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Obama, Netanyahu on collision course 6 years in the making


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Obama, Netanyahu on collision course 6 years in the making
JULIE PACE, Associated Press
MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — For six years, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been on a collision course over how to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions, a high-stakes endeavor both men see as a centerpiece of their legacies.

The coming weeks will put the relationship between their countries, which otherwise remain stalwart allies, to one of its toughest tests.

Netanyahu is bound for Washington for an address to Congress on Tuesday aimed squarely at derailing Obama's cherished bid for a diplomatic deal with Tehran. At the same time, Secretary of State John Kerry and other international negotiators will be in Switzerland for talks with the Iranians, trying for a framework agreement before a late March deadline.

In between are Israel's elections March 17, which have heightened the political overtones of Netanyahu's visit to Washington.

The prime minister is speaking to Congress at the request of Republicans. His visit was coordinated without the Obama administration's knowledge, deepening tensions between two leaders who have never shown much affection for each other.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street, said Netanyahu was "crossing some lines that haven't been crossed before and is putting Israel into the partisan crossfire in a way it has not been before."

But the largest pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has tried to play down the partisanship.

"AIPAC welcomes the prime minister's speech to Congress and we believe that this is a very important address," spokesman Marshall Wittmann said. "We have been actively encouraging senators and representatives to attend and we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from both sides of the aisle."

Nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers plan to sit out Netanyahu's speech, calling it an affront to the president.

Stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb has become a defining challenge for both Obama and Netanyahu, yet one they have approached far differently.

For Obama, getting Iran to verifiably prove it is not pursuing nuclear weapons would be a bright spot in a foreign policy arena in which numerous outcomes are uncertain and would validate his early political promise to negotiate with Iran without conditions.

Netanyahu considers unacceptable any deal with Iran that doesn't end its nuclear program entirely and opposes the diplomatic pursuit as one that minimizes what he considers an existential threat to Israel.

Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use.

"Through scaremongering, falsification, propaganda and creating a false atmosphere even inside other countries, (Israel) is attempting to prevent peace," Iran's top nuclear negotiator said Saturday in Tehran.

"I believe that these attempts are in vain and should not impede reaching a (nuclear) agreement," said Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

U.S. and Iranian officials reported progress in the latest talks on a deal that would freeze Tehran's nuclear program for 10 years, but allow it to slowly ramp up in the final years of the accord.

Obama has refused to meet Netanyahu during his visit, with the White House citing its policy of not meeting with foreign leaders soon before their elections. Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry will both be out of the country on trips announced only after Netanyahu accepted the Republicans' offer to speak on Capitol Hill.

The prime minister is scheduled to speak Monday at AIPAC's annual policy conference. The Obama administration will be represented at the event by U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and national security adviser Susan Rice, who criticized Netanyahu's plans to address Congress as "destructive" to the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The Iran dispute has heightened a relationship between the two leaders that has been frosty from the start. They lack any personal chemistry, leaving them with virtually no reservoir of goodwill to get them through their policy disagreements.

Within months of taking office, Obama irritated Israel when, in an address to the Arab world, he challenged the legitimacy of Jewish settlements on Palestinian-claimed land and cited the Holocaust as the justification for Israel's existence, not any historical Jewish tie to the land.

The White House was furious when Netanyahu's government defied Obama and announced plans to construct new housing units in East Jerusalem while Biden was visiting Israel in 2010. Additional housing plans that year upended U.S. efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The tension between Obama and Netanyahu was laid bare in an unusually public manner during an Oval Office meeting in 2011. In front of a crowd of journalists, the prime minister lectured Obama at length on Israel's history and dismissed the president's conditions for restarting peace talks.

Later that year, a microphone caught Obama telling his then-French counterpart in a private conversation that while he may be fed up with Netanyahu, "You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day."

Despite suspecting that Netanyahu was cheering for his rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama tried to reset relations with the prime minister after his re-election. He made his first trip as president to Israel and the two leaders went to great lengths to put on a happy front, referring to each other by their first names and touring some of the region's holy sites together.

The healing period was to be short-lived.

Another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed. Israeli officials were withering in their criticism of Kerry, who had shepherded the talks, with the country's defense minister calling him "obsessive" and "messianic." The Obama administration returned the favor last summer with its own unusually unsparing criticism of Israel for causing civilian deaths when war broke out in Gaza.

The U.S. and Israel have hit rocky patches before.

The settlement issue has been a persistent thorn in relations, compounded by profound unhappiness in Washington over Israeli military operations in the Sinai, Iraq and Lebanon during the Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations that led those presidents to take or consider direct punitive measures. Yet through it all, the United States has remained Israel's prime benefactor, providing it with $3 billion a year in assistance and defending it from criticism at the United Nations and elsewhere.

"We have brought relations back in the past and we will do it again now because at the end of the day they are based on mutual interests," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and informal adviser to Netanyahu. "The interests of Israel and the U.S. are similar and sometime identical and I think that is what will determine in the end and not feelings of one kind or another."

