Netanyahu Backs Off on Iran
While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was belligerent in tone at the UN, he signaled a retreat on substance, postponing his threatened attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. That suggests he is reading the U.S. polls and thinks he may have to deal with President Obama in a second term, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
The main takeaway from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s U.N. speech was the inference that he has been forced to relent on the possibility of military action against Iran, with his threats deferred past the U.S. election on Nov. 6 and off into next spring and beyond.
His ominous intonation that “everyone should have a sense of urgency” about Iran “amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon” went over like a dead trial balloon – fatally punctured when he pushed the acute-worry-date into sometime in 2013:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 27, 2012. (Photo credit: United Nations)
“By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they [the Iranians] will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”
Netanyahu then resorted to an unusual visual aid, apparently in an effort to draw attention away from his more relaxed projection regarding how soon Iran could get the bomb. The Israeli prime minister reached down from the podium and lifted high a graphic of a round bomb with a fuse, like the one typically seen in a “Road Runner” cartoon.
“I brought a diagram for you,” Netanyahu said. “Here’s the diagram. This is a bomb; this is a fuse.” (Perhaps he was trying to trick the Iranians into mistaking the cartoon for the design of an actual bomb from Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal – and copy it as a schematic.)
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