Juan Cole
Informed Comment / July 24, 2024
Ann Arbor – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a master of misdirection, the technique master illusionists use to divert the viewer’s attention from the trick and to pull the wool over their eyes. He uses his slick American accent, his bulging eyes, his rhetorical flourishes, his maniacal certainty, to fool people whenever and however he can.
Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, boasted of destroying the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that would have resulted in a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories by 1997. He has consistently attempted to annex Palestinian private property and covertly has paid for a movement of Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land. He has engaged in collective punishment of innocent noncombatants in order to quash any resistance to his vast acts of grand larceny. He bankrolled Hamas for a decade with Egyptian and Qatari funds deposited in Israeli accounts, which he transferred to Gaza, in hopes of taming the organization by giving it Gaza as a fief. He thereby hoped to continue to split the Palestinians, most of whom support instead the secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. Most Israelis recognize that Netanyahu’s brain-dead policies led to the October 7 terrorist attack.
One of the twenty-first century’s worst war criminals, responsible for more deaths of innocents and children than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu needs a bright shiny object o distract the world from the threat his racist, fascist Likud-led government, armed with 200 nuclear devices, poses to the planet.
Ben Norton at The Real News Network has reviewed Netanyahu’s long history of blatant warmongering lies:
In 1990, when Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister of Israel, he alleged that Iraq’s nuclear program was “fast accelerating.” In December, 1990, he said on the NBC News Today Show of Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein: “The question is, really, how do we ensure that these weapons of destruction, these missiles, these chemical weapons, the nuclear program that is fast accelerating in Iraq, that these do not pose a threat in the aftermath of the crisis, assuming, assuming it gets out of Kuwait? This is an issue for the entire international community.”
Iraq’s chemical weapons were used on Kurds and on Iranian troops but were not in a form where they could be deployed outside the country. Iraq engaged only in anemic and sporadic nuclear experimentation that never amounted to anything (they did not have centrifuges, then or later). Iraq was a ramshackle third world country, not a threat to Europe or the United States. Netanyahu just had a wish list of wars he wanted other people to fight for him, and his exaggerations and fantasies were tools toward that end.
Netanyahu addressed a US Congressional hearing September 2002, saying:
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone. There is a new age, something new is happening.”
Actually, all the Arab countries are dictatorships, monarchies or failed states after the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which left tens of thousands of veterans wounded and killed 4,492 US military personnel. The US operation in Iraq gave rise to ISIL, which roiled the region for several years and conducted terrorism against France, Belgium and other countries to which Saddam Hussein had posed no challenge.
As for Iran’s ayatollahs, the US destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq and the installation of a Shiite-majority government strengthened them enormously.
Netanyahu told Congress:
“Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation. But today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do, because Saddam’s nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two decades. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He could produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country. And I want to remind you that Iraq is a very big country.”
He told Congress before the Iraq War, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever. And there was no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately. There is no question that he had not given up on his nuclear program. None whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and was trying to perfect them constantly. Saddam is hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs, atomic capabilities as soon as he can.”
Netanyahu also said, “The two nations that are vying, competing with each other, who will be the first to achieve nuclear weapons, is Iraq and Iran. And Iran, by the way, is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the Eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years. Now, the question is what’s your next step, knowing that three of these nations are developing nuclear weapons? This is not a hypothesis. It is fact. Iraq, Iran, and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons.”
None of them were racing to develop nuclear weapons. None. And none have the capacity to hit the US with missiles. It is all intense and delusional fearmongering.
Once the US military was on the ground in Iraq, it became clear that it had never had a serious nuclear weapons program, and the little it had was mothballed by UN inspectors in 1995. At the time that Netanyahu was speaking, Iraq had no centrifuges or any enrichment program of any sort. It was all smoke and mirrors, as tissue-thin and insubstantial as a paranoid nightmare. All those “no questions” were expressions of a false certainty or outright lies.
Here’s an interview Norton pulled up that Netanyahu gave on Iraq after 9/11:
INTERVIEWER: “You’re making a connection between the Taliban and Iraq.
