One of the more headscratching moments in the run-up to Bibi's congressional address yesterday was when the Man Who Couldn't Defeat George W. Bush called out Israel's PM for being "profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush", a war that then Sen. Kerry "voted for" before he "voted against" it.
Aside from the obvious pot-kettle-black implications regarding the Secretary of State's credibility on THAT score, there are other reasons why Bibi's ostensible championing of Gulf War II should actually enhance his comparative credibility regarding Iranian nukes [notwithstanding that the SOS proves to have none, so the bar is admittedly low; small steps, all].
One complaint against Bibi's then-support was that he thought removing Saddam would "have enormous positive reverberations on the region". Actually, according to some sources, Russia had a plan in place to overthrow him, but the US tipped off Egypt, who tipped off Saddam...because of the oil angle. But that's on W and Cheney, not Bibi. No one really thought Saddam was a legit sovereign. [Some Iraqis NOW think it WAS better. But again--that has more to do with the bungled postwar approach than the prewar cheerleading].
Which brings me to my next point: Bibi's "cheerleading" probably didn't include the "greet us as liberators" blurb. If anyone understands the cultural mindset in the region, it's Bibi. Certainly W had no clue; Cheney might have from his work with Halliburton; and Rumsfeld's insistence of doing war on the cheap really had nothing to do with the legitimacy of removing Saddam but a lot to do with misunderstanding how to confront a hostile middle eastern culture. But again: ALL that is on W/Cheney, NOT Bibi--and maybe even on the Dems who voted for the war under perceived political pressure in 2002 while they actually knew ahead of time HOW W/Cheney were going to war on a budget; why would Bibi have even thought they would try that? You can lay this one at the feet of Hillary and Kerry way more than Bibi.
Finally--and this illustrates how no one in current diplomatic circles has a sense of irony when it should be an occupational sine qua non--Ahmed Chalabi, who may have been one of the driving forces in pushing W to war, also was revealed to have been as likely as not on Teheran's payroll. However--just like when the US condemned VIETNAM when they invaded Cambodia in 1979 and [ancillarily, to be sure] stopped the Khmer Rouge autogenocide--both Right and Left have so much cognitive dissonance that they can't see straight: the Right about the Iraq war [with the exceptions of Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck], and the current administration that is so obsessed with making this deal with Iran that they fail to see how Teheran manipluates BOTH sides of the political fence. So really, only an outsider like Bibi can really assess Iran's threat to everyone, becuase even if he mistakenly championed W's Iraq war, it wasn't because IRAN fooled him.
Finally, the V15 group spearheading the anyone-but-Bibi effort [which Politico disingenuously terms an "Israeli grass-roots group" while even the NEW YORK TIMES clearly identifies it as a WH-linked op] claims that Bibi is "obsessed with the Iranian nuclear program." Aside from the fact that Iranian threats of nuclaer genocide might make him a bit nervous, one could counter that the Obama Administration is similarly obsessed with the Iranian nuclear program: obsessed with giving themselves political cover for what they see as something between an inevitability and Iran's soveriegn privilege, administration protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. In fact, since they likely believe that an Iranian hegemony would be "have enormous positive reverberations on the region", they probably also think nukes would aid the scenario.
Until the reverberations emanate from the sounds of the first Iranian nuclear test.
