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White House says Benjamin Netanyahu's surprise trip to US is a breach of protocol

President Barack Obama was not informed of the Republicans' invitation to the Israeli leader to speak before a joint session of Congress

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The White House fears Benjamin Netanyahu will encourage Congress to derail the Iran nuclear talks Photo: CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP/Getty Images






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By Raf Sanchez, Washington

7:13PM GMT 21 Jan 2015
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The White House has protested that Israel and the Republicans breached diplomatic protocol by organising a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington without first notifying President Barack Obama.

Hours after Mr Obama delivered his State of the Union address, Republicans tried to reclaim the media's attention by announcing they had invited the Israeli leader to deliver a speech to Congress.

The White House said it learned of the invitation shortly before it was made public by John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, and that the Israelis had not notified them of the trip as they normally would.

"This particular event seems to be a departure from that protocol," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.

Mr Boehner invited the Israeli leader to speak on February 11 and asked him to address senators and congressmen about the "grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life". The Israeli government has not yet said if the invitation has been accepted.

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Mr Boehner denied he was "poking anyone in the eye" by offering the invitation without consulting the White House.
It would be Mr Netanyahu's third address to Congress and will come just weeks before Israel's own election in March.
While Mr Obama's aides would bristle at being kept in the dark about any visit by a foreign leader, trips by Mr Netanyahu are particularly sensitive.
The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly criticised Mr Obama in public for his handling of the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran and the White House fears he will use the speech to encourage Congress to derail the talks.
The White House said it would need to know what Mr Netanyahu "plans to say in his remarks to Congress" before deciding on whether there would be a meeting at the White House.
Mr Obama is trying to stop Republicans passing a bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran if the talks fail to reach an agreement by their June 30 deadline.
The White House argues that the bill would cause the Iranians to balk and fracture the international coalition assembled to conduct the negotiations in Geneva.
Republicans have so far signalled that they intend to move ahead with the sanctions bill despite Mr Obama's threat to veto it.
The Israeli embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment.

Drew Phipps Wrote:Perhaps Obama should book a speaking engagement in East Jerusalem.

Quote:A perfect storm brews in the Middle East


By David Ignatius February 16 Follow @ignatiuspost
TEL AVIV Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Pool photo by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press)
The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu's office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal.
Obama administration officials believed these reports were misleading because the centrifuge numbers are part of a package that includes the size of the Iranian nuclear stockpile and the type of centrifuges that are allowed to operate. A deal that allowed 500 advanced centrifuges and a large stockpile of enriched uranium might put Iran closer to making a bomb than one that permitted 10,000 older machines and a small stockpile, the administration argues.
An initial report Sunday by Israel's Channel 2 news that the administration had cut all communications with Israel about the Iran talks was denied by White House spokesman Alistair Baskey. Sources here said that Philip Gordon, the Middle East director for President Obama's National Security Council, would see Israeli national security adviser Yossi Cohen and other senior officials on Monday. The discussion would include Iran policy, but U.S. officials aren't likely to share the latest information about U.S. strategy in the talks.

Obama defends decision not to meet Netanyahu(1:07)



President Obama says not meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March is standard protocol for foreign leaders running in an election. (Reuters)


