via IPS News
President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not accept a unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.
Netanyahu had hoped that the Obama administration could be put under domestic [...]]]>
via IPS News
President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not accept a unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.
Netanyahu had hoped that the Obama administration could be put under domestic political pressure during the election campaign to shift its policy on Iran to the much more confrontational stance that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak have been demanding.
But that political pressure has not materialised, and Obama has gone further than ever before in warning Netanyahu not to expect U.S. backing in any war with Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in Britain Aug. 30 that an Israeli strike would be ineffective, and then said, “I don’t want to be complicit if they (the Israelis) choose to do it.”
It was the first time that a senior U.S. official had made such an explicit public statement indicating the administration’s unwillingness to be a party to a war provoked by a unilateral Israeli attack.
Dempsey had conveyed such a warning during meetings with Israeli leaders last January, as IPS reported Feb. 1, but a series of moves by the administration over the next several months, including the adoption of Israeli demands during two rounds of negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue in May and June, appeared to represent a retreat from that private warning.
Dempsey’s warning was followed by an as-yet unconfirmed report by Time magazine that the Pentagon has decided to sharply cut back on its participation in the largest-ever joint military exercise with Israel designed to test the two countries’ missile-defence systems in late October.
Originally scheduled for last spring, the exercise was delayed in January following an earlier round of Israeli sabre-rattling and the apparent Israeli assassination of an Iranian scientist, which had further increased tensions between Netanyahu and President Obama.
Former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland suggested in an interview with Reuters Tuesday that the Dempsey statement had changed the political and policy calculus in Jerusalem. “Israeli leaders cannot do anything in the face of a very explicit ‘no’ from the U.S. president,” Eiland said. “So they are exploring what space is left to operate.”
Eiland explained that Netanyahu had previously maintained that the U.S. “might not like (an Israeli attack) but they will accept it the day after. However, such a public, bold statement meant the situation had to be reassessed.”
Netanyahu and Barak have never explicitly threatened to attack Iran but have instead used news leaks and other means to create the impression that they are seriously considering a unilateral air strike.
The Netanyahu campaign, aimed at leveraging a shift in U.S. policy toward confrontation with Iran, appeared to climax during the first two weeks of August amid a torrent of stories in the Israeli press suggesting that Netanyahu and Barak were getting closer to a decision on war.
An unnamed senior official – almost certainly Barak – indicated in an interview that the Israeli leader would reconsider the unilateral military option if Obama were to adopt the Israeli red line – in effect an ultimatum to Iran to end all enrichment or face war.
As Eiland suggests, however, Netanyahu may no longer feel that he is in a position to make such a demand when he meets Obama later this month. Not only has Obama drawn a clear line against unilateral Israeli action, but the Republican Party and its presidential candidate Mitt Romney have failed to signal that Obama’s rejection of Netanyahu’s belligerence on Iran will be a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Although the party platform said the threshold for military action should be Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons “capability” rather than the construction of an actual weapon, Romney did not embrace the threat to go to war unless Iran agrees to shut down its nuclear programme, as Netanyahu would have hoped.
That omission appeared to reflect the growing influence in his campaign of the “realist” faction of the Republican Party which opposed the radical post-9/11 trajectory of George W. Bush’s first presidential term in office and re-asserted itself in the second term.
The party’s marquee speaker on foreign policy was not a neoconservative but former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whom the neo-conservatives viewed with disdain, not least because of her effort to begin diplomatic engagement with Iran.
Rice mentioned Iran only in connection with its crackdown against dissidents during her prime-time speech.
Until recently, prominent neo-conservatives, such as Dan Senor, Elliott Abrams, and Eric Edelman, as well as aggressive pro-Israel nationalists such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, had appeared dominant among Romney’s foreign policy advisers.
The fact that the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a strong supporter of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, has pledged up to 100 million dollars to support the Republican campaign seemed to assure them of the upper hand on Israel and Iran.
But neo-conservatives may have lost influence to the realists as a result of Romney’s ill-fated trip in July to Britain, Israel and Poland – all neo-conservative favourites – as well as recent polling showing ever-growing war-weariness, if not isolationism, among both Republicans and the all-important independents in the electorate.
On the convention’s eve, Lee Smith, a neo-conservative scribe based at the Standard, published an article in Tablet Magazine entitled “Why Romney Won’t Strike Iran”.
One of Romney’s senior advisers, former CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, has even partially echoed Dempsey, telling the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Thursday that an Israeli raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely be counter-productive.
Both Hayden’s and Dempsey’s remarks about the futility or counter-productivity of an Israeli attack on Iran echoed those of a broad range of Israel’s national-security elite, including President Shimon Peres and the former chiefs of Israel’s intelligence agencies and armed forces, who, provoked by Netanyahu’s and Barak’s war talk, have come out more strongly than ever against the idea.
In addition to publicly casting doubt on whether an attack would be effective, many of the national-security critics have warned that a unilateral strike could seriously damage relations with the U.S.
