The dust is beginning to settle and the fire extinguishers being refilled after “Bibi the Iran Dragon Slayer’s” fiery Congressional speech. An unprecedented number of seats were empty in the hall… 55 in total, but adding to the Republican shock was their constant looking left to see many of the attending Democrats not standing to applaud.
Thank God not all of the AIPAC-trained seals were willing to humiliate America as happened at his last visit, where they appeared to have spring-loaded seats. They seemed to race each other to have the cameras recording them being the first to jump. AIPAC will be watching all of that footage very carefully to see who gets the carrot…and who the stick.
But the AIPAC convention on Monday was where the real battle took place. While the President and Joe Biden were away, the administration’s lady commandos Susan Rice and Samantha Powers raided the AIPAC event, in what was described as a tough love speech from national security adviser Rice.
She laid the hammer down on Bibi’s speech before he had uttered a word, that Netanyahu’s long demand that Iran have no reprocessing capability was dead on arrival. She said Bibi’s demand, while desirable, was “Neither realistic nor achievable… Our closest partners in the P5+1 don’t support it. If that was our goal they would abandon us… Simply put, this is not a viable negotiating position…nor is it even attainable.” That is what we call a slam-dunk.
Bibi’s planned congressional speech just got shot out of the water. You can bet that his aides were burning the midnight oil Monday night, with those pleading with him to stand in front of Congress and pretend that nothing Rice said matters because Napoleon Netanyahu is in town, while others urged him to find a new key issue to ride in his speech. In the end all we could see is he did not use the word “zero” in his talk when referring to Iran’s reprocessing capability, hardly a concession.
We had been seeing some carefully orchestrated counter moves from the Obama people, which we had expected for this stunt that House Speaker Boehner had helped orchestrate. He brought in a head of state who probably has the Olympic Gold medal for his track record of lying, and gave him a prestigious forum to lie some more.
As for Israel itself, it has a track record going back more than two decades claiming that Iran would have the bomb in a few years if “something was not done”, a euphemism for a preemptive strike — something the Israelis have a love affair with.
I have published the long list of these charges but will not use this important space for that. The TV cameras were recording the scrunching faces of the Congress members showing their disgust at what he was saying. The post speech responses have been the worst that anyone can remember. Let’s take a look at the lies, some of the whoppers he told on Tuesday.
We fully expected to listen to Bibi’s rant that Iran was the Godzilla of Terror and aggression in the Mideast, and we had to hear this from the head of a country that has thumbed its nose at the world community with the largest undeclared WMD program and stockpiles in the world.
First up, we have Bibi taking a shot charging Iran with supporting a Shia reign of terror in Iraq. This was incredible, as the only Sunnis getting killed in Iraq are the ISIL Takfiris and their active Sunni supporters. I suspect Bibi got a big check from the Saudis to make this silly charge. “Backed by Iran, Shiite militias are rampaging through Iraq.” This was a perverse lie.
In reality, Iran was helping Iraq stave off the ISIL attacks with advisors on the ground, technical assistance and helping secure the eastern regions along its borders, while the US was concentrating on getting the dysfunctional former PM Malaki out of the way. Iran played a key role during the most difficult days, as it took time to get the bombing campaign rolling and the 3000 American advisors into the field.
Iran has been a more staunch opponent of terrorism in the region than anyone else, having endured over five 9-11 attacks itself with over 17,000 victim families as members of its Habilian Association, with which Veterans Today is looking forward to working during their next conference this August in Tehran.
Next, we had “Iran was responsible for killing and maiming thousands of American servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.” This is an outrageous number, and Bibi leaves out that both Israel and the US have a long history of supporting MEK terrorism against Iran, with the Habilian Association attributing 12,000 of their victims to MEK alone. These terror operations continued during the Iraq war and Iran had every right to defend itself under international law.
Israel was the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the Mideast until the West began its terror campaign in Syria and then with ISIL. VT has documented both sitting members of Congress and retired generals aiding and abetting their terror efforts.
But it gets worse. Bibi actually claimed that “Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam… Both want to impose militant Islam first on the region and then on the entire world.” We watched Congressional people shake their heads in disgust at this outrageous comment, with Netanyahu literally lying at a pathological level.
He then claimed the current deal on the table after the ten-year freeze, would leave Iran in a position to do whatever it wanted. But of course the West would have that option also. Bibi failed to mention that this is actually the position Israel has been in with its undeclared and non IAEA-inspected WMD stockpiles… doing whatever it wants, with full US financial, military, and political backing.
And last, we have this ridiculous “break out” ploy, which is the new scam to replace the bogus claims of Iran’s hidden weapons program. The West and Israel have been selling that to their respective publics, and it has been the basis for the constant US blathering of “All options are on the table,”…all of them but truth, that is.
The new scam is based on taking X-number of centrifuges and extrapolating how long it would take to produce enough weapons-grade material to make one bomb. They claim this would be a mortal offensive threat, when it would make perfect sense for anyone who is a neighbor to Israel to have one for use in retaliating against a preemptive strike.
Once again, left out of this silly diversion is how would Iran be able to master the tremendous engineering feat of forming this bomb grade material into a weapons design it does not have, and could not test without detection. Our nuclear expert Clinton Bastin, before he died last year, briefed us in detail on what a huge project that is, and how long it took us to do it.
Anyone who knows anything about nuclear weapons, even decades-old material before the advent of laser triggers, knows this “break out” scare-mongering is just that. This breakout silliness is a sideshow for the public.
What Israel wants is the security that comes with being able to bully anyone it wants with a preemptive attack with total assurance that they cannot respond with “mutually-assured destruction”, something we all lived under during the Cold War. I remember the “duck and cover” drills in elementary school, where even at that young age and with the wall of windows in our classroom, I knew the routine would be no protection whatsoever.
The good news is we have a fractured Israeli Lobby now, and anti-Bibi allies in Israel. Ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan spoke out against Bibi’s madness, as did 180 ex-military, Intel and police commanders who noted that his Congressional speech was campaign grandstanding and a last ditch attempt to kill the talks, which a huge majority want to be successful.
It is time now for the rest of us to take our revenge on the enemies of peace for the threat they unashamedly represent to all the rest of us. We have been taking names of all the Netanyahu US supporters, so I will close by thanking Mr. “Bibi the Bombastic” for helping us update our national security threat list.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.