(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) US.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is visiting Saudi Arabia Wednesday, as part of a regional tour aimed at convincing skeptical allies about the benefits of the Iran nuclear deal.
Carter is to hold meetings with King Salman as well as the Saudi minister of defense, before heading back to Jordan for a meeting with the Jordanian military leadership.
On Tuesday, Carter met with coalition troops in northern Jordan at an air base from where operations against targets in Syria are launched.
He flew to Jordan from Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to provide reassurances of continued U.S. security support following the Iran's nuclear agreement. Mr. Netanyahu greeted Carter with a somber face before going into nearly two hours of talks at his office in Jerusalem.
Later, Carter said of the Netanyahu talks, "We don't agree on everything. And the prime minister made it quite clear that he disagreed with us with respect to the nuclear deal."
Carter is the first Cabinet-level U.S. official to visit Israel since Iran agreed last week to curb its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a partial lifting of economic sanctions against it.
Relations between the United States and Israel have been strained by the agreement. Netanyahu criticized it as a "bad deal of historic proportions" and pledged to combat it through allies in the U.S. Congress.
Israeli politicians, including most of the opposition, also condemned the deal.
Many Israeli analysts criticized the deal, saying the U.S.-led Western powers "caved in" because of a lack of appetite for another war in the Middle East.
But other analysts, including many former military and intelligence officials, weighed in to say the deal was not that bad.
Amos Yadlin, director of Tel Aviv's Institute for National Security Studies, called it "a highly problematic agreement that entails risks to Israel's national security," but, he added that comparing it to a "dream agreement" whereby Iran would stop enriching uranium is unrealistic.
"Had no agreement been reached," said Yadlin, "the infrastructure existing in 2013 [when the negotiations began] would have expanded even further to the point of immediate breakout capability, with no inspection regime in place."
The former director of the Mossad intelligence service, Ephraim Halevy, put it more succinctly: "Don't fight with America."
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