Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Barack Obama yesterday just what he thinks of the just-announced framework for a nuclear deal with Iran – and the Israeli PM is not pleased. “The current framework would threaten the survival of Israel,” Netanyahu said through his spokesman Mark Regev.
“We see this like the deal with North Korea,” said Netanyahu’s spokesman Regev. “You’ll recall in the 1990s North Korea signed a deal, committed themselves to non-proliferation, they kept their nuclear program intact, and when they were ready they proliferated… and today they threaten East Asia. Iran is much, much more dangerous than North Korea.”
In a series of tough-talking tweets, Netanyahu had this to say:
While Iranians celebrated in the streets yesterday, Netanyahu’s spokesman aired Israel’s misgivings to anyone who would listen.
“Let’s be clear: when you’re dealing with an authoritarian, totalitarian regime, their ability to play games with inspectors is proven,” said Regev in an interview with CNN. “We’ve seen that in Iran, we saw that in Iraq, we saw that in Libya. In other words, when you’re dealing with this sort of regime, inspections alone cannot solve your problem.”
Regev continued: “An expansive nuclear program remains in place, thousands of centrifuges.... The Iranians are building today intercontinental ballistic missiles. The deal doesn’t talk about that at all…. they’re not building those missiles to target Israel… they’re building those missiles to target countries… like the United States of America.”
“You know what else is not part of the deal?” Netanyahu’s spokesman said to CNN. “Iranian behavior. The Iranians are exporting their version of the Islamic revolution to Syria, to Iraq, to Lebanon…Yemen. This is a regime that is dedicated to a very extreme fanatical Islamist radicalism. What about a change in the behavior of the regime?”
President Obama called Netanyahu from Air Force One “to discuss the political framework” of the plan for Iran’s nuclear program. He emphasized that “nothing is agreed until everything is” but that “the framework represents significant progress towards a lasting, comprehensive solution that cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb and verifiably ensures the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program going forward,” the White House said in a statement.
The White House asserts that “progress on the nuclear issue in no way diminishes our concerns with respect to Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and threats towards Israel.” Backing the nuclear deal seems at odds with concern about terrorism or Iran’s backing of militants throughout the Middle East.
Other leaders in the region, like King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, are equally concerned by Iran’s increasing influence (through proxy forces) in Iraq and Syria. The Saudi defense minister on Monday openly questioned why we are "negotiating with the Iranians when they are responsible for growing tension in the Middle East."
"Iran can't be trusted," the Saudi defense minister told Rep. Buchanan (R-Florida.) Monday.
Perhaps to ease fears, Obama put in a call yesterday to the Saudi King and said that the proposed deal will “not in any way lessen U.S. concern about Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region.”
"It is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives," Obama said in a White House Rose Garden speech. "This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon."
"If Iran cheats," Obama said, "the world will know it."
Meanwhile just three weeks ago, the world heard Iran’s supreme leader chant “Death to America.”