before following Netanyahu in screaming that it is bad.
I hope that the Obama administration, in addition to using their own people, enlists any Republican elders who can speak in favor of this - if they exist. It would be great to have people like Lugar or Baker also speaking in favor. Not to mention, I hope they REALLY REALLY use the Secretary of Energy, a nuclear physicist, to make the case.
For those arguing in less partisan places, this is a good article showing that Netanyahu completely misstated and misunderstood nuclear physics when he spoke to the UN.
In September 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the United Nations General Assembly holding a cartoonish drawing of a makeshift bomb, which came to be known as the Wile E. Coyote poster. The gimmick grabbed front page headlines around the world, but as the New York Times reported the next day, Netanyahu’s “attention-grabbing performance seems to have created confusion in, of all places, Israel.”
According to the report, the percentages on Netanyahu’s drawing were supposed to indicate the quantity of sufficiently enriched uranium that Iran was amassing on its way to making a nuclear bomb, but several Israeli analysts misinterpreted it to mean the actual degree of uranium enrichment that Iran had attained. They lambasted Netanyahu for things he never meant to say.
A few short weeks later, however, Israeli officials involved in the nuclear talks came to the conclusion that Netanyahu himself may not have fully comprehended the import of what he was saying. In short time, they started tearing their own hair out.
In what many Israelis and American Jews viewed at the time as a masterful slam-dunk performance on the UN stage, Netanyahu proposed that the international community draw a red line “before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb”, I.E. before Tehran accumulated enough 20% uranium to produce the far smaller amounts of 90% enriched uranium needed for a bomb. Whatever his intentions were, what Netanyahu achieved, in effect, was to give Tehran a blank check to expand, solidify and upgrade the infrastructure needed to produce a nuclear bomb – including the addition of thousands of new centrifuges - which is exactly what they proceeded to do.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.649690
This is very telling. He is the Prime Minister of a country with a very strong Scientific community. This means one of two things - neither positive:
1) He wrote this - to present to the UN - and didn't bother to have anyone qualified review it. No one expects a politician to be an expert on a technical issue. I do expect them to work with the experts to avoid saying things that are just wrong.
2) He DID consult with scientists - and decided the optics of this were more important than the truth.
Either way, this should diminish the man that the right is following on this.
Not to mention, there were the entire torrent of things he said before the election -- only to act surprised that anyone (including Obama) took his comments as serious. What is clear is that he lies often and easily. He clearly considers that his ends justify any means -- and that means NOTHING he says should be taken without verification.
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