Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech to the United States Congress is a continuation of his nearly 20 years of scaremongering the US government to encourage both US intervention in the Middle East and US military aid for Israel says Ron Paul Institute Academic Board Member Hillary Mann Leverett in a new CCTV interview. Instead of falling for the scare tactics again, Mann Leverett suggests the US move toward a policy approach that would include pulling back from repeated military invasions and occupations designed to achieve dominance in the Middle East.
In response to host Anand Naidoo mentioning Chris McGreal writing in the Guardian that Netanyahu did in the speech “what he does so well: scare American politicians to death,” Mann Leverett comments:
Well, I think in a lot of ways Prime Minister Netanyahu succeeded. But, he’s had a lot of practice in this. You know, he first addressed Congress — in a very similar way, saying that Iran was going to become the world’s nuclear terrorist state — back in 1996. So, for nearly 20 years Prime Minister Netanyahu has been coming to Washington trying to scaremonger Americans against the threat of either a nuclear Iran or back in 2002 he was one of the leading voices to go to Congress to give testimony about how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was deploying nuclear weapons in what he called these portable mass vehicles to launch these nuclear weapons to annihilate not only Israel but the world. So, he’s had a lot of experience doing that.
Unfortunately for my compatriots in Washington, they seem to fall for it again and again and again either by, in 2002, building up the case for actual war and invasion of Iraq or by increasing every year exponentially military sales, military aid — it’s not even a sale, actually giving it to the Israelis — of the most advanced American weapons systems possible.
What Prime Minister Netanyahu does, and some of his Israeli colleagues when they come to Washington, is not only to push the United States to continue these very counterproductive military adventures in the Middle East, but it is for themselves to get more and more military aid and more and more weapons systems.
Mann Leverett also addresses in the interview other related issues including the future of US relations with Israel and what she sees as a better US approach to the Middle East in which the US “would have constructive relations with all of the important players, including Iran.”
Watch the complete interview here:
