Netanyahu comforts hard-liners everywhere: Our view

Benjamin Netanyahu's much-heralded speech to Congress on Tuesday will surely stoke the fires of hard-liners everywhere — not just in Washington or Israel but also in Iran, where the regime's more bellicose elements must have been cheering.

There, on international TV, was the provocative Israeli prime minister trying his best to attain a goal that has eluded them: killing off the international negotiations that might rein in Iran's nuclear program — to rabid applause from the U.S. Congress, no less.

For an Iranian radical, what's not to like? The talks are in jeopardy even before an agreement is reached, along with the more moderate Iranian president who initiated them, and thanks to Netanyahu and his cohorts in Congress, the United Stated is poised to get the blame, weakening prospects that the Iranian people will turn against Iran's theocratic regime.

Netanyahu mentioned none of this, of course. His mission was not even-handed analysis. Rather, he sought to rally the Congress and Israeli voters, who will go to the polls in two weeks, against the opposite and equally legitimate risk: that the six nations negotiating with Iran will accept a weak deal, which Netanyahu fears will jeopardize Israel's survival.

The prime minister has reason to be concerned. Talks are now just three weeks away from a make-or-break deadline, and leaks hint at worrisome details. Negotiators are seeking a complex deal that would allow Iran to enrich uranium and keep centrifuges, both in limited amounts, for 10 years with intrusive inspections, in exchange for gradually lifting sanctions that are strangling the Iranian economy.

It is not clear at this point whether the deal would do to more to achieve President Obama's stated objective — to keep Iran at least a year away from a nuclear breakout — or to put Iran on the safe glide path to nuclear legitimacy, as Netanyahu expects.

Either way, the prime minister wants the U.S. to walk away now and stay away until Iran gives up pursuit of any nuclear capability, agrees to stop aggression against its neighbors, abandons terrorism and ends its threats to annihilate Israel. Iran, he insists, will eventually come crawling back to the table.

All are fine objectives shared by the United States. But expecting that they'll be so easily achieved is, charitably, optimistic. In historical context, it is roughly akin to having expected that the Soviet Union would sacrifice its aggressive ambitions at the outset of the Cold War. Success in that nuclear confrontation was achieved by more patient means.

A likelier scenario if the United States walks away from a deal accepted by the other five negotiating nations (members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) is that they will abandon sanctions, leaving a congressional threat to ratchet them up essentially irrelevant and Iran stronger and more confrontational.

With hard-liners ascendant of both sides, the path to an extremely dangerous conflict would be well-paved.

None of this fazes the perpetually combative prime minister. He thrives on conflict and has had to be restrained from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran. But whether it is in the best interests of the United States or Israel, where the issue has been contested much more publicly and much more hotly that it has been here, is another matter.

The danger described by Netanyahu is real, but so is the danger that he ignored. What his speech did was to accelerate the debate that otherwise would have emerged in three weeks while weakening the American position.

The smart move is to wait until the facts are known and critical questions can be answered: Are the inspection provisions credible? Will Iran's nuclear facilities grow or shrink? How swiftly will sanctions be lifted? Will the deal and policies the U.S. develops in support of it be sufficient to deter a nuclear arms race in the Middle East?

Will the deal, which is just a preliminary outline, even be completed?

Netanyahu thinks he has the answers. But the American public — which stands to bear a very high cost in dollars, lives and risk — does not. Three weeks, with three more months until the final deadline, is not very long to wait.

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