Obama, Netanyahu got what they hoped for at UN meeting
Obama and Netanyahu did not meet with each other at the United Nations, where leaders and foreign ministers from the world body’s 193 member states have gathered since last week to give speeches and hold private talks to resolve conflicts and boost trade.
But the two men left the UN meeting with more than they arrived with: Obama with an assurance that Israel would not attack Iran’s nuclear sites before the Nov. 6 US presidential election, and Netanyahu with a commitment from Obama to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from producing an atomic bomb.
The General Assembly, concluded yesterday, was notable for what was not accomplished. World powers failed to break deadlocks over Iran’s nuclear program, the conflicts in Syria, Mali and Congo, and the stalled Israel-Palestinian peace talks.
The lack of substantive progress on the world’s protracted conflicts led diplomats and analysts to question the relevance of the United Nations, saying it was incapable of moving decisively as it did last year on Libya.
“The diplomatic situation at the UN may have to get worse before it gets better,” said Richard Gowan of New York University. “Perhaps we need a diplomatic debacle on the scale of Iraq — or a peacekeeping failure like Srebrenica (Bosnia) — before big states wake up and ask why the UN is stagnating.” In July 1995, UN peacekeepers in Bosnia failed to prevent the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Analysts and diplomats argue that the lack of UN backing for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 highlighted the need for a UN seal of approval for military interventions. Widely seen as “illegal,” as former UN chief Kofi Annan described it, Western powers made certain that the NATO intervention in Libya last year had the backing of the UN Security Council unlike the Iraq war.
While the United States and Israel have long refused to rule out the use of military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Netanyahu has criticized Obama for failing to make clear to Tehran under what circumstances Western powers would be prepared to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Suggestions from Israel that he was letting down the Jewish state were an irritant Obama did not want to put up with in the final weeks before an election, especially given the way the issue has been leveraged by Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile, Western officials say, Netanyahu may want to avoid antagonizing Israel’s main ally and poisoning ties with the man who could occupy the White House for another four years.
In his speech to the General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate the threat of Iran’s nuclear program. He used a red marker to draw a line at the point where Iran would be close to producing an atomic bomb.
Images of “Bibi’s bomb” — referring to Netanyahu’s nickname — with its graphic “red line” representing the moment Iran can no longer be stopped from getting a nuclear weapon will likely be the defining image of this year’s assembly.
It may also join other memorable moments when visual aids were used in UN speeches. These include: US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s unveiling of U-2 spy plane photos of Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s flawed intelligence briefing seeking to make the case for war with Iraq before the March 2003 US-led invasion.
Netanyahu praised Obama for telling the General Assembly that the United States will “do what we must” to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and acknowledged that there was still room for diplomacy. Harsh sanctions, Netanyahu said, could probably persuade Tehran not to build a nuclear weapon.
But the Israeli leader also hinted at war. He said Iran’s enrichment plants were visible and vulnerable to attack and suggested that a decision on force could come by next spring. Tehran’s UN mission responded by saying Iran has the means and right to retaliate with full force against any attack.
Israel, presumed to be the region’s only nuclear power, has twice destroyed sites it feared could be used to develop atomic weapons — in 1981 in Iraq and in 2007 in Syria.
n Reuters
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