This latest breach in the U.S.-Israeli relationship began around Jan. 12 with a phone call from Netanyahu. Obama asked the Israeli leader to hold fire diplomatically for several more months while U.S. negotiators explored whether Iran might agree to a deal that, through its technical limits on centrifuges and stockpiles, extended the breakout period that Iran would need to build a bomb to more than a year. But Netanyahu is said to have responded that a year wasn't enough and to have reverted to Israel's hard-line insistence that Iran shouldn't be allowed any centrifuges or enrichment.
Obama was concerned because the United States had shared with Israel its goal of a one-year breakout period since the beginning of the talks. The White House saw Netanyahu's comment as a change, one that could potentially scuttle the negotiations. The Israeli response is that Netanyahu has always argued for "zero enrichment."
Relations began to unravel quickly after the phone call. On Jan. 21, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) invited Netanyahu to address Congress and share his concerns about the talks. The invitation hadn't been pre-negotiated with the White House, as is usually the case when foreign leaders are invited to address Congress.
Then came the alleged leaks about the nuclear talks. On Jan. 31, the Times of Israel reported that an unnamed senior Israeli official had told Channel 10 TV news that the United States was ready to allow more than 7,000 centrifuges and had "agreed to 80 percent of Iran's demands." Channel 2 reported that the U.S. offer was 6,500 centrifuges. U.S. officials believed that Netanyahu's office was the source of these reports and concluded that they couldn't be as transparent as before with the Israel leader about the secret talks.
Asked for comment, an official in Netanyahu's office said: "The details of the last round of negotiations are known in Washington, Paris, London, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin and Tehran. It is perplexing that a decision would be made to try to keep those details a secret from Jerusalem when Israel is threatened by Iran with annihilation and its very survival could be threatened by a bad deal."
The Iran issue will come to a head next month. Netanyahu's speech to Congress is scheduled for March 3. Israeli elections, in which Netanyahu is running against a coalition of more moderate Israeli politicians, will take place March 17. The deadline for reaching a framework deal in the Iran negotiations is March 24. It's a month that could shape the future of the Middle East, not to mention the U.S.-Israeli relationship, for years to come.
Iran policy isn't the only short-circuit between Washington and Jerusalem. The administration also fears that Netanyahu is ignoring a potential new blowup with the Palestinians. U.S. intelligence reports indicate that the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank and has nominal authority now in Gaza, could run out of money as early as next month. If that happened, the United States fears that the civil service and security force in the West Bank could collapse, creating a new crisis for Israel and the region.
"This is a dangerous issue," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned Friday. "Israel is withholding our money and this means that the State of Palestine' will face a crisis." The United States believes Abbas may simply dissolve his government if the money isn't released.
The Israeli government dissents from this dire assessment. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said in comments Monday to a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies here that the Palestinians were making an empty threat. He cited an Israeli saying: "If they want to collapse, they'll collapse. If they don't, they won't collapse."
The money crunch stems from Israel's decision to withhold tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. This move was retaliation for the Palestinian decision last fall to pursue legal action against Israel in the International Criminal Court.
The Obama administration is considering various options to show Israelis and Arabs alike that it is still serious about pursuing a Palestinian peace agreement, despite the impasse reached last year in U.S.-brokered talks.
One option under active consideration is to make public the framework that Secretary of State John Kerry developed during the talks to deal with such key issues as Israeli security, the status of Jerusalem and the rights of refugees. This might simply be announced publicly or introduced as a U.N. Security Council resolution updating Resolutions 242 and 338, which for decades have been the benchmarks for negotiations.
The "perfect storm" metaphor is overused. But one may be developing in the Middle East as Israeli, American, Palestinian and Iranian interests collide in a vortex.

Quote:

The Obama-Netanyahu Showdown

February 21, 2015

President Obama has been reduced to asking Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for permission to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, recognizing Netanyahu's power over the U.S. Congress. But Netanyahu's determination to block any deal has left Obama traversing a difficult negotiating path, writes Gareth Porter.
By Gareth Porter
The latest public spat between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government centers on Israeli leaks of details of the U.S. negotiating position in the Iran nuclear talks and the U.S. consequently reducing its consultation with Israel on the talks. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius divulged some of the details of the quarrel this week.
It involves the alleged leak to an Israeli journalist of an Obama administration proposal that would "allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal," according to Ignatius. The immediate issue was White House anger over Netanyahu's taking advantage of the information on the U.S. negotiating stance to interfere again in U.S. domestic politics.

