Avoiding Working With The People Who Actually Understand The Threat

Fox News posted an article today stating that the United States is withholding the details of the nuclear negotiations with Iran from Israel. Since Israel is the country most threatened by an Iranian nuclear weapon and since Israel is the country with the best intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program, this approach makes very little sense.

The article reports:

In extraordinary admissions that reflect increasingly strained ties between the U.S. and Israel, the White House and State Department said they were not sharing everything from the negotiations with the Israelis and complained that Israeli officials had misrepresented what they had been told in the past. Meanwhile, senior U.S. officials privately blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself for “changing the dynamic” of previously robust information-sharing by politicizing it.

The comments came as a late March deadline to forge the outline of an Iran nuclear deal looms. Netanyahu has angered the White House by his open opposition to a deal he believes threatens Israel’s existence, and by accepting a Republican invitation to address Congress about Iran in early March without consulting the White House, a breach of diplomatic protocol.

The article further reports:

Netanyahu has insisted that Iran, whose top officials have sworn to obliterate Israel, should not be allowed to enrich any uranium. The U.S. and its partners say that stance is untenable because Iran would never accept it.

As the talks have progressed, Netanyahu’s opposition to an agreement has increased over what he believes to be extreme concessions made to Iran that would leave it as a threshold nuclear weapons power and a direct threat to Israel’s existence.

The White House and State Department maintained that the U.S. will not leave Israel threatened. They also insisted that Israel has not been completely cut out of the loop and that overall security cooperation with the Jewish state remains strong.

If Iran will not accept the prohibition of enriching uranium, doesn’t anyone think there might be a reason for that? Have we not learned from what happened with North Korea (which incidentally has played a very large role in Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear talks)? Any treaty that comes out of the current negotiations with Iran is not worth the paper it is written on. President Obama heralding a treaty with Iran is very much along the lines of Neville Chamberlain declaring, “Peace for our time” after the 1938 Munich Agreement. We know how that turned out.