Editorial: Damn right, Bibi

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP

Heed his warning

The world leader who addressed a joint meeting of Congress on Tuesday was a man with a clear vision of Iran as an expansionist, extremist, radical Islamist power sure to use nuclear weaponry for domination.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked the chamber through the regime’s four-decade history of imposing fundamentalism via repression at home and terror abroad as compelling prologue for urging the U.S. to abandon President Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with the mullahs.

As directly as possible, Netanyahu told the gathering of America’s elected representatives:

“For over a year, we’ve been told that no deal is better than a bad deal. Well, this is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. We are better off without it.”

Obama has on the table technical specifications and inspection standards designed to limit Iran’s ability to “break out” toward building a nuclear bomb within a year. He would allow the pact to expire in ten years, trusting that Iran would then meet standards for peaceful atomic energy.

The White House says, in effect, that this is the best the world can do considering that Iran has developed advanced nuclear know-how, illegally built sophisticated nuclear facilities, amassed ballistic missiles and could wire up and deliver a bomb in a hop, skip and a jump.

Well, whose fault is that?

Across most of the six years of his presidency, Obama accepted without forceful response Iran’s defiant and duplicitous march toward becoming a nuclear state. As a result, his partisans now resignedly contend that, because there’s no way to return the genie to the bottle, Obama’s deal would at least place a check on the rogues.

For Netanyahu — and for America — a check is far from enough, not on a government whose leader has vowed to annihilate Israel, that is relentlessly extending its sway over the Middle East and that could smilingly claim world approval as it stands within months of assembling a bomb.

And, hell to the chief, the prime minister said so, rousing the chamber with an unflinching presentation of geopolitical realities that Obama has skated past while Secretary of State John Kerry struggles to come to terms with the mullahs. Most trenchantly, Netanyahu told Congress:

“Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.”

Pathetically, Obama falsely derided Netanyahu for failing to propose “viable alternatives” for further reining Iran in. Even more pathetically, at this 11th hour, Iran rejected the 10-year freeze that’s crucial to Obama’s scheme, flatly deeming it “unacceptable.”

The Iranians’ sudden deal-breaking intransigence highlights the folly of Obama’s enterprise and points the U.S. toward the action that Netanyahu, in fact, called for:

Get up from the table and lead the world to impose an ever-increasing economic chokehold on a rogue regime that has proved vulnerable to sanctions.

Obama fails to see so-called viable alternatives only because he has neither the nerve nor the wisdom to use them.