President Barack Obama holds a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office, Oct 1, 2014. The meeting was described as chilly, reflecting the strained relationship between the two leaders. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

But the Ignatius account also provides further evidence that the Obama administration still feels it necessary to clear every significant diplomatic move on Iran with Netanyahu, whose openly declared aim is to prevent any agreement from being reached.
The real reason for President Barack Obama's continued appeasement of Netanyahu on the talks is that the White House believes Israel's minions in Congress pose a serious threat to the administration's diplomatic strategy on Iran.
To understand the politics surrounding the latest proposal it is necessary to go back to the basic facts about Iran's enrichment capacity and the negotiations on that issue. The first basic fact is that Iran's installed capacity is nearly 20,000 centrifuges, of which half have never actually gone into operation. So when Iran proposes a total of 9,400 centrifuges, as Zarif did last July in an interview with the New York Times, it represented a 50 percent cut in that total enrichment capacity.
But U.S. and European officials have studiously avoided any reference to the nearly 10,000 installed centrifuges that have not been operating. Their statements to the press insisting that Iran has not shown political will have pretended that those centrifuges don't exist. Thus they have referred to the proposed Iranian reduction to 9,400 as merely maintaining "the status quo," as the International Crisis Group's Ali Vaez reported last August.
The Obama administration has justified its demands for much deeper cuts in the number of centrifuges by citing the need to provide a sufficiently lengthy "breakout" timeline. That arbitrary metric has nothing to do with the reality of nuclear policy, since it posits a scenario that even the former WMD adviser to Obama, Gary Samore, admits is completely implausible.
The Obama administration claims that it needs a year or more in case of an Iranian decision to enrich uranium at weapons-grade levels in this "breakout" scenario so the President has enough time to fashion a response. But the idea that the President of the United States needs a year to decide what to do about an open violation of the agreement by Iran is so far-fetched as to suggest that the supposed need for a one-year "breakout timeline" is actually a cover for the real strategy underlying the U.S. negotiating position.
The reality is that the 9,400 level Iran is proposing would give Obama plenty of time to make a decision. Two graphs accompanying an article by David Albright and Olli Heinonen, the former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) deputy director-general for safeguards, last June shows that fact very clearly.
Assuming no stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium, and a reduction of the Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile to zero, according to those graphs, the breakout time for 10,000 IR-1 centrifuges would be about nine or 10 months.
Iran had already agreed to get rid of its stockpile of 20 percent-enriched uranium and agreed last autumn to reduce its LEU stockpile to a low level by shipping it to Russia to be converted into fuel assemblies for Bushehr, provided that other elements of the agreement were acceptable. Those graphs provide perspective on the proposals the United States has been making since the start of the negotiations and the political considerations that have been shaping the U.S. approach.
In the initial May 2014 draft agreement, the P5+1 demanded that Iran agree to a cap of 1,500 centrifuges, representing a reduction of 92 percent from the existing Iranian enrichment capacity. But diplomats apparently suggested privately to Vaez that they might ultimately settle for a 6,500 cap.
In July, U.S. and European officials in Vienna succeeded in convincing Vaez of the ICG that their "margin of maneuver" had been reduced during the spring and summer, and that the 6,500 centrifuges the ICG had proposed in May was no longer possible. Capping the number of centrifuges at about 4,000, Vaez wrote, was "a political imperative" for the United States and its European allies. A glance at the graph shows that a reduction to 4,000 would increase the breakout time to somewhere between 21 and 28 months.
A semi-official Iranian source revealed in early November that the Obama administration had just offered 6,000 as the total to be allowed in the comprehensive agreement a total that would be equivalent to 12 to 15 months on the graph. Now we know from the story of the Israeli leak that the Obama administration was ready to offer 6,500 in January.
That 6,500 may not be the final U.S. offer. The Obama administration has never adopted a firm final numerical demand for the cap on centrifuges numbers going into the negotiations, according to a U.S. source who has been briefed on its negotiating calculus. But the administration has not had any incentive to be more forthcoming on centrifuge numbers, as discussed earlier in this space, because the status quo gives the U.S. what it needs most.
And Washington is convinced that Iran is playing a weak negotiating hand, because the sanctions and the steep plunge in the price of oil have put intense pressure on the Rouhani government to reach an agreement.
That same perception has also led to a U.S. position on lifting sanctions that would allow it to hold on to leverage over Iran through sanctions until late in the implementation of the agreement, even though Iran would be expected to cut the number of centrifuges immediately.
But the Obama administration has yet another reason for making no real effort to accommodate Iran's political problems, which brings us back to the significance of the latest Obama-Netanyahu spat. It is the fear that proposing anything less than a one-year breakout timeline would cause Congress to vote to reject the agreement.
According to the well-informed U.S. source, the administration is worried that if Congress rejects a final deal it will be perceived by the rest of the world as an indication that the U.S. was responsible for the failure of the talks. That fear and the determination of the Obama administration to avoid having to bear the onus for diplomatic failure gives the extremist opposition in Congress and its Israeli sponsors a veto power over the administration's negotiating stance. And that explains why the administration approached Netanyahu, hat in hand, in January to seek his blessing for its most recent offer to Iran.
The irony in this situation, therefore, is that Obama's own diplomatic gamesmanship, aimed at gaining the upper hand over Iran, has in the end handed Netanyahu, whose demands on Iran he rejected decisively in 2012, a new and powerful form of leverage on US Iran policy.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This story first appeared at Middle East Eye.]

