The following is excerpted from US President Barack Obama’s speech
at the AIPAC Policy Conference on March 4, 2012.“…Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.…
A nuclear-armed Iran is completely counter to Israel’s security interests. But it is also counter to the national security interests of the United States. Indeed, the entire world has an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. A nuclear-armed Iran would thoroughly undermine the non-proliferation regime that we’ve done so much to build. There are risks that an Iranian nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of a terrorist organization. It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions. It would embolden a regime that has brutalized its own people, and it would embolden Iran’s proxies, who have carried out terrorist attacks from the Levant to southwest Asia.…
Iran’s leaders should have no doubt about the resolve of the United States—just as they should not doubt Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs. I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.…”
OBAMA’S HAWKISH IRAN TURN
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2012
As White House U-turns go, President Obama’s hawkish rhetorical shift on Iran in the last week has been remarkable. The question now is whether Israel, and especially Iran, will believe that he means it after three years of trying to woo the mullahs to the bargaining table with diplomacy.
Mr. Obama opened the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Sunday with a keynote whose strong talk on Iran kept the audience coming to its feet. The President took credit for isolating the Islamic Republic diplomatically and imposing a de facto oil embargo that has sent the Iranian rial tumbling.
His speech follows an interview last week with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in which Mr. Obama went out of his way to call a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” He referred to the “military component” of U.S. policy and said that “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as President of the United States, I don’t bluff.” As startling, he added that containing a nuclear Iran wouldn’t work because of near-certain proliferation in the region and that “the risks of an Iranian nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorist organizations are profound.”
The timing of all this is no accident as [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu meets Mr. Obama in the White House today amid intense speculation about an imminent Israeli strike on Iran. In an interview with Wall Street Journal editors on Friday, Eyal Gabbai, the former director general of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, said Mr. Netanyahu’s meeting with Mr. Obama “will be the last time they can speak face-to-face before a decision is taken.”
The Israeli military calculus toward Iran is driven largely by the perception that the regime’s nuclear programs will soon enter a “zone of immunity,” beyond which they may be effectively invulnerable to a non-nuclear Israeli strike. But also driving Israeli fears is the sense that the Obama Administration isn’t prepared to use military means if diplomacy, sanctions and covert acts don’t persuade Iran to stand down.
Those fears are far from groundless. Though Mr. Obama now takes credit for sanctions, his Administration fought Congress tooth-and-nail on sanctioning Iran’s central bank. The President only reluctantly signed the sanctions into law as part of a larger defense bill. His aides also worked to stop legislation to cut off Iran from making financial transactions via the Swift banking consortium. As for military strikes, senior Administration officials have repeatedly sounded as if their top priority is deterring Israel, rather than stopping Iran from getting a bomb.
As recently as November, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said a military strike would have “unintended consequences” and wouldn’t necessarily result in “deterring Iran from what they want to do.” In the last two weeks, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey said an Israeli strike would be “destabilizing,” while Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that the Iranians haven’t decided to build a bomb. Little wonder the Israelis are nervous about U.S. resolve.
It’s welcome news if Mr. Obama is now trying to put those fears to rest, but he is also more outspoken than ever in trying to avert Israel from acting on its own. “Do we want a distraction in which Iran can portray itself as a victim, and deflect attention from what has to be the core issue, which is their pursuit of nuclear weapons?” Mr. Obama told Mr. Goldberg—the “distraction” here meaning an Israeli attack.…
The question Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli leaders have to ponder is whether Mr. Obama now means what he says. The President has built up an immense trust deficit with Israel that can’t be easily dispensed in a week. All the more so when Israelis know that this is an election year when Mr. Obama needs to appear more pro-Israel than he would if he is re-elected.
It’s good to hear Mr. Obama finally sounding serious about stopping a nuclear Iran. But if he now finds himself pleading with Israel not to take matters in its own hands, he should know his Administration’s vacillation and mixed signals have done much to force Jerusalem’s hand. More fundamentally, a President who says he doesn’t “bluff” had better be prepared to act if his bluff is called.