NETANYAHU: Yes, I am. I’m saying that the, if you look at those who harbor terrorists, and those who support terrorists, and-.
INTERVIEWER: I guess I was looking for a connection between September 11, and my understanding why we went to the Taliban is it was a connection there, they were harboring somebody that we believed did the act of September 11.
NETANYAHU: Yes, that’s the first reason why you did it, and-.
INTERVIEWER: Now you’re going to take me from September 11 to Iraq, somehow?
NETANYAHU: Yes, but I’m saying something else. I’m saying the connection is not whether Iraq was directly connected to September 11, but how do you prevent the next September 11? . . . And to the various critics, especially overseas, believe that a clear connection between Saddam and September 11 must be established before we have a right to prevent the next September 11, well, I think not.”
I once saw on the web a captured Iraqi document from Saddam’s secret police warning of how dangerous Ben Laden and al-Qaeda were and putting out an all-points bulletin for any al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Saddam was afraid of those people, not in cahoots with them. We know that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had absolutely no plans or possibly even the capacity to stage a terrorist attack on the United States homeland. Iraq was secular and Arab nationalist. There was no connection with or resemblance to the fundamentalist Pushtun-speaking Taliban or the equally fundamentalist al-Qaeda. Netanyahu was just pulling things out of his ass, to drag the U.S. into a Middle East war that would break the legs of Iraq, then a significant military power. As Norton pointed out, he even asserted that the US needed no casus belli to go to war with Iraq. Apparently paranoid suspicions are sufficient. Which explains a lot.
Iraq was not the only butt of his calumnies. In 2012, Norton shows, Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly, “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.”
Iran has had a civilian nuclear enrichment program since 2000. If it wanted a nuclear weapon, it could have one by now. In fact, the CIA has repeatedly assessed that Iran has no military nuclear program and cannot be shown to be trying for a bomb.
Netanyahu has long tried to get the US into a war with Iran: “Obviously we’d like to see a regime change, at least I would, in Iran, just as I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out? It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. The application of power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism. The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes. The first victory in Afghanistan makes a second victory in Iraq that much easier. The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier, too.”
Those “victories” in Afghanistan and Iraq turned quickly to dust in America’s mouth, and if the US government ever allowed the wily Netanyahu to trap it into a war with Iran, it might well bankrupt the Republic for no gain.
Netanyahu tried to derail the 2015 UNSC nuclear deal with Iran, in which it mothballed 80% of its nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions relief. Netanyahu successfully pushed US Republicans to refuse the sanctions relief, helping derail the treaty. He then went before the UN again, saying, “Well, tonight I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files.”
UN inspections repeatedly showed that Iran was carefully abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal. Netanyahu was just making shit up again. Norton quotes Robert Kelley, the former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the falsity of Netanyahu’s claims: “I thought many of the things that he presented were very childish. I would think that a country like Israel that has its own nuclear weapons, and has scientists who must be pretty competent, would be able to look at the information we were shown and say right away, well, this is garbage. He presented very early in the presentation a drawing which was supposed to be an illustration of a nuclear device. And you look at that drawing, it’s a cartoon, it’s a joke. You look at this and you see it’s completely amateurish, completely childish, and trying to make something very important out of something that’s not important at all.”
When Trump got in, Netanyahu whispered into his ear that he should rip up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump did with alacrity. As a result, Iran felt stabbed in the back. It never got sanctions relief. Its leaders felt free to enrich uranium to higher levels than the treaty had allowed.
Having destroyed the best chance for denuclearizing Iran, Netanyahu will now tell Congress to go to war against that country because “there is no question” that Tehran is attempting to get a nuclear bomb with which to attack the United States.
Netanyahu has all the variation in his speeches of a myna bird, and squawks just as annoyingly. After his decades of lies, misrepresentations, undermining of the US government’s foreign policy, and now his maniacal genocide, no one in Washington should be willing to listen to a word he says.
Note that Netanyahu was afraid of having any layovers on his way to Washington in any civilized countries for fear he’d be dragged off to the Hague for trial. Congress has brought eternal and indelible shame on itself by inviting this war criminal to address it.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
