To 26 standing ovations in a half-hour speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to invoke images of nuclear holocaust if there is ever a deal between the so-called P5+1 (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China plus Germany) and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear programme. It was a speech that was rife with fear mongering, overstating Tehran’s domination of the Middle East and understating the timespan of the deal that’s still being shaped — and was virtually the same as that delivered to the United Nations in 2012 and to any gathering that Netanyahu has been invited to address in the past two years.
With two weeks to go for Israel’s general election, US Republicans gave Netanyahu a world stage to deliver a stump speech and raise his profile — with their standing ovations delivering credibility to his claims that even a 10-year freeze on Iran’s nuclear programme would be bad. He said Tehran would have an infrastructure intact and would have the ability to restart its programme within a short time frame.
The Obama administration argues that a year is plenty long enough for international inspectors and intelligence agencies to pick up on any effort by Iran to surreptitiously “break out” towards nuclear weapons. Netanyahu said his government’s understanding of the agreement means that window would be narrower. He didn’t specify by how much, however. Instead of dismantlement, officials have spoken of Iran converting its underground uranium enrichment site at Fordo into a research facility. A planned heavy water reactor at Arak seems likely to be redesigned to produce far less plutonium than first envisioned. Plutonium, like uranium, can be used in nuclear warheads. And Netanyahu is convinced that as soon as a decade of any deal is up, Tehran will immediately begin building “many, many nuclear bombs”. American and western officials say the full ledger of restrictions in an agreement would stay in place for at least a decade, and only then would Iran’s programme be allowed to gradually expand.
In short, this speech was pure politics and polemics. Too bad that Republicans gave this two-bit soothsayer a soapbox to peddle his well-worn wares and warnings.