SUNNY, WITH CLOUDS ON HORIZON FOR NETANYAHU, OBAMA
Herb Keinon
Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2012
Like classic American football games that are known by short titles—”The Ice Bowl,” “The Immaculate Reception,” “The Drive”—some of the more memorable White House meetings between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama lend themselves to this type of labeling.
There was “The Ambush”—that first meeting in May 2009, just weeks after both men took office, when Obama was determined to establish new rules of engagement (some would less charitably say he wanted to put the new prime minister in his place), and blind-sided Netanyahu with a call for a complete settlement freeze.
There was “The Disrespect”—that memorable White House meeting in March 2010, soon after the blowup with the US over the announcement of plans to build in Jerusalem’s Ramat Shlomo neighborhood that took place during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. As the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl wrote of Obama’s treatment of Netanyahu at the time—refusing to allow non-official photographers to record the meeting, and issuing no statement afterward—Obama treated Netanyahu “as if he were an unsavory third-world dictator, needed for strategic reasons, but conspicuously held at arms length.”
And then there was “The Lecture”—the last meeting at the White House in May 2011, where Netanyahu turned the professorial tables on Obama and lectured him about why exactly it was impossible for Israel to return to the “indefensible” pre-June 5, 1967 lines, which Obama had called for the day before, albeit, with mutually-agreed land swaps.
And now [today’s] parley between the two, the ninth since May 2009, and likely the last before the US elections in November. How will that be remembered? Chances are good that this meeting will be remembered as “The Concord.” For even though there are differences between Israel and the US over the best policy to take toward Iran, and even though the two men have not developed chemistry or an abiding personal friendship over the last three years, they both have an interest in radiating unity, harmony and concord after their head-to-head talks.
For Obama it is a simple question of electoral mathematics. Eight months before the November elections, he will do everything he can to show his support and friendship for Israel. He articulate[d] it at length during his Sunday speech to the AIPAC annual policy conference, and he will follow-up with signaling friendship and support for Israel at the press opportunity following his meeting with Netanyahu.…
Obama needs Jewish voters and donors come November. In 2010 he captured 78 percent of the Jewish vote, but this time the polls are showing discontent among a good number of Jews. A Pew Research Poll on trends in party identification by religion from last month showed that Jews supporting or leaning Republican, jumped from 20% in 2008, to 29% in 2011, while those supporting or leaning Democratic fell from 72% in 2008, to 65% in 2011. That is troubling news for the Obama campaign. In key battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Nevada—where there are significant Jewish populations—the shift by just a couple percentage points of the Jewish vote from Obama to his Republican opponent could make a huge difference in a close election.…
Obama and his staff know very well that despite Obama campaign clips showing Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak saying what a good friend of Israel he is, and despite the oft repeated mantra—both in the US and Israel—that the Israeli-US security relationship has never been better, many American-Jewish voters still suspect Obama, and think that his heart is “not in the right place” when it comes to Israel. Netanyahu’s visit, and the AIPAC appearance, gives him a prized opportunity to demonstrate the opposite.
Netanyahu also has an interest in a harmonious visit for political reasons. The night before Netanyahu went to the AIPAC conference last time, in May 2011, Obama gave a speech outlining his vision of the Mideast and talked about a return to the 1967 lines, with mutually-agreed swaps. Even before he got on the airplane, Netanyahu issued an extremely harsh response, signaling that he was interested in tangling publicly with the president. The next day they met and, afterward, Netanyahu delivered “The Lecture.…”
That visit came just days after hundreds of Palestinians rushed the country’s northern borders on “Nakba Day,” and Netanyahu calculated there would be huge public support for saying clearly to Obama that Israel could not return to the 1967 lines. Netanyahu’s comments were crafted carefully to align with the vulnerability felt by many in the country after the border incidents. And he calculated correctly. A Haaretz poll shortly after the visit showed that his popularity skyrocketed after that Washington trip.
