Inside AIPAC and out, Obama's opponents turn up the heat

President Obama promised the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to do everything in his power to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon yesterday while simultaneously complaining there has been too much "loose talk" about war with the Islamic Republic.

Later today he meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in turn will give a keynote address to AIPAC's annual meeting tonight. Iran's nuclear program will be front and center in both events, count on it.

War fever around Iran has all but obscured the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, traditionally a focus of these conferences.

But a lot of the comments around the AIPAC meeting and Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week seems as much about defeating Obama in November as about Iran. Former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney, told the meeting "There is no president who has done more to delegitimize and destabilize the state of Israel in recent history than President Obama."

As Obama spoke at AIPAC yesterday, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney told supporters at a pancake brunch in Georgia that "it's pretty straight forward in my view. If Barack Obama gets reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon and the world will change."

Another barb came from a paper owned by Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish-American casino magnate who has poured millions of dollars into the super PAC of Newt Gingrich. A commentary in Israel Hayom responds to an interview that Obama gave last week to The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, in which the president promised "We’ve got Israel’s back." David Weinberg writes that the "gentleman doth protest too much" and seeks to lay out a case why Obama is dangerous for Israel.

"The US on Obama’s watch seems to be a confused and unpredictable superpower and a fair-weather friend," writes Mr. Weinberg. "This ranges from the strange burst of military activism in Libya to a lack of activism against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. From the abandonment of Hosni Mubarak to the coddling of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. From obsequiousness toward the king of Saudi Arabia to brutishness toward Netanyahu."

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