Is Netanyahu Israel’s ‘Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing’?

President Obama should be forewarned that the US would not help Israel in a war of aggression. The US should not accept any longer to be jerked around by a politically deranged leader of a tiny country.

The Israeli leadership freaked out when noticing a rapprochement between Iran and the US. Netanyahu seems not to have understood the writing on the wall. The American people are fed up with spilling their boys’ blood for other countries’ interests. In case of Iran, 85 per cent Americans favour diplomacy rather than war. It seems as if the belligerent American political class can only be stopped by massive public opinion, as the case of Syria has shown. Whether the Zionist lobby AIPAC can overturn antiwar opinion by financially supporting the US midterm elections remains to be seen.

Netanyahu showed a lack of political acumen when he dismissed the Rosh Hashanah greeting of Iran’s newly-elected President Hassan Rouhani to the Jewish people. He accused him of being a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ for his rant before the UN General Assembly. Netanyahu called Rouhani’s predecessor even a ‘wolf in wolf’s clothing’, forgetting that he himself behaves politically only slightly better. There are occasional diplomatic voices that reject Israel’s destructive influence on the negotiations of the five veto powers and Germany with Iran.

For the last 20 years, Netanyahu’s political fad has been to warn the world of Iran’s fictive ‘atomic bomb’, which was alleged to be just around the corner. This bogus ‘Iranian threat’, however, is now widely recognized as a phantom. All the intelligence agencies know it. And even the Mossad knows that Iran’s nuclear programme is not an existential threat to Israel, let alone to the US. So, why is Netanyahu still beating the drums of war? To keep the ‘phantom menace’ alive serves a single purpose: Israel intends to maintain its hegemony over the entire Middle East and does not want to make real concessions to the Palestinians despite the ongoing secret ‘negotiations’. The Israeli security establishment fears that it would lose its maneuverability and the usefulness of its own deterrence should Iran acquire nuclear capability. A look at the facts shows who presents a danger to world peace.

 Israel is the fourth-strongest military power in the world. Armed to the teeth with 100 to 300 nuclear warheads, five submarines capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and a significant biological and chemical weapons arsenal and led by an aggressive political leadership. Contrary to Israel, Iran has signed the NPT Treaty and its nuclear programme is under tight scrutiny of the IAEA. The country has also signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) which Israel has only signed, not ratified. Since the Islamic revolution, Iran has rejected the production of nuclear and biological weapons on ethical and religious grounds. Out of opportunism, the West does not believe statements by elected Iranian leaders, but believes every declaration made by Osama bin Laden or his phantom. Even if Iran would develop a nuclear weapon, it could not use it because it would take years before they could weaponize it. The US alone has almost 8 000 nuclear warheads.

However, Iran has every reason to distrust the US and Israel. Both countries conduct cyber warfare through Stuxnet (a computer worm believed to have been created by the US and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities) against Iran. The US engages in direct and indirect economic warfare against the country and its citizens. The US and its Western allies have earlier provided poison gas to Saddam Hussein who used it against Iran during the war from 1980 to 1988. Iran cannot forget that the nations with no credible deterrent are liable to be invaded by the US as the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and perhaps Syria if it surrenders its chemical weapons, show.