WASHINGTON -- Having been rebuffed by President Barack Obama last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel took to U.S. television on Sunday to make the argument that the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon was to draw a "red line" that, if crossed, would trigger military intervention.
Mr. Netanyahu was criticized at home and abroad for similar remarks last week that were widely seen as an effort to put pressure on Mr. Obama to act more forcefully against Iran.
And yet, less than two months before Election Day, he turned to two prominent American talk shows, "Meet the Press" on NBC and "State of the Union" on CNN, to make his case even more urgently to a broader U.S. audience, arguing that Iran was six months away from having "90 percent" of what it needed to make a nuclear bomb.
"You know, they're in the last 20 yards, and you can't let them cross that goal line," Mr. Netanyahu said on "Meet the Press," displaying his familiarity with American football. "You can't let them score a touchdown, because that would have unbelievable consequences, grievous consequences for the peace and security of us all, of the world really."
Iran, which denies that it is pursuing nuclear weapons, added threats of its own Sunday, significantly increasing international tensions over its nuclear efforts. The commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, took the unusual step of holding a news conference to warn that "nothing will remain" in Israel if it or the United States launches an attack against his country.
He said Iran and its allies -- presumably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza -- would retaliate at Israel's borders, as would Iran itself in Israel and beyond, targeting U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has often threatened to counter any attack, but the general's threats were unusually specific and signaled Iran's intent to turn an attack into a regional conflict.
"Our response to Israel is clear: I think nothing will remain of Israel," Gen. Jafari said, according to an account by The Associated Press. "Given Israel's small land area and its vulnerability to a massive volume of Iran's missiles, I don't think any spot in Israel will remain safe."
The warnings from both sides were made after a tumultuous and violent week in the Middle East that began with the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the deaths of four Americans at a consulate in Libya, and continued with protests across the Islamic world inspired by an amateurish American-made Internet video that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad.
The violence forced the State Department to evacuate all but emergency staff members from the U.S. Embassies in Sudan and Tripoli on Saturday, though the intensity of the protests seemed to be subsiding.
Mr. Netanyahu, in his television interviews, sought to link the violence to Iran's nuclear ambitions, arguing that its leaders were driven by the same fanaticism that enraged the protesters. "All the things that you see now in these mobs storming the American embassies is what you will see with a regime that would have atomic bombs," he said on CNN. "You can't have such people have atomic bombs."
The United States and Israel have cooperated over most matters of security, including Iran's nuclear efforts, but Mr. Netanyahu's remarks over the last week underscored his personal estrangement with Mr. Obama.
The two spoke by telephone Tuesday after Mr. Netanyahu's first remarks, but the conversation appeared to do little to reassure the Israeli leader.
While the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency have cited Iranian efforts to accelerate work on enriching uranium, U.S. officials say there is not hard evidence that Iran has resumed work on the military components necessary to build a bomb. The differences over how to respond were fully on display Sunday. The U.S. representative to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, appeared on several Sunday talk shows and argued that international diplomacy and economic sanctions were having an impact on Iran and should be given time to work. She said the United States had shared its evidence with the Israelis.
"There is time and space for the pressure we are mounting," she said.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly said the United States would not stand by while Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, but Mr. Netanyahu argued that the administration needed to communicate more clearly to the Iranians that at a specific point it would use military force to stop it from building a bomb.
