Adding to a central point of David Remnick’s article in the New Yorker earlier this week — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far with his pressure campaign against President Barak Obama and alienated allies in the process — are additional arguments in the National Interest, the [...]]]>
Adding to a central point of David Remnick’s article in the New Yorker earlier this week — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far with his pressure campaign against President Barak Obama and alienated allies in the process — are additional arguments in the National Interest, the National Journal (print edition), Al-Monitor and the Atlantic:
Paul Pillar explains how “Netanyahu’s Arrogance” may contribute to the reshaping of US-Israel relations:
Maybe Netanyahu’s arrogance, greater than the norm even for Israeli prime ministers dealing with the United States, may be a force that eventually reshapes the relationship. It can do so by making it painfully clear to Americans what they are dealing with. M. J. Rosenberg evidently is talking about this when he goes so far as to say that Netanyahu “poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.” He is referring to the damage being done to the relations with the superpower patron—that “all Netanyahu is accomplishing with his ugly saber-rattling is threatening the survival of the US-Israel relationship.” That may well be the effect of Netanyahu’s behavior on the relationship, but perhaps we should not speak of this in terms of threats. Replacing the current pathological relationship with a more normal one certainly would be good for U.S. interests. Ultimately, however, it also would be good for the interests of Israel, which, in order to get off its current path of endless conflict and isolation, desperately needs the sort of tough love that it is not getting now.
James Kitfield argues that “by inserting himself into a U.S. presidential election, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has jeopardized the long-term health of the alliance”:
But more important, this pressure on a U.S. president waging a tough reelection campaign all but guarantees that the enmity between Obama and Netanyahu will only worsen, to the point where they, like Shamir and Bush, may not talk frankly or show their true cards. What if one country wants to strike and other isn’t ready? What if one country strikes and then both need to coordinate the aftermath? If the leaders aren’t on the same page, their countries aren’t likely to be either. Netanyahu’s gambit has lowered trust when the stakes–war and a nuclear-armed rogue–are highest.
Barbara Slavin says Netanyahu’s misreading of US attitudes is harming his own strategy:
Recent polls show that 70% of the American people do not think it is worth attacking Iran to try to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons — and a majority would not join an Israeli strike against Iran. For someone partly raised and educated in the United States, the Israeli prime minister is profoundly misreading the American mood.
Instead of pushing the US government to agree to “red lines” beyond which Iran cannot cross, Netanyahu is alienating US officials and many other Americans — including those who count themselves pro-Israel. The Israeli prime minister is repeating a pattern of ill-considered behavior that made the administration of Bill Clinton so furious at him that Clinton’s campaign advisers eagerly went to Israel in 1999 to work for Netanyahu’s then political rival, Ehud Barak.
And while being less daring than the others, even Jeffrey Goldberg is trying to explain why Netanyahu is taking the risk of “alienating” Obama:
]]>So why risk alienating the man who he believes will probably be president until January of 2017? Because Netanyahu genuinely believes that Obama, at the crucial moment (whether it is this year, next year or the year after), will flinch and allow Iran to cross the nuclear threshold. This is why he is pestering the President for red lines. I’ll get into the red line discussion later, but the nub of the issue now is Netanyahu’s view of Obama.
Condoleezza Rice continued her book tour this week talking with Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. Rogin pushed Rice to share her reflections on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and surprisingly, the former Secretary of State chose to distance herself from the right-wing talking point that the end of [...]]]>
Condoleezza Rice continued her book tour this week talking with Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. Rogin pushed Rice to share her reflections on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and surprisingly, the former Secretary of State chose to distance herself from the right-wing talking point that the end of year troop withdrawal from Iraq will dangerously strengthen Iran’s regional influence.
The go-to criticism leveled by GOP hawks doesn’t hold much water with Rice. She told Rogin:
The Iraqis are good armed forces; they’re buying a lot of our equipment. I think they’ll be able to defend themselves. They continue to need help on the counterterrorism side, and it would have been a good message to Iran. Although I think it’s easy to overstate the degree to which the Iraqis have any attraction to Iran — that’s a pretty lousy relationship, really.
Neocons and various Republicans harshly criticized President Obama for announcing that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. Fred and Kimberly Kagan wrote that “it will unquestionably benefit Iran.” Newt Gingrich told an audience, “Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.” Rick Santorum claimed “Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government.” And the Bill Kristol “letterhead organization,” the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) wrote, in anticipation of a withdrawal, that the U.S. must maintain a strong presence in Iraq to “help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.”
While neoconservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls are eager to suggest that the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq — in conformity with the Status Of Forces Agreement negotiated and signed by Bush — is a major win for Iran, the former Secretary of State is clearly not buying it.
]]>Washington Post: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria bravely singles himself out as one of the last media commentators to still be talking about “engagement”.
Strategic engagement with an adversary can go hand in hand with a policy that encourages change in that [...]]]>Washington Post: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria bravely singles himself out as one of the last media commentators to still be talking about “engagement”.
