THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

We may elect a President and let him choose a Secretary of State, with the consent of our elected Senators, but the real hand on our Middle East foreign policy would appear to be Benjamin "Bugsy" Netayahu Prime Minister of Israel and unindicted war criminal.

“I know what America is,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli settlers in 2002 in a hot-mic moment captured on video by Israel’s Channel 10. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”

That’s a proposition House Speaker John Boehner plans to test on March 3, when he presents the Israeli leader to a joint session of the House and Senate in the expectation that Netanyahu will give full-throated support to a congressional effort to overrule the Obama administration’s Iran policy.

Boehner may be counting on Netanyahu’s popularity across the partisan divide to help Republicans attract enough support for new sanctions on Iran to override the veto promised by President Barack Obama. And there are certainly a number of Democrats pushing for new sanctions despite the administration’s warning that such a move would torpedo prospects for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.

The decision to bring in a foreign leader to weigh in against the president on what Obama has defined as an issue of war and peace was taken by a Republican leadership and an Israeli head of state. The Republicans were looking to use a new congressional majority to challenge the lame-duck president, and the Israeli leader wanted to continue his own, relentless battle against nuclear compromise with Tehran. Neither party, according to Haaretz, bothered to tell the White House as they forged the plan.

“The typical protocol would suggest that the leader of a country would contact the leader of another country when he’s traveling there,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday. “This particular event seems to be a departure from that protocol.”

It would hardly be the first time Netanyahu has tried to change U.S. policy by going around the White House and appealing directly to Congress to take a harder line on Iran. He did the same to President Bill Clinton when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House in 1996, and to Obama in May 2011.

Netanyahu has consistently played the spoiler in nuclear negotiations with Iran, even though his hard line position on diplomacy with Iran has drawn frequent rebukes from Israel’s security chiefs over the years. Indeed, Bloomberg reported late Wednesday that Israel’s Mossad intelligence service had broken ranks with Netanyahu’s effort to press for further sanctions, and was warning U.S. officials and lawmakers that such a move would destroy efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Iran standoff. (Update: The Mossad on Thursday, via a statement released by Netanyahu's office, denied it had opposed new sanctions on Iran.)

It might be that Bugsy is overplaying his hand in this one. The President can still deport unwanted aliens.