Robert Fisk: Netanyahu’s power in the Middle East wanes, Trump has to find his own way to deal with Iran

By Dilip -
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...
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/netanyahu-israel-elections-trump-likud-benny-gantz-iran-saudi-arabia-a9112061.html

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