WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered the White House for his Tuesday meeting with US President Donald Trump using a side entrance.

Trump didn’t greet him outside the West Wing as he had for many of their previous seven meetings of his second term, and reporters weren’t called into the Oval Office to hear the pair issue statements or answer questions.

The limited public nature of the meeting appeared to advance a joint interest — that Israel not be seen as once again dragging the US into renewing the conflict against Iran.

That was certainly the perception after Trump and Netanyahu last met on February 11, when the prime minister made a high-stakes Situation Room pitch for the US to join Israel in striking Iran.

Seventeen days later, the joint US-Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic began.

However, many of Netanyahu’s reported predictions — that Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks; that Tehran would be so weakened by US-Israeli attacks that it would be unable to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; that it would likely be unable to strike US assets in neighboring countries; and that the regime was ripe for collapse, thanks to help from Kurdish fighters capable of invading the country from Iraq — did not ultimately pan out.

Instead, the US risks becoming embroiled in an extended conflict with Iran with no obvious exit strategy and without achieving any of the key goals with which it entered the war.

Over the weekend, Trump halted nearly two weeks of strikes........

© The Times of Israel