In a profanity-filled telephone conversation last September, according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, President Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu that “Everybody’s sick of you, Bibi. All the Jews are sick of you. Even the two Jews on this call [Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner] are sick of you.”

This may have been Trump’s most insightful observation ever.

And yet, with the unctuousness of the furniture salesman he once was, Netanyahu persuaded Trump only a few months later that attacking Iran militarily was a good idea and that a US-Israeli war with Iran would not only be over in a matter of weeks but would result in surrender by and a change in the Tehran regime.

As is painfully obvious to all by now, especially to Trump, things didn’t quite work out that way. The war far lasted longer than Netanyahu predicted, was far costlier both politically and economically than anticipated, and there indeed was a surrender, but on the part of the U.S. rather than Iran.

As regards regime change, Netanyahu is still peddling a fictional spin to his ever-shrinking base. It will take the Iranian government and military “a long time to recover… And they may not recover” from the “cumulative damage” inflicted on them by the war, he told the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem this past Sunday. “Because once you deal these blows, and once the rift between the regime and the people is so deep, you cannot tell when such a regime will fall. And I think we created the conditions for its future fall.”

Netanyahu’s bravado sounds like off-key whistling past what may well be his own political graveyard\. The war did result in regime change in Tehran, but the new regime is more hardline than the one that had been in place at the beginning of the war. With the Iranians receiving an unexpected infusion of billions upon billions of dollars into their struggling economy, there is no reason to believe that anyone in Tehran is packing their suitcases to go anywhere.

Contrary to Netanyahu’s pronouncements, the Iranian regime seems to be recovering quite nicely, thank you very much.

For the son of a historian, he displays either a blatant disregard or a spectacular ignorance of history.

By unsuccessfully trying to drag successive U.S. presidents into what anyone with even rudimentary geopolitical awareness knew would be a doomed military conflict with Iran and finally hitting paydirt with Trump, Netanyahu has effectively reduced Israel’s de facto status to that of a vassal state of the U.S. Not since a series of Herodian kings tugged at the forelock before Roman emperors, generals, and prefects (among them Pompey, Julius Caesar, Vespasian, and, lest we forget, Pontius Pilate) has the head of a Jewish commonwealth manipulated himself into such subservience to a foreign power.

It would be easy to blame far-right or far-left antisemites, or Hamas, or Qatar, or anti-Zionist politicians for this untoward state of affairs. But it is Netanyahu and Netanyahu alone who has provided them with the requisite rhetorical ammunition by systematically blowing up alliances nurtured and cultivated by his predecessors and engaging in reckless military adventures that were doomed from the outset.

Let’s be clear: only in Netanyahu’s illusory self-aggrandizing virtual reality could anyone with an IQ in the triple digits or even a modicum of military and geopolitical awareness have convinced themselves that a nation the size of New Jersey, even in partnership with the U.S., could successfully wage war against Iran, the 17th largest country in the world with a landmass equivalent to Texas, California, Montana, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)