The New York Times – of all papers – published an anti-Semitic cartoon on April 25. It depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading US President Donald Trump as a blind man. This incited unprecedented condemnation, and rightly so.
The literary allusion in my title is decidedly more flattering. But I hope it makes the same point without being so needlessly offensive.
That said, it is self-evident that Netanyahu enjoys stroking Trump’s ego almost as much as Trump enjoys having it stroked. Granted, every world leader knows that a little flattery goes a long way with this gullible narcissist – who is now acting as president of the United States.
But Netanyahu is hell-bent on getting Trump to go so far that his flattery extends to hailing him variously as a latterday Cyrus the Great and Moses. Never mind that Trump probably finds Netanyahu’s promise to name a new Israeli settlement after him most flattering.
I have lampooned this flattery in many commentaries, including most recently in “Trump – Sent by God to Save the Jews?” March 26, 2019. But I hasten to concede that there’s serious intent behind Netanyahu’s idle (or idol) flattery.
In fact, his intent is so sinister, one has to look to fiction for a precedent, namely the way Shakespeare’s Iago flattered Othello. Here is how I warned of Netanyahu’s intent in “Celebrities ‘Boycotting’ Israel the Way They Boycotted South Africa,” April 25, 2018:
Netanyahu knows that flattery goes a long way in getting Trump to do his bidding. He clearly hopes that will include getting Trump to do everything from turning a blind eye to the atrocities Israel perpetrates against the Palestinians to launching preemptive strikes against Iran – under the ironic pretext of saving the Jews from the country Cyrus begat.
That is why this comes as no surprise:
The United States is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the Middle East in response to a ‘number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings’ from Iran, US national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday.
(CNN, May 6, 2019)
Nor does this:
Israel passed information on an alleged Iranian plot to attack U.S. interests in the Gulf to the U.S. before national security adviser John Bolton threatened Iran with ‘unrelenting force’ last night, senior Israeli officials [said]. …
‘It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it, but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.’
(Axios May 6, 2019)
Frankly, “it is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how” does not square with claims of “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran. Just as “[it was unclear to us that Iraq ever] possessed WMDs and had connections to al-Qaeda terrorists” did not square with claims that it “posed an imminent threat to the United States” – as MSNBC reported in “How the Bush administration sold the Iraq war,” March 22, 2013.
Meanwhile, it was not enough for Netanyahu to get Trump to betray world leaders (from China due west to Canada) by
- threatening to sanction countries, including European allies, that do business with Iran;
- withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear deal;
- imposing crippling economic sanctions on Iran; and
- thinking he can play fire-and-fury games with Iran the way he did with North Korea.
Now this Dr. Strangetwit or: How Bibi never learned to stop lying about Iran and the bomb, is trying to get Trump to create a pretext for war.
Never mind that just getting Trump to withdraw from the nuclear deal was combustible enough – as I asserted in “Iran Nuclear Deal: Trump Withdrawal Explosive,” May 9, 2018.
No doubt you’ve heard Netanyahu’s Chicken-Little cries about the existential threat Iran poses to Israel. Except that Iran has been threatening “death to America!” much longer than it has been threatening to “wipe Israel off the map!”
Moreover, as it was with Iraq, Iran would sooner attack a fellow Muslim country like Saudi Arabia before it even thinks about attacking either the United States or Israel. And every (warmongering) right-wing neocon in the United States and right-wing Zionist in Israel knows this.
Besides, if the US invasion of Iraq taught the leader of Iran anything, it is how to avoid giving any US president any cause to attack. Not to mention that Iran is far more capable of coping with a US-led embargo than Cuba was when the United States imposed that infamous embargo in 1958. And we all know how that turned out. Therefore, if the United States is waiting for sanctions to trigger regime change, it might as well be waiting for Hell to freeze over.
All of the above explains why this deployment will amount to more saber-rattling and kabuki dancing than shock and awe … then mission accomplished.
Granted, it also smacks of wagging the dog. And it might seem consistent with Trump’s unrelenting efforts to detract from the truth and consequences of his high crimes and misdemeanors, which are outlined in the Mueller Report. But his criticisms of the invasion of Iraq loom so large that it would be too foolhardy even for him to launch another never-ending, unwinnable war in Iran.
Even so, the neocons who goaded Bush into invading Iraq are trying their damnedest to goad Trump into invading Iran. Nothing demonstrates this quite like Vice President Pence sounding alarm today about Iran building a terrorist “beachhead” in Venezuela to launch attacks against the United States. Of course, this mirrors the way Vice President Cheney sounded alarm back then about Iraq allowing terrorists to set up training camps to launch similar attacks.
I readily concede, however, that Pence was probably also trying to appease both his fellow neocons and his boss because of this:
A chummy discussion between Vice President Pence and former vice president Richard B. Cheney quickly turned into a vigorous back-and-forth over President Trump’s foreign policy at a private gathering Saturday, with Cheney comparing the president’s instincts to those of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. …
‘I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.’ he said.
(The Washington Post, March 11, 2019)
As it happens, I opened my May 5 commentary on Venezuela by noting that nothing gets under Trump’s thin skin quite like observations that he’s behaving just like Obama. I cannot overstate that hatred or jealousy of Obama motivates nearly all of this president’s policies, foreign and domestic.
In any event, the following from “Netanyahu, Obama’s Iago; Iran, His Desdemona,” October 2, 2013, puts this latest development into perspective:
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The chutzpah of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never ceases to amaze me. …
Netanyahu is continuing his mercurial goading to get Obama to do his dirty (military) work. This was evident during their White House meeting on Monday. He warned Obama that he should not be misled by the peace offerings of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, who Netanyahu caricatured, with self-righteous indignation, as nothing more than a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ …
It cannot be lost on Obama that, if he had his way, Netanyahu would have already misled him down a primrose path to war against Iran similar to the one neo-cons misled his predecessor, George W. Bush, down to war against Iraq 10 years ago. …
Netanyahu has given Obama just cause to be far more wary of him than he quite properly is of Rouhani.
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Still, think whatever you will of Netanyahu, not only did he hang on as prime minister long enough to outlast Obama, but he now has in Trump an Othello ripe for misleading.
Related commentaries:
celebrities boycotting…
Trump sent by God…
Iran nuclear deal…
Mueller report…
Venezuela…
Netanyahu, Obama’s Iago…