Netanyahu's White House Visit

By Ken Silverstein

It's never pleasant to favorably cite Robert Novak. “Beneath the asshole,” Michael Kinsley once said of him, “is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.” But Novak had a particularly good column on the Middle East in yesterday's Washington Post. “The aphorism . . . that Arabs 'never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity'”, he wrote in the piece, “now can be applied to Israel.” Novak was referring to Israel's reaction to last week's Riyadh declaration, which showed a definite willingness on the part of Arab states to find a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quickly responded to the declaration by saying that preconditions for any talks included the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas last June. He also made clear that Israel would reject the right of return for Palestinian refugees or a withdrawal by Israel to its pre-1967 borders. “Negotiating those points does not mean they will be conceded,” Novak wrote. “But setting conditions for talks is a classic mechanism for escaping talks altogether.”

Novak said there would be no prospect of progress on a peace deal without serious White House pressure on the Israeli government, which is clearly not in the cards under George W. Bush--and not likely under his successor, based on the last month's AIPAC conference in Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney and various administration officials attended, as did many prominent Democrats, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A well-placed source told me that Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former prime minister and head of the Likud Party, had a private meeting with Cheney when he was in town for the conference. I ran that by Cheney's spokeswoman, Megan McGinn, who confirmed the meeting, and said it was held at the White House on March 12th. Several Israeli officials also were at the meeting, including the country's U.S. ambassador, McGinn added.

Of the meeting itself, my source said Cheney and Netanyahu discussed the need for heavy pressure on Iran over the next few months--the diplomatic equivalent of "overwhelming force" on the military front. They agreed that a military option should remain on the table, and Cheney left clear that the U.S. and Israel should continue to closely coordinate their policies on Iran.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton, an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and author of the new book Hezbollah: A Short History, for his opinion on the interplay between American and Israeli policy on Iran. His take:

The reason there is no light between the expressed U.S. position on the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli position reflects:

a. a genuine concern about Iran's challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East;

b. a fear that Iran, with a nuclear arsenal, might open the arsenal to non-state actors, including terrorists; and

c. the fact that Israel's politically influential supporters in the U.S. share deep Israeli concerns about the Iranian program.

C is certainly more important than B or A. Which is why the U.S. will not give the time day to any serious discussion of a nuclear free Middle East, which would put Israel's nuclear arsenal on the table. What serious presidential candidate, from either party, has done other than underline the "existential threat" posed by Iran to Israel? Is this the result of rigorous analytical thinking or is it because none of them dares to run the political risk of saying otherwise?