WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday renewed his calls for President Obama not to trust Iran or ease tough sanctions until that nation gives up “the whole caboodle” of its nuclear-weapons program.
“I’m not against talking. But it is actions that we want,” Netanyahu said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“What we want is the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability,” he said. “The whole caboodle. The whole thing. Dismantle it completely.”
The leader of the Jewish state issued a stern warning for Obama not to trust recent conciliatory gestures from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, whose regime has vowed to wipe Israel off the map.
“What Khamenei is saying, I’ll make some tactical concessions . . . some minor concessions, give you some nuclear material, but maintain the necessary material of low-enriched uranium by which I can make a bomb . . . and the machines to make it” said Netanyahu. “No way. We’re not gullible. We’re not fools.”
“We should have a common concern,” said Netanyahu. “They already have missiles that can reach us [and] reach you. We don’t want them to be able to put nuclear warheads on these missiles. We don’t want them to have the ability to practice nuclear terrorism that can reach every single American.”
“They want to keep it in exchange for the smiles and double talk that they have here. No way,” he declared.
Netanyahu’s warning follows a speech he gave last week at the United Nations in which he called Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
He also gave his most explicit threat yet to attack Iran if it doesn’t cease its nuclear program, despite a recent thaw in relations between the Islamic republic and the West.
Obama and Rouhani last week spoke by phone, the first phone call between leaders of the United States and Iran in three decades.
Netanyahu insisted that he and Obama remained in full agreement about the “goal” of stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons, including nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States.