The Guy Nicknamed "Bibi" Wears The Pants In This Relationship

I could have told you this was coming quite some time ago, but now our wonderful Israeli Prime Minister friend is telling our President exactly what the hell he needs to be doing.

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”

But Netanyahu also said that Iran threatens many other countries apart from Israel, and so his mission over the next several months is to convince the world of the broad danger posed by Iran. One of his chief security advisers, Moshe Ya’alon, told me that a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. “This is an existential threat for Israel, but it will be a blow for American interests, especially on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region—Washington or Tehran?”

So, we arrive at the impasse, the heart and soul of Obama's Presidency outside the US: Either Barack Obama is in charge of our foreign policy in the Middle East, or Benjamin Netanyahu is.

Which is it Mr. President? The fact that an honest observer of American/Israeli relations would have to stop and ask themselves that question at this point is the problem.

[UPDATE] Matt Yglesias sums up the problem:

You can’t fly from Israel to Iran without going over Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq and every discussion of this I’ve ever heard specifically says the Israelis would need to go through Iraq. It would of course be possible for Israel to do that without American approval. But none of those three countries would conceivably give Israel permission to use their airspace for this mission and the United States is committed to the defense of all three. In practice, the fact of an Israeli attack would be read throughout the region as proof of an American green light, especially were the attack not swiftly followed-up by a sharp curtailment of American aid. And for Americans, that’s really the point—as long as Israel is the biggest winner in the U.S. aid sweepstakes, Israeli actions are inevitably seen as the actions of American proxies, and if we can’t get Israel to respect our interests then we need to revisit that relationship.

Understand also that the second Israel does this (and the timeframe Israel is talking about is in "months") our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan evaporate in a matter of hours. Baghdad and Kabul will fall overnight. The Al-Malaki government in Iraq and the Karzai government in Afghanistan will collapse, and quite frankly the act almost certainly will destabilize Pakistan President Zardari's fragile government as well, and "destabilized nuclear Muslim country" is exactly the nightmare we're trying so badly to prevent. Even Dubya understood this and refused to green light Israel.

India will not allow nuclear Pakistan to fall apart, and they have nukes too. Same goes for China and Russia...and things start to get really, really ugly from there.

Somebody needs to make it plain to Israel that they're risking WW III here. So why is he doing it? There's not a winning play to be made by bluffing here, not after rattling the sword for the last two years.

Which honestly leads me to believe that he's not bluffing. He's either crazy or stupid, and either one should scare the shit out of all of us.