Robert Fisk: Netanyahu’s power in the Middle East wanes, Trump has to find his own way to deal with Iran
One option for Trump, now he knows
Netanyahu’s fate, would be to turn on the Saudis, whose intelligence men
chopped off poor Jamal Khashoggi’s
head a year ago and did other unmentionable things to him before disposing of him down a consulate drain, fountain or sink. Just what
did the Saudi crown prince know about this abysmal, disgraceful affair?
And let
me add another question: was Khashoggi’s face turned towards Mecca
when he was buried? Perhaps Mike Pompeo could actually ask Mohamed bin
Salman, smiling broadly when he met him on Wednesday, what he knows about
this gruesome killing of a very old friend of mine?The Saudis are our allies – the Brits are still sponsoring them – and they tell us that the drone
strikes by the Houthis/Iranians were “a test of global will”. And was our
response to Khashoggi’s murder also a test of global will? .. I was surprised, these hot few days
in the Middle East, that no one – not Iran, not America, nor the Israelis –
remembered that this week marked the 37th anniversary of the Sabra and Chatila
massacre by Israel’s Christian militia allies in
Lebanon, the slaughter of 1,700 mostly Palestinians in the refugee camps
to which they were sent by an Likud minister in 1982..
There is an
extraordinary irony in the fate of both Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran. The first has been
captaining the Titanic, in the words of one Israeli
academic, through the past couple of days. The second – a rather better
captain, it might be said – has been captaining a couple of tankers in and
out of the Mediterranean and the Gulf. The second was also
the target of Netanyahu’s Likud rhetoric
at the United Nations. Remember the famous comic-cuts test tube cartoon
which Netanyahu held before the UN, a symbol of the time it would take for the
Islamic Republic to create a nuclear weapon? Iran must be “defanged”, I believe
the words were; nuclear Islamist tyrant must be disarmed.... the man who led
the great anti-Iranian bash at the UN appears to have sank his ship, and the
man who once told us all at the Herzeliya conference so many years ago that
Beirut was “the centre of terror”, the then chief of staff Benny
Gantz, may now be leading the state of Israel for the near
future. And the winner? Iran,
of course...