- Strategic engagement with an adversary can go hand in hand with a policy that encourages change in that country. That’s how Washington dealt with the Soviet Union and China in the 1970s and 1980s. Iran is a country of 80 million people, educated and dynamic. It sits astride a crucial part of the world. It cannot be sanctioned and pressed down forever. It is the last great civilization to sit outside the global order. We need a strategy that combines pressure with a path to bring Iran in from the cold.
Haaretz: A professor at Purdue University who chaired Project Daniel in Israel and two retired U.S. military members with high security credentials write a hawkish editorial discussing the legal and practical issues involving a preemptive U.S. attack on Iran. Louis René Beres, Admiral (ret.) Leon “Bud” Edney and Lt. Gen. (ret. ) Thomas G. McInerney argue that if there isn’t “an American defensive strike on Iran”, the U.S. and Israel will have to deal with a “fully nuclear Iran, led by irrational Shiite clerics”. In case readers aren’t alarmed enough by such a prospect, the authors also tell us that we are at the “11th hour.”
Most interesting about this article is the considerable time the authors spend discussing how imminent a “threat” must be for the “survival” of a state before a preemptive attack can be legally launched and the quick and simplistic way they dismiss those arguments to justify their hawkish stance.
- Yet, we no longer live in the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries…The permissibility of anticipatory self-defense is understandably much greater in the nuclear age. Today, waiting passively to absorb a nuclear attack could be clearly suicidal. A particular danger is posed by terrorist groups serving as surrogates: If not prevented from receiving nuclear weapons or fissile materials from patron states, such proxies (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaida ) could inflict enormous damage upon targets.
And why should the U.S. protect Israel from this alleged threat? A strange, almost paternalistic answer: Israel is “at greatest risk from Iranian nuclear weapons” and there is a “long and venerated international legal tradition that Great Powers have commensurately great responsibilities.”
Wall Street Journal: Mansour Arbabsiar, the number one witness and defendant in the U.S.’s controversial case about an “Iranian plot” to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, has plead not guilty to the charges laid against him. This is important because all the evidence made public so far is based on Arbabsiar’s confession and calls.
IPS News: Reporting from Iran, Yasaman Baji informs us that the U.S.’s allegations about an “Iranian plot” have stirred complex and nationalistic feelings in Iran.
- Hussein, who has a degree in economics, insists that until now he never believed the narrative peddled by regime hardliners that the West wants to destroy Islamic Republic. But with the loud public pronouncement of Iran’s guilt “before a trial is held and solid proof is offered”, he says, he no longer has any doubts.
Foreign Policy: Dalia Dassa Kaye, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, explains that a military attack on Iran is still inadvisable for a list of reasons including
- …the aftermath of an attack could be devastating militarily and politically. It could unleash a wave of Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces, allies, and interests. Iran maintains a wide array of levers across the region, including militia groups it has trained and funded, that it could employ to retaliate against U.S. forces or diplomatic personnel, particularly in countries like Iraq. Iranian missiles have ranges that can reach Israel and all its Gulf Arab neighbors, including those hosting U.S. military forces. Such an attack could also backfire by fomenting nationalist sentiment within Iran (particularly if large numbers of civilians are killed) and boost support for more hard-line elements within the regime that current policies are attempting to marginalize. It could also increase Iranian incentives to obtain nuclear weapons to avoid such attacks in the future
Tikun Olam: Richard Silverstein has been tracking a growing wave of hawkish articles appearing in Israeli media about a pending attack on Iran. This week Silverstein pointed out that Israel’s most prominent journalist, Nahum Barnea, is also warning of an Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak led strike. Silverstein argues that Barnea’s article makes the prospect of an Israeli attack imminent, but this is debatable considering how previous Israeli threats along these lines were mere posturing which resulted in further “concessions” made to them by the U.S. The article is in Hebrew, but Silverstein has translated excerpts of it. Here’s one:
- Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are the two Siamese twins of the Iranian issue. A rare phenomenon is taking place here in terms of Israeli politics: a prime minister and defense minister who act as one body, with one goal, with mutual backing and repeated heaping of praise on each other…They’re characterized as urging action. Netanyahu portrayed the equation at the beginning of his term as: Ahmadinejad is Hitler; if he is not stopped in time, there will be a Holocaust. There are some who describe Netanyahu’s fervor on this subject as an obsession: all his life he’s dreamed of being Churchill. Iran gives him with the chance. The popularity that he gained as a result of the Shalit deal hasn’t calmed him: just the opposite, it gave him a sense of power.
Barak does not use the same superlatives, but is urging military action: he is certain that just as Israel prevented nuclear projects in the past, it must prevent this one as well. This is both his strategy and legacy…There are those who suspect Barak of having personal motives: he has no party; he has no voters. A strike on Iran would be the big bang that would make it possible for Netanyahu to bring him into the top ten of the Likud in the next elections. This way he could continue to be defense minister.