Tail wagging the US dog

Yes, it's that time again, when the junior partner of the sole military superpower flies to Washington to hand the US president a dressing down and to dispense orders on how to deal with Iran.

Once again Netanyahu lectured all and sundry on the Holocaust, lamenting Washington's failure to bomb Auschwitz in 1944, shortly before the death camp's liberation by the Soviet Red Army.

He drew the conclusion, despite Obama's repeated pledge to "always have Israel's back," that Israel can rely only on its own resources to protect its own interests.

"Today, we have a state of our own and the purpose of the Jewish state is to defend Jewish lives and to secure the Jewish future," Netanyahu declared.

His attempt to transpose the Europe of 1944 onto today's reality, to equate the Holocaust with Iran's civil nuclear programme, does not emanate from an inability to appreciate the historical inaccuracy of this fraudulent stance.

Obama tried last year to put pressure on the Israeli leader to assist him in kick-starting negotiations with the Palestinians by taking the necessary steps of halting the settlement-building programme in the occupied West Bank.

He was treated contemptuously by Netanyahu in a manner that no other international politician could have dreamt of doing.

Faced with a choice between backing their president or Netanyahu, most elected US politicians, of both parties would opt for the latter rather than face the wrath of pro-Israel lobby group Aipac.

Aipac, which is no more representative of the political views of US Jews than it is of US non-Jews, has worked assiduously to acquire a reputation for ruthless efficiency, with the power to destroy the careers of politicians who do not embrace its Tel Aviv-approved project.

That current priority is to project Iran's nascent civil nuclear programme as a declaration of impending annihilation against poor defenceless Israel, armed with little more than hundreds of nuclear weapons, the means to deliver them and the most modern air force and conventional forces in the entire region.

Netanyahu needs hysterical overreaction to Tehran's nuclear programme because he knows that any rational assessment would conclude, as US national intelligence director James Clapper did before Congress in January, that Iran has no plans to develop a nuclear military capability.

If he cons the US into believing that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran, who could oppose a pre-emptive and essentially defensive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities?

Who would divert their attention from Israel's faltering right to existence to self-determination for the Palestinians, who are already dispossessed, ethnically cleansed and viewed as expendable?

Netanyahu is on a winning streak. Obama is a loser. But opposition is growing in the US to Israel's tail wagging Washington's dog.

Retired generals and intelligence officers have funded a newspaper advert opposing a "war of choice" against Iran, while 51 per cent of citizens do not want the US embroiled in a war of Israel's making.

Straws in the wind, to be sure, but sober heads in Israel may well be calculating already the negative effects of Netanyahu's repeated swaggering arrogance in the home of their closest ally.