‘Obama is coming to tell Netanyahu not to strike Iran’

‘Obama is coming to tell Netanyahu not to strike Iran’.(TOI).Barack Obama will be making his first presidential visit to Israel next month primarily in order to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in person to hold off on any military intervention in Iran, it was reported Sunday.
Quoting unnamed Israeli sources, Israel’s Army Radio said the president would indeed seek to host some kind of summit meeting between Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and possibly Jordan’s King Abdullah, to try to re-energize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
But the key reason for the visit and its timing, the report said, is that Netanyahu cited spring 2013 in his speech to the UN General Assembly last fall as a notable deadline relating to thwarting Iran’s nuclear drive, and the president wants to tell the prime minister face-to-face that the time is not yet ripe for military action. “Obama fears that the prime minister will decide to strike in Iran now, at a time when he is backed by a new government and can set up a new security cabinet in which two reported [ministerial] opponents of military intervention — Dan Meridor and Benny Begin — will no longer be present,” the Army Radio report said. Meridor and Begin both lost their Knesset seats in the January 22 elections.
Obama will reiterate US determination to ensure that Iran does not attain nuclear weapons, and will remind Netanyahu that the US has military “capacities” that Israel does not possess, the report added. New Secretary of State John Kerry said last week that the diplomatic option remained open, but that all other options were also on the table.
“Obama decided to come himself and deliver to Netanyahu the direct message, ‘Don’t strike at Iran. Let me oversee the contacts with Iran as I see fit. If necessary I’ll take action against them. We have capacities that you do not have’,” the radio report said.Hmmmm......Obama: "Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us." Read the full story here.