Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be returning next week to his favorite haunt: the speaker’s podium at the UN General Assembly meeting, where he is expected to address the assembly participants on Sept. 19. Sept. 27 will mark five years since his 2012 landmark horror show on that same podium regarding Iran’s nuclear bomb. “Where should the red line be drawn?” Netanyahu asked before marking his red line on a sketch of a bomb that he held up. “The red line should be drawn … before Iran gets to a point where it is a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.”
Years went by, and most of the bombs going off in Israel are metaphoric stink bombs related to corruption suspicions dropped on the residences of the prime minister and his wife.
With the Iranian nuke agreement signed and sealed, the issue of the bomb threat is off the international agenda. Netanyahu might actually feel himself bereft up on the podium without having a drawing of a nuclear bomb to clutch. Nevertheless, he could always try getting global attention by presenting another drawing — that of a North Korea-made bomb. But then, he will be confronted with another problem: His red marker — emphasizing the red line supposedly separating between a medium threat and a critical one — will be of no use. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is color blind in that regard. He enjoys poking US President Donald Trump in the eye. One day Kim conducts a nuclear test and the next he fools around with a missile launch over Japan. The US administration is helpless against a leader whose intentions are unclear and whose moves are unpredictable.
The prime minister can provide proof, of course, of the close cooperation between the Iranian ayatollah regime and the communist ruler in Pyongyang. For example, the cable sent by the US State Department to the embassy in Beijing, part of the batch of documents leaked to WikiLeaks, indicated that Iran and North Korea make use of their national airlines’ cargo flights to transport nuclear technology and components. According to information collated by Israeli experts, quite a few Iranian liquid-fueled ballistic missiles and related launchers were developed based on know-how and technology provided by North Korea.
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