The inevitable blame game for what appears to be a historic US-Israeli military defeat in the making heats up.
JD Vance confronted Benjamin Netanyahu in a tense phone call, accusing the Israeli leader of being overly optimistic about the chances of regime change in Iran. The Vice President told the Israeli leader on Monday that many of his predictions about the war which he had sold to Donald Trump had not materialized. Despite the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hardline factions have tightened their grip on power and the regime remains firmly in control.
‘Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the President as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements,’ a source told Axios.
Vance, who reportedly advised Trump against going to war with Iran, was appointed by the President to help lead negotiations to end the conflict.
A day after Vance’s call with Netanyahu, a Right-wing Israeli news outlet owned by GOP donor Miriam Adelson reported that the Vice President had yelled at Netanyahu over Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. White House officials, who described the story as false, began suspecting that Israelis planted it to try to smear Vance. An Israeli official denied that Netanyahu had planted the story and said his office issued a full denial when approached by reporters.
JD Vance was never likely to become president in the first place. But being second-in-command in an administration that has lost a totally unnecessary war in humiliating fashion to a third-rate power should suffice to ensure that he never wins a presidential election, even though the blame quite rightly falls on Netanyahu. The Israeli leader has been lying for decades, so it’s not really much of an excuse to claim that you took him at his word.
DISCUSS ON SG