I don't know why Carter is bothering with this trip. All he's going to get from Bibi is more earfuls about how his boss has made Neville Chamberlain look like Otto Von Bismarck and signed Israel's death warrant as surely as if he were pushing Ali Khamenei's "red buttons" himself. Carter will spend a few days taking the tongue-lashings in Obama's stead and return to Washington with U.S.-Israeli relations - and Netanyahu may as well break them off at this point - in even worse shape than they were already.
- Me, two days ago
I'd say, "I told you so," but in this case it really isn't that much of a clairvoyant accomplishment:
No public pleasantries were exchanged when U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter showed up at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to talk about the Iran nuclear deal and strained U.S.-Israeli ties.
Tentative plans to issue joint statements were abandoned. Microphones set up for the occasion went unused. A news conference was out of the question.
“If you gentlemen want, we can come back,” Netanyahu told reporters as he ushered Carter up the stairs to his private office in Jerusalem on Tuesday. But the press was quickly escorted out of the building once the meeting began.
The visit only underscored the tension in U.S.-Israeli relations over the deal -- vigorously opposed by Netanyahu as inadequate even before it was completed -- that’s intended to [aid] Iran’s nuclear program [plus lift the] sanctions.
The prime minister used the meeting as an opportunity to express his outrage directly to the first senior U.S. official to visit Israel since the accord was reached by Iran and six world powers in Vienna last week, according to a U.S. defense official who attended the session.
Netanyahu spoke passionately about his objections to the accord, the official told reporters later, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.
Carter confined his account of the meeting to brief[, dishonest] remarks hours later, after he traveled to Jordan and visited with multinational troops at a Jordanian air base whose precise location reporters were told they couldn’t disclose for security reasons.
In short, Bibi paddled Carter until his buttcheeks bled. It was the mother of all ass-chewings for which neither man wanted public witnesses. It was meant for Obama, but Carter "did his job" and took the beating in his betraying boss's stead. Unfortunately, the pro wrestling analogy can't be taken any further, because O will never show up for the big steel cage, main event pay-per-view match.
And to think he thinks he'd be "punching down".
Exit question courtesy of the Israeli PM: "Netanyahu has heaped scorn on U.S. efforts to reassure Israel on the Iran deal by dangling promises of more weapons or aid. “If this 'deal' is supposed to make Israel and our Arab neighbors safer, why should we be compensated with anything?” he said Sunday in an interview on ABC’s This Week program.
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