David Guyatt Wrote:The arrogance of Netanyahu and the weakness of Obama. The tail is wagging the dog.

From the Washington Post:

Quote:A perfect storm brews in the Middle East


By David Ignatius February 16 Follow @ignatiuspost
TEL AVIV Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Pool photo by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press)
The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu's office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:The arrogance of Netanyahu and the weakness of Obama. The tail is wagging the dog.

From the Washington Post:

Quote:A perfect storm brews in the Middle East


By David Ignatius February 16 Follow @ignatiuspost
TEL AVIV Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Pool photo by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press)
The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu's office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal.

Interestingly, some one leaked a Mossad document from several years ago contradicting Netanyahu and advising that Iran did not have the capability to produce nuclear weapons.

Quote:

Israel's Netanyahu Lied About Iran With Infamous "Clear Red Line" Threat, Mossad Leak Reveals

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/23/2015 17:13 -0500

• Barack Obama
  
• Crude
  
• Crude Oil
  
• France
  
• Iran
  
• Iraq
  
• Israel
  
• SPY
  
• Uranium
  
• White House
  

It was just over 12 years ago today when then Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, and lied to a packed auditorium of world leaders and the entire world, making the case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

It was only after the second US invasion of Iraq (not to be confused with Obama's third) that we learned that not only did Saddam not have WMDs, but that the whole invasion was merely a pretext for the US to gain control of yet another middle-eastern regime and one of the largest producers of crude oil at the time. What was also revealed as the NYT Examiner reported is "how easily truth becomes irrelevant in the process of going to war."
Fast forward a decade, when in precisely the same venue another unabashed warmonger, Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu, was desperate to launch a war with Iran (hoping the US would fight said war for him) and came up with the now legendary "red-line" threat, demanding that the international community should set a "clear, red line" to stop Iran making a nuclear weapon, a line he claimed would be reached as early as next spring. As the Guardian then reported, Netanyahu presented the UN general assembly in New York with a diagram of a cartoon bomb, complete with a burning fuse,and used a red felt pen to mark a line near the top of the bomb beyond which he said Iran should not be allowed to pass.

That line, representing 90% of the way to making a warhead, would be reached "by next spring, at most by next summer. Netanyahu added that from there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb." Consequently, the international community had to make it clear Iran would not be allowed to cross that critical threshold.

Now each day that point is getting closer. And that's why I speak today with such a sense of urgency, and that's why everyone should have a sense of urgency," he said. "I believe that, faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down," the Israeli leader added, arguing that would give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to work towards the dismantling of the Iranian programme.

