Will Netanyahu Be Satisfied With Trump's Assurance?

Did the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history finally get what he wanted with the U.S. bombing of Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities?

Several commentators have recently pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resembles the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” in the Aesop’s fable.

In 1992, the then-parliamentarian gave an address to the Knesset in which he asserted that Iran was “three to five years” away from reaching nuclear weapons capability, and that this danger needed to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.”

In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism, he made a similar claim, as he did in addresses to Congress in 1996 and in 2002. During the latter address, he claimed that Saddam Hussein was also close to getting a nuke.

A 2009 U.S. State Department cable released by Wikileaks reported that the then-prime ministerial candidate Netanyahu had assured a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran was “probably one or two years away” from developing nuclear weapons capability. Another 2009 cable reported the re-elected Prime Minister telling another delegation of American politicos that “Iran has the capability now to make one bomb … [or] they could wait and make several bombs in a year or two.”

In a 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, he asserted “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs . . . that’s what is happening in Iran.”

In 2012 Netanyahu said in talks reported by Israeli media that Iran is just “a few months away” from attaining nuclear capabilities.” Later in 2012 he addressed the United Nations and asserted that Iran would be able to build a nuke in roughly one year.

To be fair, one could argue that the key point was that Iran was working diligently on acquiring the nuke and would eventually succeed, even if it took far longer than Netanyahu’s intelligence sources claimed.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s repeated assurances over the last thirty years are indeed strongly reminiscent of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

At last, the Israeli prime minister seems to have persuaded President Trump to take military action against this threat that has apparently been imminent since 1992.

Will Netanyahu be satisfied with the results of Operation Midnight Hammer? How will President Trump react if Netanyahu claims that Iran is still in possession of weapons grade nuclear material or that the enrichment facilities were not—has Trump has vehemently asserted—totally destroyed?

One interpretation of this latest Middle East Smoke and Mirror Show is that Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer not only to take out Iranian nuclear facilities, but also in a gambit to satisfy Netanyahu and his cronies in Washington.

Because it was a highly sophisticated, expensive, and politically risky operation, it could provide Trump with considerable political leverage to tell Bibi to put a sock in it—at least for the next four years.

I often wonder what James Madison would think of the United States government now being the arbiter of the great tribal conflicts of the Middle East. He was particularly well versed in ancient Rome’s entanglements in the region—entanglements that were costly for the Roman treasury and army, but also served as a handy distraction in the event that the plebeians on the Italian peninsula became unhappy with their patrician rulers. As he put in a debate at the Constitutional Convention:

Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.

I suspect Madison’s observation also applies to the rulers of Iran and Israel. It seems that a lot of ordinary Iranians are not happy with their rulers and that a lot of ordinary Israelis are not happy with theirs.

POSTSCRIPT: Judging by reader responses, many feeling that the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable does not apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s long history of claiming that Iran’s possession of nuclear bomb was imminent. As I acknowledged in my original post, it could be that the key point was that Iran was pursuing the bomb, not the development timeline.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that this isn’t a very satisfying claim. Whenever anyone proclaims that he is threatened by a danger so that he can justify committing a violent acts—or to persuade others to commit violent acts—the individual making the assertion has a responsibility to ascertain that the danger is real and not merely a danger that he feels confident will emerge at some point in the future. Otherwise, the individual making the claim will risk losing credibility and be perceived as the Boy Who Cried Wolf.