Bibi Netanyahu has just been sworn in as the new Israeli Prime Minister and got right down to business.

A few hours before he was sworn in, he gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and gave Obama an ultimatum:

The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

(snip)

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

(snip)

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

As Cernig warns in his post Netan-Yahoo: “An Israeli strike on Iran would either be contested by American air defenses or seen as carried out with American complicity if it was allowed to proceed unchallenged.”

Now I have no idea what is being said behind the scenes – and I certainly hope someone in this administration is paying attention to the reliable reports from both our own NIE and the IAEA that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon – but public statements like those of Petraeus yesterday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, which repeat the unfounded claims that Iran is building one, are, at best, not helpful, and, at worst, a nod and a wink to the Israelis that we will not intervene to stop them.

Obama has both called Netanyahu and congratulated him on his swearing-in, pledging full support for the security of Israel. At the same time, he issued a statement with Medvedev which is possibly a subtle rebuff to Bibi’s threats:

"While we recognize that under the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear program, Iran needs to restore confidence in its exclusively peaceful nature," U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced in a joint statement ahead of their first sit-down.

But as Kaveh L Afrasiabi writes in the Asia Times:

The new diplomatic tempo generated by Obama’s "game-changing" tactics toward Iran could be torpedoed by Israel’s military rhetoric against Iran.

The Israeli leadership claims to support Obama’s initiative, but appears unwilling to forego its sabre-rattling broadsides – salvos that simply fuel the argument of Tehran’s hardliners that Iran should not be content with simply having nuclear capability, and must actually build bombs. Fortunately, this is not an argument to which the present leadership in Iran is listening.

Israeli officials and media often refer to "the time factor" – how close Iran is getting to the bombs. Yet it may be Israel’s own threats that have been accelerating the process. In fact, the more Israel repeats the official line that "once all the options are exhausted, there will be no choice but the military option", the more it prevents successful negotiations.

M.J. Rosenberg over at TPM has the best advice for Obama:

President Obama needs to get on the phone and let Netanyahu know that Israel can take no action vis a vis Iran without full consultation with Washington. …

That is a message Obama needs to deliver not diplomatically but directly and unambiguously.

Let’s hope someone on the Obama foreign policy team is doing precisely that.