And now we know that just like Colin Powell before him, and countless other leaders of the "free world" using the UN as a venue for their factless warmongering, Netanyahu also lied to the entire world.
We know this because earlier today, in another historic Snowden-type whistleblower leak - one of the biggest such spy leaks in recent times - in which of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world's major intelligence services including Mossad were unveiled by the Guardian and al-Jazeera (yes, the leakers trusted al-Jazeera more than any US media outlet), it was revealed that Binyamin Netanyahu's dramatic declaration to world leaders was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

As the Guardian, one of the two leak outlets reports, in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel's intelligence agency concluded that Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons". The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel's military and intelligence establishment.

It also means the Israel leader, who no doubt had all the information Mossad did, lied to the members of the UN assemble and the entire world, with the clear intent of ultimately launching war which would lead to the death of thousands of innocent people and untold destruction.
The timing of the leak couldn't be worse for the belligerent, warmongering prime minister of Israel:

The disclosure comes as tensions between Israel and its staunchest ally, the US, have dramatically increased ahead of Netanyahu's planned address to the US Congress on 3 March.

The White House fears the Israeli leader's anticipated inflammatory rhetoric could damage sensitive negotiations between Tehran and the world's six big powers over Iran's nuclear programme. The deadline to agree on a framework is in late March, with the final settlement to come on 30 June. Netanyahu has vowed to block an agreement he claims would give Iran access to a nuclear weapons capability.

Of course, now any statement by Bibi about Iran's nuclear weapons capability will be the souce of much laughter, if not at the US Congress, a place which itself has used countless lies to start its own wars.
What else did the leaks contain? The documents, almost all marked as confidential or top secret, span almost a decade of global intelligence traffic, from 2006 to December last year. It has been leaked to the al-Jazeera investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.

The papers include details of operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations, but also the targeting of environmental activists.
The files reveal that:

• The CIA attempted to establish contact with Hamas in spite of a US ban.
  
• South Korean intelligence targeted the leader of Greenpeace.
  
• Barack Obama "threatened" the Palestinian president to withdraw a bid for recognition of Palestine at the UN.
  
• South African intelligence spied on Russia over a controversial $100m joint satellite deal.
  

The cache, which has been independently authenticated by the Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between South Africa's intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world. It is not the entire volume of traffic but a selective leak.

One of the biggest hauls is from Mossad. But there are also documents from Russia's FSB, which is responsible for counter-terrorism. Such leaks of Russian material are extremely rare.

Other spy agencies caught up in the trawl include those of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, the UAE, Oman and several African nations.

One conclusion resulting from the confidential disclosure is effectively summarized by Guardian: "The scale of the leak, coming 20 months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of NSA and GCHQ documents to the Guardian, highlights the increasing inability of intelligence agencies to keep their secrets secure." Which is true, unless of course the leak itself was premeditated, but that's entering some truly abstract conspiracy theory territory.
An interesting tangent is that while Netanyahu was desperate to start a war, he had done so without the express prior permission of the US, and if there is one thing the world's Globocop demands above all else, is for all conflict pre-clearances to go through the Pentagon:

A few days before Netanyahu's speech to the UN, the then US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to force the US into a corner. "The fact is … presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country … don't have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions," he said. "What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed in order to deal with that situation. I mean, that's the real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner."

Do "facts" involve blatant lies about a country's weapons of mass destruction or YouTube clips "proving" without a shadow of a doubt that the paid actors, pardon, "casualties" of a Syrian chemical attack deserve an immediate and lethal US retaliation?
It would appear that, on the surface, Netanyahu's days are numbered, because this latest "leak" of Mossad secret data, may well have had the NSA's blessing.
As for the second conclusion, that the leaders of the "free world" are nothing more than the biggest propaganda liars conceivable well, that hardly needed yet another "leak" as proof. After all we now live in a world in which, thanks to the Brian Williams-es of the "mainstream media" and the now daily data leak refuting long-held "narratives", conspiracy theory has become the last safe refuge for truth.

