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As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes yet another move that suggests he is all but openly and actively allied with the Republican Party, it’s now clear that the gloves are now nearly off in the Obama administration. Secretary of State John Kerry was exceedingly blunt in comments before Congress about Netanyahu’s past judgement on a teeny-weeny little matter called the Iraq war:
Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday slammed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran, calling it as wrongheaded as the prime minister’s backing of the Iraq War.
“Israel is safer today with the added time we have given and the stoppage of the advances in the nuclear program than they were before we got that agreement, which by the way the prime minister opposed,” Kerry said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. “He was wrong.”
Kerry was later asked to address Netanyahu’s criticism of a hypothetical deal with Iran as a threat to Israel.
“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush,” Kerry replied. “We all know what happened with that decision.”
Now look for a story sometime soon coming from an unidentified senior Israeli official who blasts Kerry. That’s the way this kind of exchange usually plays out.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.