These are the same allegations that Dennis Ross, Obama’s top National Security Council official for [...]]]>
These are the same allegations that Dennis Ross, Obama’s top National Security Council official for Iran policy, pushed back against in his talk yesterday at a U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) event.
In the Leveretts’ piece, they cite a Huffington Post article by Reza Marashi, who just joined the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) as research director after four years in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs:
It should now be clear that U.S. policy has never been a true engagement policy. By definition, engagement entails a long-term approach that abandons “sticks” and reassures both sides that their respective fears are unfounded. We realized early on that the administration was unlikely to adopt this approach. [...]
Moreover, as the leaked cables show, the highest levels of the Obama administration never believed that diplomacy could succeed. While this does not cheapen Obama’s Nowruz message and other groundbreaking facets of his initial outreach, it does raise three important questions: How can U.S. policymakers give maximum effort to make diplomacy succeed if they admittedly never believed their efforts could work? …And what are the chances that Iran will take diplomacy seriously now that it knows the U.S. never really did? The Obama administration presented a solid vision, but never truly pursued it.
This is pretty damning stuff from a guy who just left the Obama State Department. He was on the inside. And the Leveretts are feeling vindicated:
This, of course, provides additional powerful and public confirmation—from inside the Obama Administration—for our argument, in a New York Times Op Ed published in May 2009, that the Obama Administration’s disingenuous approach to dealing with Iran had already betrayed the early promise of President Obama’s initial rhetoric about engagement.
They mention that Ross was quite displeased with what they then had to say, and he let them know. The Leveretts note that Ross had Ray Takeyh, then his assistant at the State Department, push back against the notion that Obama’s “extended hand” to Iran was a checklist item for building international backing for more pressure on Iran, and possibly eventually military strikes. Takeyh called the idea “wrong and fraudulent.”
The Leveretts want to know what Takeyh thinks now:
]]>In light of the Wikileaks cables and Mr. Marashi’s public confirmation that the Obama Administration was, in fact, pursuing engagement to pave the way for more coercive options, including expanded sanctions, we ask Ray Takeyh: who was perpetrating a fraud with regard to the underlying intent of the Administration’s Iran policy?
The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear [...]]]>
The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear program, it is indeed a less than ‘ideal’ plan — it may not work at all.
Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in his August story, that even the Israelis are convinced that an attack might only temporarily set back the Iranian program: “[T]hey believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years.” Many experts estimate the length of the delay will be even less.
Goldberg cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s secret Osirak nuclear facility as an example of a successful attack: “In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” (Glenn Greenwald notes Goldberg made the opposite claim in the run up to the Iraq war: Hussein’s program never ended.)
The “success” of the Osirak attack is a common theme among neoconservatives. The Hudson Institute cited the strike in a January 2010 report urging the U.S. to support an Israeli attack on Iran and to prepare for the resulting wider war.
At the Progressive Realist blog, Louisville professor and blogger Rodger Payne lines up a number of academic and other studies that challenge this conclusion. Here’s an excerpt of one (PDF):
The 1981 Israeli aerial striike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program, and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the “success” at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track record of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation.
Most honest appraisals of a potential military strike against Iran’s nuclear program admit that it may only be a setback for the alleged weapons program — if it works at all.
“Numerous analysts doubt that Israel is capable of carrying out a successful strike,” Matt Duss wrote this summer, lining up experts.
A study by a British think-tank this summer concluded, according to Haaretz, that “[a]n Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.”
Even if the U.S. — as Lieberman wants — carries out a strike with its more advanced weaponry and planes, the results will likely be the same. There’s no reason to expect that U.S. intelligence or technological abilities are so much greater than Israel’s that a U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear program would be decisive.
This is something Duss and I have harped on as of late: not only would an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities be no “cakewalk,” but like the Osirak attack, it probably will not accomplish its ostensible longer-term objectives.
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