Now, however, Netanyahu’s political calculations are a bit different. A Geocartography poll last week showed that if elections were held today, Likud would win 39 seats. Netanyahu is going to Washington in a strong political position: his coalition is solid, and it seems safe to assume there will be elections before the end of 2013 only if he wants them. And if Netanyahu does decide to call new elections before the end of his term—many are discussing the possibility that he might like to see them before the end of the year—he is vulnerable to criticism that he caused a rift with the US; that Jerusalem’s relations with Washington are at their lowest ebb in years; and that the intimacy Israel enjoyed with the Oval Office during the Bush and Clinton years faded away under his watch. A good, friendly, warm meeting with Obama on Monday can be used by Netanyahu to dispel those charges.…
While the US and Israel share the same goal—that Iran should not gain nuclear weapons…their disagreement centers around that point when sanctions need to be ditched and military action taken. The Israeli position is that military action should be taken before Iran has all the technological capabilities needed to assemble a bomb, while the American position is that a strike is needed only after the political decision in Tehran is made to put together a nuclear device.
And that is a fundamental difference, because Iran could have all the bomb-making capabilities—even begin fortifying their installations to make them invulnerable to attack—and yet only decide to actually assemble a device years down the road. It is this difference that has very much been in the air over the last few weeks, as US and Israeli officials traveled back and forth to each others’ capitals. And it is a difference that threatens to cast a shadow over the upcoming meeting.…
CAN ISRAEL TRUST THE UNITED STATES
WHEN IT COMES TO IRAN?
Yossi Klein Halevi
New Republic, March 2, 2012
When Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Barack Obama on Monday, the main issue will be trust. Obama will ask that Israel trust America’s determination to stop Iran, and trust that when he says all options are on the table he means it. Netanyahu will likely be thinking about May 1967.
In late May 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dispatched his foreign minister, Abba Eban, to Washington. Egyptian and Syrian troops were pressing on Israel’s borders; Egypt had imposed a naval blockade on the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s shipping route to the east. Eban’s request of President Lyndon Johnson was that America honor its commitment to back military action if Egypt blocked the Straits of Tiran. That commitment had been made by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1957, to secure Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai desert following the 1956 Suez War. Only a declaration by Johnson that he intended to immediately open the straits to Israeli shipping even at the risk of war—one idea was for the U.S. to lead an international flotilla—could stop a unilateral Israeli strike. Though Johnson was viscerally pro-Israel, he proved unable or unwilling to honor Dulles’ commitment. Preoccupied with Vietnam, Johnson wasn’t ready to support another war, let alone initiate one.
Even if Barack Obama is truly the pro-Israel president his Jewish supporters claim he is, the Johnson precedent tells us that it may not matter. Like Johnson, Obama presides over a nation wary of another military adventure, especially in the Middle East.…
What the world remembers of the Six Day War era is Israel’s military victory in June 1967. But these days Israelis are recalling the vulnerability of May 1967, in the weeks that preceded the victory. To be sure, Israelis understand that, in several crucial ways, today is different.… Then, Israel was entirely on its own in facing the threat on its borders. Today, by contrast, many countries, including in the Arab world, regard a nuclear Iran as a very real threat. In 1967, the war was localized, while this time the consequences of an Israeli preemptive strike will directly affect the international community and especially the United States—and perhaps not only economically.… And that could risk the stability of the American-Israeli relationship.
The Iranian nuclear threat could force Israel to choose between two of its essential national values. On the one hand, there is the commitment to Jewish self defense. On the other hand, there is the longing to be a respectable member of the international community. Allowing an enemy that constantly threatens Israel’s destruction to acquire the means to do so would negate Zionism’s promise to protect the Jewish people. And launching a preemptive strike without American backing could lead to Israel’s isolation.…
In this excruciating dilemma, the question of whether Israel can trust the administration to act militarily against Iran becomes all the more crucial. Israeli leaders believe that their window of opportunity in launching a preemptive strike will be closing in the coming months. America, though, with its vastly superior firepower, could retain a military option even after Israel’s lapses. In other words: An Israeli decision not to strike this year will mean that it effectively ceded its self-defense—against a potentially existential threat—to America. When Obama tells Israel to give sanctions time, what he is really saying is: Trust me to stop Iran militarily when you no longer can.
