Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned the UN General Assembly yesterday with a placard depicting a bomb, then using a red marker to draw a line near the top.
The crude cartoon, reminiscent of a Wile E Coyote “Acme” bomb, went viral — a huge hit among Bibi’s admirers and detractors far beyond the UN halls.
The image, and the argument behind it, will surely figure in the Oct. 22 Obama-Romney foreign-policy debate.
Netanyahu’s recent demand for a “red line” after which the West will no longer try to negotiate Iran’s bomb away — and President Obama’s rejection of the idea — renewed old hostilities between the two men.
Even some of Netanyahu’s most ardent US supporters started to question the wisdom of raising a contentious issue in the heat of a presidential campaign. But yesterday Netanyahu didn’t budge: “The hour is getting late, very late,” he said. “The Iran nuclear calendar doesn’t take time out for anyone or for anything.”
Like it or not, that calendar has inserted Israel’s problem (which is America’s and the world’s as well) into the campaign.
Paul Ryan told Fox News yesterday that Republicans tried three years ago to push the sanctions that Obama is applying only now, adding, “We don’t think the president speaks with credibility when he says all options are on the table.”
Obama refrained from addressing the red-line issue in his Tuesday UN speech, but vowed America will “do what we must” to prevent Iran from obtaining a bomb and said that containment is not an option.
Bibi sought to defuse the political fracas yesterday, expressing his “appreciation” for Obama’s containment line and saying that stopping Iran from getting a bomb “unites the people of Israel. It unites Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike.”
He also said that Iran is getting close to the point where “by next spring, at most next summer,” it could move to the final stages of building a nuke — which some took to mean there’ll be no Israeli “October surprise” before the US election.
But Netanyahu’s whole point was that 1) Iran must be stopped before that point, and 2) “Red lines don’t lead to war. Red lines prevent war.”
The line he drew yesterday was at the “90” mark of his cartoonish bomb — when Iran gets 90 percent of the weapons-grade enriched uranium it needs for a nuclear weapon.
Iran finishing a detonator to ignite that bomb is no place to draw a line, he explained, because that device can be made at “ a small workshop” anywhere in the country, and thus is unlikely to be detected by intelligence agencies.
In short, “The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb, but at what stage we can no longer stop” it.
Critics seized on the cartoon as proof that the Israeli leader’s approach to Iran is unserious and simplistic. Yet everything he said yesterday about Iran’s nuclear dash is based on recent open-source data from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“But,” as a Bibi aide sighed, “who reads IAEA reports?” Which is why Netanyahu simplified it all so that a six-grader (or even a UN official) can get it.
He’s hoping yesterday’s widely-watched performance will move the debate away from America’s campaign trail to where he said he’s long wanted it to be: on the menace that a genocidal weapon in the hands of a genocidal regime presents for Israel and the rest of the world.
He may yet get his wish — but first we’ll see our presidential nominees debate it.