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-- (c) Associated Press 2015-03-01

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Israeli has no faith in the complex negotiations under way between Iran and the US (along with its five partners) to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It pushes for greater sanctions on Iran knowing that—as Secretary of State John Kerry has said—additional sanctions would threaten the diplomatic path. If the nuclear talks fail, the violence that has engulfed the Middle East will only get worse and will put the US on a dangerous path to more war.

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Israeli has no faith in the complex negotiations under way between Iran and the US (along with its five partners) to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It pushes for greater sanctions on Iran knowing that—as Secretary of State John Kerry has said—additional sanctions would threaten the diplomatic path. If the nuclear talks fail, the violence that has engulfed the Middle East will only get worse and will put the US on a dangerous path to more war.

You think bombing Iran would lessen the violence huh?

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I tend to agree with you, NeverSure. But I don't think the US should go ahead and start rattling the sabre. If/when Israel determines that Iran has the bomb, they have the capability of taking it out. There is no doubt, regardless of politics, that the US is not going to be right behind them.

The US needs to negotiate with a wider vision than Israel does. We will face repercussions from Russia and others.

The US is not Netanyahu's cattle dog and when he says 'sick 'em' boy, we don't have to do it.

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If Israel attacked Iran that could very well be the catalyst for the moderate Muslims to unit and to go hell bent. If you think ISIS is a problem now, wait till that happens.

The Sunni states would then issue condemnations in the U.N, return home and privately say 'Thank God for Israel'.
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Very interesting article on the subject at
Netanyahu’s Congress speech scuppers bipartisan unity on support for Israel.
<snipped>
“We will, of course, be publicly condemning any Democrats who don’t show up for the speech—unless they have a doctor’s note,”
Talk about the tail wagging the dog. Who are the true patriots... the Israeli firsters, or supporters of the dignity of President Obama's office.

It should count if the note is from a psychiatrist.

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The president of the United States is looking after the national security interests of the United States.

Iraq is off topic but in passing to say the US needed to withdraw all forces because the Iraqi government would not agree to the requisite Status of Forces Agreement of US forces there.

There is no 10-year deal at this point in time because rumors are not facts. The P5+1 and Iran are continuing to negotiate.

“The policy is Iran will not get a nuclear weapon,” Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier Tuesday. “And anybody running around right now, jumping in to say, well, we

don’t like the deal, or this or that, doesn’t know what the deal is. There is no deal yet.”

| The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/white-house-denies-10-year-freeze-deal-in-works-with-iran/#ixzz3T7CaKIkp

People opposed to a negotiated agreement offer no peaceful alternative course of action. The opposition to a P5+1 and Iranian nuclear agreement want to stop the negotiations, end them, terminate the negotiations. Yet those opposed to negotiations have no alternative plan they have said would lead to a peaceful resolution of nuclear power and energy in Iran.

The people opposed to a negotiated agreement have no alternative to it. Certainly not a peaceful alternative to a negotiated agreement. What is the peaceful alternative to no negotiated agreement? What is the alternative to a negotiated agreement?? If there's no negotiated agreement, then what???

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Stopping Obama from allowing Iran to get nukes is a lot more important than partisan politics. He gives more respect to Islamic dictators than one of our closest allies.

What an unbelievably partisan post. 'Stopping Obama from allowing Iran to get nukes'? I think the goal is to stop Iran from getting Nukes, not stopping Obama...

Oh, wait, for you, yes, it may be about stopping Obama.

Netanyahu and Obama are not the only ones on a collision course here.

It might be a good idea if the Republicans made up their mind what they want beside to eliminate Obama. The whole situation is beginning to sound a little like Thailand's effort to eradicate someone from politics and history.

It's mind boggling how childish this all is.

Onummer is dead set to reach an agreement with Iran in order to make himself look good at the expense of Israel. The deal he is trying to get Iran to agree to is for 10 years. After that, Iran is free to do what it wants. Even the other Arab countries don't want Iran to go nuclear because it will make an uneven playing field with the other Arab countries and they too fear what Iran would do when they get the nukes.

The day that the USA turns her back on Israel is the day the USA will fail. We have been on that collision course for quite some time. Had Obummer listened to the Generals that requested 30,000troops to remain in Iraq, ISIS would have never been able to do what they have done.

BTW...Obummer had nothing to do with pulling the troops out of Iraq like he claims. What he is responsible for is what is taken place there now. Complete failure!

And if the Republicans under Dubya acting on the weapons of mass deception advice of his Israeli supporting neocons had not needlessly started this whole mess in Iraq with a totally futile mission looking for non existent WMD, Saddam, tyrant though he was, would have kept Iraq stable and Iran neutralized.

The Republicans and Netanyahu display incredible chutzpah in laying all the ills of the Middle East at Obama's door.

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