01/23/15 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next up is Jim Loeb from Interpress Service, Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net, and of course, they run The Great Gareth Porter and a lot of other great reporters there.
Welcome back to the show.
Jim, how are you?
Okay, how are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today on the show.
The news is that Netanyahu is coming to town.
He's going to give a speech in Washington, D.C. to the Congress.
He's been invited by the House Speaker, John Boehner.
What's the controversy?
He gives speeches to Congress all the time, right?
Well, this would be his third speech to a joint session, if in fact it takes place.
Well, the controversy is that no normal procedures were followed with respect to the invitation that was sent and presumably accepted.
Nobody knows exactly who initiated the idea of inviting him, but in any case, Boehner failed to consult with the minority, which is normal practice when a foreign leader is invited to address the Congress.
So the minority didn't know, and the minority in Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are very angry about it.
And the Israeli ambassador or the Israeli government did not consult with the State Department or the White House in advance.
In other words, this was all done in order to get around the administration and Democrats who were considered loyal to the administration.
It was a very unilateral move on both the part of Speaker Boehner and very possibly Senator McConnell, who seems also to have been involved, and Bibi Netanyahu and his ambassador here, Ron Dermer.
And of course, the substance of the speech will be Congress, do everything you can to stop the president from succeeding in his nuclear negotiation, even though Israel is the driving force behind why America has this policy in the first place, to assure that Iran never makes nukes.
I mean, obviously, it's the American interest as well, but it's the Israeli, the Netanyahu government's obsession that Iran be prevented from nuclear weapons technology.
So I guess that's why you call the article chutzpah squared.
Well, it's squared in the sense that that there were two, that it involved both, at least Bibi, that is Bibi's nickname, or Netanyahu's nickname in Israel, and Boehner, at the very least.
So, no, it just took extraordinary chutzpah for Boehner to make this invitation without consultation, and for Netanyahu, apparently, to encourage it, and ultimately, it appears, accept it.
The final date was for early February, I guess, in some kind of effort to pacify those who are very critical within the administration.
And I would say that the administration is extremely angry about this.
They pushed it back to the AIPAC conference in early March, but that's, of course, just two weeks before the Israeli elections, which is why, which is the reason the administration says that no senior administration official will meet with Netanyahu if and when he comes during the AIPAC conference, because they don't want to influence the results of a foreign election that would be considered undue foreign interference.
And now, so there was a leak, if I understand it right, there was a leak directly from the administration to Haaretz, seemed like an official one, which is interesting that they put it right in the Israeli Liberal Daily, that the president had called Netanyahu and told him to back off of his pushing Congress to push these sanctions.
Is that right?
Is that your understanding?
Well, yeah, I mean, there's been, I mean, the administration has tried to work with Netanyahu and has warned him repeatedly that it's not helpful for him to try to sabotage the negotiations, and his attempts to do so are taken very seriously here.
I think what's also really important is that the Israeli kind of national security establishment in the institution of its intelligence community also agrees with the administration's analysis, which is that if we get additional sanctions legislation of the kind that Netanyahu and Boehner are pushing for, it's going to blow up the P5 plus one negotiations.
And they apparently conveyed this to a congressional delegation that was visiting Israel last week, and that leaked out as well.
And then the head of Mossad was obviously pressed by Netanyahu to issue a kind of public retraction saying, well, we, we, you know, we're not saying that they're going to blow up the negotiations and we do feel that pressure is really important and so on and so forth.
Well, it seemed like actually, didn't it?
If I read it right, the walking back was more hilarious than Mossad throwing Netanyahu under the bus in the first place, because what they said was, yeah, we did say that the sanctions would wreck the negotiations, but we want to wreck the negotiations.
Well, they didn't say, yes, that is correct.
They said that they had used the expression that was quoted by Haaretz, but they said, but then they thought that the negotiations would resume under better circumstances.
Right.
That is that the Iranians would not walk away definitively or not completely destroy them and start them over again.
Right.
It's just a matter of like shocking the negotiations and then and then resuming them in, in a, in a better situation.
Oh, okay.
That's important.
Yeah.
But I mean, none of this can be believed with great seriousness.
What can be believed is that the national security establishment in Israel is very, I think, upset with, with Netanyahu and what Netanyahu is doing.
And frankly, they should be, because of course, at the same time that, that Boehner announced this invitation, the foreign ministers of France, Britain, and Germany, that is our closest allies in Western Europe and in NATO, as well as the foreign minister of the European Union were publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post that said, Congress should not mess this situation up.
And so now you have this very strange situation where you have not just Obama, but also our traditional NATO allies lined up telling Congress and the Republicans, don't screw this up against Boehner, the Speaker of the House, McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate, and Netanyahu.
And the idea is, okay, so who, who are the Republicans going to choose to listen to?
Our traditional, they don't like Obama, granted, but are they going to listen to our traditional NATO allies?
Or do they consider our alliance with Israel to be more important?
And with Netanyahu in particular, because it's not the National Security Establishment of Israel, it's Bibi Netanyahu.
So who are they going to, who are Republicans going to line up with here?
That's, that's one of the really interesting questions that's been posed by this situation and which I think Netanyahu and the others didn't really, and certainly Boehner didn't fully understand or anticipate.
Well, before the audience places all their bets, I'll point out this very important paragraph in your piece today.
It's the spotlight on antiwar.com, y'all, you can find it, where you talk about some Republicans are quote, rethinking their position.
Boy, you know, I've been told some substantive things and I think maybe it's time to back off these sanctions.
So that's a good sign, huh?
Yeah.
And also, as I think I said in the same post, which I think is really important, is it puts the major Jewish mainstream organizations, which almost always back the Israeli government in an extremely difficult position because they want to hold on to their image as being bipartisan and as working with Democrats and even more with Democrats than with Republicans.
But now you have a situation where you've got the Republican leadership in Congress pulling the stunt off with the prime minister of Israel.
And I think that puts them in an extremely invidious position, because if they want to retain their bipartisan image, they can't be seen as being entirely as complicit with this with this maneuver.
Right.
Yep.
Very interesting to see how it'll play out.
In fact, I think it's very interesting that it's Josh Rogin and Eli Lake who broke the big story about Mossad throwing Netanyahu on the bus there, in fact.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I completely agree.
Yeah.
I think that's very that that's that's very in some ways it's very ironic because Eli in particular, you know, is very close to the neoconservatives.
And I think it's people like Crystal who's who who dreamt up this little scheme, this little maneuver.
And yet he has some integrity and or and he's a good journalist.
And, you know, he called it like he was told, basically, which is this is a terrible idea.
Either that or he's closer to Mossad even than the Israeli prime minister's office.
Well, yeah.
Oh, that's an old joke for people who used to read Eli back in 02 and 03 when he lied us into war with Iraq.
But anyway.
Well, his tenure with the New York Sun and so on.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, this has been such a great interview.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
Oh, not at all.
Sorry.
I have to leave you now.
No, no.
It's fine.
Thank you so much.
OK.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's the great Jim Loeb.
He's at Loeb blog dot com like your earlobe Loeb log dot com.
And of course, he's the Washington bureau chief for Interpreter Service at IPS News dot net.
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