Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. 'The thing about Bibi is, he's a chickenshit,' a senior Obama official told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was 'scared to launch wars.' Nine years later, Trump would tell attendees at a campaign rally that Netanyahu had initially committed to join America's 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani, the notorious head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but backed out at the last minute. 'I'll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,' Trump told his supporters at the gathering, just days after the Hamas massacre in 2023. That was then. Such assessments of Netanyahu sound absurd today, as Israel wages war on Iran for the second time, having dismantled the regime's proxy armies'Hamas and Hezbollah'and assassinated its supreme leader. But in fact,...
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