.  To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war.  We can’t let that happen.

You can’t find any better moral clarity than that.

Henry Kissinger reminded us a few weeks ago that the nuclear talks with Iran began as an international effort, supported by six UN resolutions, to deny Iran the capability to develop military nuclear weapons.  Now we find that the negotiations are bilateral and essentially about the scope of that capability, and, in his words, “the impact of this approach will be to move from preventing proliferation to managing it”.  Not an acceptable outcome.

But we should also understand that, in an even more basic sense, we are attempting to negotiate with a regime that is based on an ideology that doesn’t even accept the validity of the process of negotiations among nation states.  The whole process is contrary to Sharia law and they have no intention to abide by the agreed treaty provisions.  There is no way to square that circle and the fact that we do not seem to understand this is further emblematic of our misguided approach.  The only thing these people understand is power and the willingness to deliver it in defense of our interests.