Troubles With Bibi

Dear Mr. President,
So you and Bibi Netanyahu aren’t hitting it off too well these days. Since you won’t go along with his call to bomb Iran’s nuclear program out of existence, he’s doing an end run and cozying up to Congressional Republican hawks (they’re more hawkish than you?) and semi-openly endorsing Mitt. As David Remnick’s article, “The Vegetarian,” in the September 3 New Yorker points out, there’s also a lot of resistance within Israel to bomb, baby, bomb. A bunch of current and former Israeli generals and intelligence chiefs, even Shimon Peres, are openly opposing him. I read you spent an hour on the phone trying to calm him but apparently you didn’t make much headway. I know how hard it is to convince someone his obsession is wrong—79 letters opposing your drone wars hasn’t made the slightest difference, the drones keep droning, the Hellfires keep incinerating suspected insurgents and civilians alike and your “just” war in Afghanistan keeps burning through $300 milion a day. But Remnick’s article clearly puts the Iran issue into context. The lines that clarified it for me was a quote by Meir Dagan, head of Israel’s Mossad from 2002 to 2011: “The Iranian leadership sees certain markers in its history—the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 and U.S. support of the Shah; the development of an atom bomb in Israel; the eight-year war with Iraq, in which the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein—and acts according to its own version of rational…The Iranians learned from North Korea, Pakistan, and India that a state with a nuclear weapon will not suffer interference the way a state without one does.” Is it any wonder Iran doesn’t trust us? A foreign policy driven by oil is not a valid foreign policy and you have done nothing to change it. Similar explanations could probably go a long way to explaining 9/11. Dagan warns that if Netanyahu’s call to bomb is carried out, it would have unintended consequences: it would start a regional war, a counterattack on Israel, and stabilize a currently shaky regime in Tehran. As another Israeli security dissident says, “You discover it is possible to get dragged into something and then it is hard to explain why it all happened…” [Does that resonate, Mr. President?] “You always have to pay attention to your internal moral compass and ask the right questions.” I wonder if you’ve paid attention to your moral compass or maybe the lust for power causes you to ignore it. But war is never the solution to anything. Keep resisting Bibi. Don’t bomb.