{"id":144049,"date":"2015-03-03T17:34:12","date_gmt":"2015-03-03T17:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=144049"},"modified":"2015-03-03T17:34:12","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T17:34:12","slug":"netanyahus-troubling-subtext","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/netanyahus-troubling-subtext\/","title":{"rendered":"Netanyahu\u2019s Troubling Subtext"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Paul R. Pillar<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will talk, as he has innumerable times before, about how an Iranian nuclear weapon is supposedly an extremely grave and imminent (he has been saying for years that it is just around the corner) threat to world peace and to his nation.<\/p>\n<p>There has been genuine concern in Israel about this subject, but Netanyahu\u2019s own behavior and posture indicate this is not the concern that is driving his conduct and in particular his diplomacy-wrecking efforts. He is acting out of other motives, ones that \u2013 quite unlike the objective of avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapon \u2013 are not shared with the United States and instead directly conflict with U.S. interests.<\/p>\n<p>There have been plenty of reasons to doubt all along Netanyahu\u2019s alarmist rhetoric. There has been his history of wolf-crying on the subject, against the background of an Iran that has not even decided to build a nuclear weapon. There is the further background of Israel\u2019s overwhelming military superiority in the region, at not only the conventional level but <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/blog\/paul-pillar\/israels-widely-suspected-unmentionables-11191\">also at the level about which Netanyahu is raising such alarm<\/a>. And there are the repeated indications that his alarmism<a href=\"http:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/print-edition\/news\/mossad-chief-nuclear-iran-not-necessarily-existential-threat-to-israel-1.404227\">goes beyond what even his own security services believe<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But even those reasons are not the main ones to conclude that Netanyahu is not acting on behalf of precluding an Iranian nuclear weapon. The main, and most obvious, reason is that he is pushing for an outcome that would <em>remove<\/em> restrictions and enhanced monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program and would give the Iranians <em>more<\/em> freedom to expand that program than they otherwise would have.<\/p>\n<p>That would be the result of destroying the negotiation process that Netanyahu is trying to destroy, while destroying along with it the preliminary agreement that has kept the Iranian program more heavily restricted and monitored than it had ever been before. An absence of agreement <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/great-debate\/2015\/02\/25\/get-over-it-theres-no-better-deal-coming-on-irans-nuclear-program\/\">is the only plausible alternative<\/a> to whatever agreement emerges from the current negotiations, and Netanyahu is smart enough to realize that.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/03\/03\/netanyahus-troubling-subtext\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read \u00a0more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul R. Pillar Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will talk, as he has innumerable times before, about how an Iranian nuclear weapon is supposedly an extremely grave and imminent (he has been saying for years that it is just around the corner) threat to world peace and to his nation. There has been genuine concern [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-144049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}