Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech this week to a joint session of Congress was an "effective rhetorical exercise" that may help him win re-election, but his opposition to the proposed deal with Iran over nuclear proliferation is a "path to a dead end" for Netanyahu and U.S. Republicans who agree with him, political commentator Pat Buchanan said Thursday on "America’s Forum."
"We're going to get an agreement with Iran I believe on nuclear proliferation and on the centrifuges and all the rest of it that are in Iran," Buchanan told
Newsmax TV. "That's going to leave Bibi Netanyahu and his Republican allies with one problem. They're going to have to try and torpedo and scuttle that agreement, and get the Republicans and Congress to reject that agreement.
"If we do have a deal with Iran that is supported by the P5+1, they're going to find that they have very few allies ... the Russians, Chinese, British, French and the Germans [will] all bail on the United States if they succeed in that," he said.
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"The president of the United States will not go along with that," Buchanan said, "and the Republicans and Netanyahu will be out front in trying to scuttle a deal, which most Americans are going to support.
"The Republicans helped themselves with AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the Jewish community, but in the long run this could spell disaster for the Republican Party."
Based on what he knows of
the proposed deal, Buchanan said he does not think it’s a bad one.
"From what we know so far, the Iranians have stopped the uranium enrichment at 20 percent, they've gotten rid of all their 20 percent uranium, they have agreed to stop the Arak heavy water plant, they got cameras at every single facility, and inspectors at every single facility," he said.
"I agree with the U.S. intelligence agencies, which have said twice that Iran does not now have an active bomb program," Buchanan said, adding that "if this is true" and the Iranians "demonstrate that," and agree to a deal that denies them the ability to produce bomb-grade uranium for a number of years, "the American people are going to support that."
Without the deal, the U.S. would put on "a path to war with Iran," said Buchanan, who questioned the rationale of going to war with a country of 80 million people "to deprive it of weapons of mass destruction it does not have? Haven't we done that once before?"
It’s the
Iranians and Shiite militia, he said, who are fighting the Islamic State (ISIS), he added.
Asked what his prescription would be to allies in the Sunni world, Buchanan said: "We've got your back, but you all are going to do the fighting on this one. You're going to put the boots on the ground. And if you're not going to put the boots on the ground, we will certainly use our airpower still, but we're not sending another 100,000 American kids to fight and die for a Sunni terrorist organization you ought to be dealing with yourselves, and some of you have been aiding."
It’s those countries, not the United States, that are actually threatened by the radical Islamic terror group, he said. Comparing the threat of ISIS to the kind of carnage wrought by Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong’s China is way off track.
"To think that ISIS, these psychos, this death cult, is some kind of threat to the United States of America, the greatest country on Earth, comparable to those is preposterous," said Buchanan. "We're frightening ourselves to death with our own propaganda.
"Look, ISIS, what can they do? They can blow up a restaurant here, they can blow up airliners, they can blow up buildings, they can shoot up Charlie Hebdo and all the rest of it. They can make life difficult; they can make us impose certain restrictions on our freedom.
"But the idea that this is an existential threat to the United States of America — what is the matter with these people?"
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