That argument, which resonates strongly in Israeli politics, was given much greater weight by Dempsey’s warning last week.
Further eroding Israeli tolerance of Netanyahu’s talk of war was a blog post on the Atlantic Magazine’s website by Jeffrey Goldberg, an influential advocate of Israeli interests who has helped propagate the notion that Israel would indeed act unilaterally in the past. As the Netanyahu campaign reached its climax last month, Goldberg offered “7 Reasons Why Israel Should Not Attack Iran’s Nuclear facilities”.
Goldberg worried that an Israeli “strike could be a disaster for the U.S.-Israel relationship,” especially if Iran retaliated against U.S. targets. “Americans are tired of the Middle East, and I’m not sure how they would feel if they believed that Israeli action brought harm to Americans,” he wrote.
]]>By Gary Sick
Every few months there is a concocted “crisis” involving suggestions that Israel is just on the verge of attacking Iran. This cycle started almost a decade ago, and it has repeated itself roughly annually, though sometimes more frequently.
In the early days, these alarms typically began with [...]]]>
By Gary Sick
Every few months there is a concocted “crisis” involving suggestions that Israel is just on the verge of attacking Iran. This cycle started almost a decade ago, and it has repeated itself roughly annually, though sometimes more frequently.
In the early days, these alarms typically began with a series of “leaks” by anonymous sources, usually to well connected Israeli or pro-Israeli reporters. For years it appeared that the US and world media would bite every time, with no apparent recollection that they had heard that tune before.
But when you have cried wolf so many times, even the main stream media, which loves an exciting story, begins to wonder if it is not being led by the nose. More important, over the past two years, as the veiled threats of an attack became ever more shrill, virtually the entire Israeli security establishment came out in opposition to such an operation. For a good summary, click here. Their reasoning was simple:
- Israel could not finish the job by itself; it could launch an attack by aircraft and cruise missile, which might do damage to the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, but Israel could not finish the job. For that, they needed the United States.
- A unilateral Israel strike would very likely speed up Iran’s nuclear weapon development; Iran might well withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out the IAEA inspectors who are our eyes and ears on the ground, and announce that, since they had been attacked by a nuclear weapons state, they were no longer bound by their pledge not to produce a weapon.
- The entire Persian Gulf region would be thrown into chaos and the price of oil would probably go sky high for some time. The costs to delicate world economies, still struggling to recover from the Great Recession, would be severe.
- The Iranian people, at least initially, would probably rally around their hard line leadership, as they have in the past when their national sovereignty was challenged. The Green reform movement would be undercut, since they would not dare associate themselves with external invaders.
- The United States would be blamed (and not only by Iran) for complicity in the attack, regardless of whether it was true. Iran and its allies might well retaliate against US military and civilian targets, in addition to Israel, thus sparking a much wider regional conflict.
- If an air strike did not work, the logical next step would be to go after the leadership. And, as we learned in Iraq, that means boots on the ground.
In short, an Israeli (or American) attack would very likely leave the situation much worse than it was before taking military action. Israel’s security would not be improved; in fact, it might be imperiled by the negative response of even Israel’s closest allies. And Iran’s creeping approach to nuclear capability might turn into a sprint.
This awareness of the “day after” effect has persuaded many security specialists that an Israeli attack would be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
It is worth remembering that Israel acquires significant leverage from this constant perception of imminent war. By keeping the Iranian nuclear case at the forefront of the world’s media, political leaders everywhere are more likely to pay a price in the form of lost revenues and political sparring with Iran, rather than facing the calamity of an outright war.
The problem is that economic sanctions and covert interference with Iran’s nuclear program have been pushed to such a level that they are morphing into outright economic and political warfare. Iran has lost roughly fifty percent of its national income in the past six months, in addition to a series of assassinations and cyber attacks on its infrastructure. Inflation and unemployment are soaring — affecting all levels of society, especially the poor. There is no longer even the pretense that these are “smart” sanctions directed only at Iran’s political and military leadership.
Iran has responded to this onslaught by entering into negotiations and offering some compromise positions, such as potentially terminating its uranium enrichment to the 20 percent level and eliminating its stockpile of such uranium. But the US and its allies have taken a hard line position that Iran must cease ALL enrichment if they want to see any relief from the sanctions.
It is doubtful that the US can make any significant concessions during an election year, and Iran has shown little willingness to yield to the pressure by terminating all uranium enrichment.
That is the context for the latest crisis about a possible Israeli attack.
Based on the experience of a decade of such crises, all of which faded away with no military action, I can only be skeptical. I am aware that “This is the Middle East…” i.e. that nations are capable of acting against their own interests in the hysteria of the moment.
My only concern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, having made the case so often and so publicly for Israel’s right and even duty to attack, will have painted himself into a corner where there is no escape without actually risking national catastrophe.
Yes, that is a possibility. But I have sufficient confidence in the operation of Israeli democracy and the instinct for self preservation of its leaders to regard that possibility as vanishingly small.