Quote:Former Mossad head urges Israeli voters to oust Binyamin Netanyahu

Meir Dagan says prime minister's policies are destructive to the future and security of Israel'



Binyamin Netanyahu has said he believes that his speech is necessary to strengthen opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran being negotiated by the US and key allies. Photograph:

Abir Sultan/APPeter Beaumontin Jerusalem

Friday 27 February 201519.09 GMTLast modified on Saturday 28 February 201500.07 GMT

A former head of Israel's foreign intelligence service Mossad is urging voters to oust Binyamin Netanyahu in the next general election, accusing the prime minister of endangering the country's security with his stance on the Iranian nuclear programme.
Meir Dagan, a vocal critic of Netanyahu's Iran policy since stepping down as Mossad chief four years ago, is to be a keynote speaker at a rally in Tel Aviv next weekend, calling on the public to turf the prime minister out of office on 17 March.
Netanyahu was due to fly to Washington on Friday.
In a trenchant critique of Netanyahu's leadership, delivered in a long interview in Israel's biggest-selling newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Dagan said the prime minister's policies were "destructive to the future and security of Israel".
Netanyahu's planned speech has brought the already uncomfortable state of relations with the Obama administration to a new low amid suspicion that the speech at the invitation of Republican house speaker John Boehner was designed to enhance the Israeli prime minister's electoral prospects.
Netanyahu has said he believes that his speech is necessary to strengthen opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran being negotiated by the US and key allies.
The intervention by Dagan who ended his tenure as the head of Mossad in 2011 is doubly significant because he shares the prime minister's view over the risk posed by a nuclear Iran and is regarded as generally hawkish on defence and security matters.
Netanyahu has made security and the Iranian nuclear programme and the US-led negotiations to contain it his key election issue.
Recent days have also seen anonymous criticism of Netanyahu's speech from serving intelligence officers as well as from former diplomats and political figures in Israel, including Isaac Herzog, the leader of the opposition.
Saying that he was aware that Israel was already "paying a high price" over the confrontation with the Obama administration albeit in ways he could not disclose Dagan said: "The person causing the most strategic harm to Israel on the Iranian issue is the prime minister.
"As someone who has served Israel in various security capacities for 45 years, including during the country's most difficult hours, I feel that we are now at a critical point regarding our existence and our security.
"Our standing in the world is not brilliant right now. The question of Israel's legitimacy is up for debate. We should not erode our relations with our most important friend. Certainly not in public, certainly not by becoming involved in its domestic politics. This is not proper behaviour for a prime minister."
Insisting he held no personal animus towards Netanyahu, who had helped him get a liver transplant, he said: "I have no personal issue with the prime minister, his wife, his spending and the way he conducts himself. I'm talking about the country he leads.
"An Israeli prime minister who clashes with the US administration has to ask himself what the risks are. On the matter of settlements, there is no difference between the two [US] parties. And even so, they provide us with a veto umbrella. In a situation of a confrontation, this umbrella is liable to vanish, and within a short time, Israel could find itself facing international sanctions.
"The risks of such a clash are intolerable. We are already today paying a high price. Some of them I know and cannot elaborate.
"I would not have confronted the United States and its president. Netanyahu may get applause in Congress, but all the power is in the White House. What will Netanyahu gain by addressing Congress? I just don't understand it. Is his goal to get a standing ovation? This trip to Washington is doomed to failure."
Dagan's intervention follows that of fellow former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit and the former head of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit who are among scores of former commanders involved in a video published on Facebook calling for Israel to replace Netanyahu.
Netanyahu's determination to push on with his speech has seen unusually critical remarks from senior US administration officials in the last week who have gone out of their way to express their displeasure.
Among them was John Kerry, the secretary of state, who openly questioned Netanyahu's judgment on the issue, and Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice who warned that it was "destructive to the fabric" of US-Israeli relations.
Netanyahu's plans to speak to Congress have also irritated many Democratic party members who view the speech as a partisan intervention in US politics on the side of the Republican party, prompting a number of Democrats to say they would not attend the speech.
The speech is also being snubbed by Obama and Joe Biden, his vice president.
After leaving Mossad, Dagan went public with his criticism of Netanyahu's Iran policy, saying a military attack on Iran was "the stupidest thing I have ever heard".