DAILY BEAST COLUMN: Within hours of the Obama administration’s interim nuclear deal with Iran, Bill Kristol was already invoking Munich. Benjamin Netanyahu’s minions have been doing so for months.
Ostensibly, that’s because the agreement doesn’t doesn’t dismantle Iran’s nuclear program but stalls it in return for partial sanctions relief. That’s true. But Kristol and Netanyahu have no remotely plausible alternative for fully dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, either. In place of the interim agreement, they want more sanctions, which Iran’s reformist government has said would doom any agreement. Or they want war, which former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who oversaw Israel’s Iran file from 2002 to 2010, has said would rally Iranians behind their regime, splinter the international coalition against Tehran, and thus ultimately increase Iran’s chances of getting a bomb…
“Netanyahu doesn’t know history,” declared the great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer earlier this year. Nor does he know much about Iran, a country whose residents he thought were banned from wearing jeans. What he and his American allies do know is how to exploit historical analogies for political and ideological gain. Obama’s interim nuclear deal threatens their ability to do that, which is part of the reason it’s such a welcome thing.… (more)
