RUTHFULLY YOURS

They said he couldn’t do it.

“They” being the mainstream media mouthpieces in the United States, Europe and Israel. According to our enlightened scribes and talking heads, Benjamin Netanyahu was a goner and Israel was about to welcome in a new left-wing government that would be more pliable to the Obama administration’s relentless demands on the Jewish State.

Only things didn’t work according to the global Left’s script–in fact, it was quite the opposite. Netanyahu’s Likud party won a resounding victory over Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union that left no doubt that Bibi would be the man to lead Israel through the very rough waters ahead: from ISIS to Hamas to Hezbollah to the global “BDS” movement to a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide to a hostile “international community”–led by the Obama administration–demanding the quick establishment of a Palestinian state, to of course, Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

That’s a tall order, to say the least–yet Netanyahu is the right man for this particularly perilous period in Israel’s history.

It’s got nothing to do with American principles and everything to do with partisanship

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist
Israel is a liberal nation—in the best sense of the word—but it’s not a leftist one. And for increasing numbers of Democrats, the center-right consensus of Israeli politics is unacceptable, immoral and bigoted— incompatible with their conception of American values. Or so they say.

This is bad news, because Likud looks like it’s going to win around 30 seats. If the numbers hold, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the best efforts of the president and his allies, will likely remain prime minister. Bougie Herzog will, no doubt, have a bright future in the opposition.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Paul Krugman had already declared Likud’s impeding fall was all about inequality. (What isn’t, right?) Slate proposed that Likud’s looming death would be about housing, or maybe it was racism. Mostly, though, Netanyahu was going to lose because he has a nasty habit of challenging the progressive worldview of Barack Obama, which offends many people, according to the New York Times. And really, is there any bigger sin?

The Obama White House is enlisting all its allies to make its case for the bad nuclear deal with Iran that, say administration allies, is better than no deal. The alternative, they claim, is war. And to what purpose? Many nuclear experts, Middle East analysts, and journalists argue, after all, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would set the program back only two to three years. Indeed, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, asserted last week that setting Iran back “only a couple of years” is “the best-case scenario.”

However, it’s not entirely clear where that assessment—a couple years, or a few years, or two to three years—comes from. “When U.S. government officials have given specific estimates, like two to three years, these are for an Israeli attack on Iranian facilities,” says Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon official. “They’re not talking about a U.S. attack, which would obviously be more than what an Israeli strike could accomplish.”

Even then, says Kroenig, author of A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat, these estimates regarding American strikes are based on worst-case scenarios. “That is, if after a strike Iran decides to rebuild immediately, encounters no significant difficulties, and is able to get whatever it needs in the international marketplace. But that’s hard to imagine.”

Iran is an opportunity, not a threat; it’s a potential partner, not an enemy.

For more than six years, this view of the Islamic Republic has guided the decisions made by Barack Obama. The president has repeatedly declared his eagerness to welcome Iran into the community of civilized nations. His words sometimes suggest that Iran has a choice to make, that their acceptance into this mythical community depends in some way on their behavior. But there’s little over those six years to indicate that he means it. Instead, Obama has made clear that in his eagerness to salvage anything from his tattered foreign policy legacy he is willing to gamble the security of the United States on a blind and irrational hope that Iran will someday change for the better.

To this end, he has abandoned more than three decades of bipartisan U.S. policy towards Iran—on its nuclear weapons program, on its regional ambitions, and on its support for terrorism.

These are radical departures. The Obama administration’s goal in nuclear talks is no longer preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons at all costs, but managing the process by which Iran becomes a nuclear state. The Obama administration no longer seeks to thwart Iran’s expansionist aims in the region and in many respects is now facilitating its aggression. On terrorism, the Obama administration has cast aside inconvenient realities about Iran’s support for jihadists of all kinds and has chosen instead to pretend that to the extent there any longer exists a war on terror, Washington and Tehran are on the same side.