The speech that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, will deliver to Congress on March 3rd aims to scuttle an agreement on nuclear inspections and technology between Iran and the United States.
Netanyahu would like to sow a suspicion between these countries so fraught and durable that it will also prevent any possible future agreement. For that purpose he will restate his drastic and persistent belief on the subject. To permit Iran to go beyond the most primitive use of its nuclear facilities would pose an "existential threat" to Israel.
Netanyahu has given America several final chances to dispose of this existential threat. Each time, he announced that Iran would attack Israel within months if the US did not bomb Iran first; more than once, he said that Israel would attack Iran unassisted if Americans were blind to the emergency. But the Iranian attack on Israel has never come. The Israeli solo attack on Iran has never been tried.
Meanwhile, it has become clear that no regimen of inspection, no matter how penetrating and rigorous, could satisfy Netanyahu of an adequate Iranian compliance. What he asks is really the surrender of Iran's advanced technology: a surrender that would seal its consent to be a second-rate regional power, subordinate to the will of Israel.