Yet the message from Washington in the last few weeks has only reinforced Israeli suspicions that we are back in May 1967. The spate of administration leaks to the media questioning Israel’s military capability in confronting Iran has undermined Israeli confidence in American resolve. An administration serious about stopping Iran to the point of military intervention would convey messages that raise Iran’s anxiety, not Israel’s. By insisting that Israel’s military threat isn’t credible—without at the same time explicitly stating that America’s military threat is—the administration reassures Iran that it has little to fear from military action. The Israelis can’t and the Americans won’t.…
Faced with an imminent existential dilemma, Israel will probably opt for preemptive self-defense, even if that means risking its special relationship with America.… The precedent of the two Israeli attacks against Arab nuclear facilities—in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007—reinforces Israeli determination to stop Iran, unilaterally if necessary.…
In better times, the two allies might have been able to navigate these conflicting needs. But in the absence of mutual trust, what could remain are conflicting perceptions of interest.
ISRAEL’S LAST CHANCE TO STRIKE IRAN
Amos Yadlin
NY Times, February 29, 2012
On July 7, 1981, I was one of eight Israeli fighter pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. As we sat in the briefing room listening to the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, before starting our planes’ engines, I recalled a conversation a week earlier when he’d asked us to voice any concerns about our mission.
We told him about the risks we foresaw: running out of fuel, Iraqi retaliation, how a strike could harm our relationship with America, and the limited impact a successful mission might have—perhaps delaying Iraq’s nuclear quest by only a few years. Listening to today’s debates about Iran, we hear the same arguments and face the same difficulties, even though we understand it is not 1981.
Shortly after we destroyed Osirak, the Israeli defense attaché in Washington was called into the Pentagon. He was expecting a rebuke. Instead, he was faced with a single question: How did you do it? The United States military had assumed that the F-16 aircraft they had provided to Israel had neither the range nor the ordnance to attack Iraq successfully. The mistake then, as now, was to underestimate Israel’s military ingenuity.
We had simply maximized fuel efficiency and used experienced pilots, trained specifically for this mission. We ejected our external fuel tanks en route to Iraq and then attacked the reactor with pinpoint accuracy from so close and such a low altitude that our unguided bombs were as accurate and effective as precision-guided munitions.
Today, Israel sees the prospect of a nuclear Iran that calls for our annihilation as an existential threat. An Israeli strike against Iran would be a last resort, if all else failed to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.… Some experts oppose an attack because they claim that even a successful strike would, at best, delay Iran’s nuclear program for only a short time. But their analysis is faulty.… What matters more is the campaign after the attack.
When we were briefed before the Osirak raid, we were told that a successful mission would delay the Iraqi nuclear program for only three to five years. But history told a different story. After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed. This could be the outcome in Iran, too, if military action is followed by tough sanctions, stricter international inspections and an embargo on the sale of nuclear components to Tehran. Iran, like Iraq and Syria before it, will have to recognize that the precedent for military action has been set, and can be repeated.
Others claim that an attack on the Iranian nuclear program would destabilize the region. But a nuclear Iran could lead to far worse: a regional nuclear arms race without a red phone to defuse an escalating crisis, Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, more confident Iranian surrogates like Hezbollah and the threat of nuclear materials’ being transferred to terrorist organizations.…
President Obama has said America will “use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.…” The problem, however, is one of time. Israel doesn’t have the safety of distance, nor do we have the United States Air Force’s advanced fleet of bombers and fighters. America could carry out an extensive air campaign using stealth technology and huge amounts of ammunition, dropping enormous payloads that are capable of hitting targets and penetrating to depths far beyond what Israel’s arsenal can achieve. This gives America more time than Israel in determining when the moment of decision has finally been reached. And as that moment draws closer, differing timetables are becoming a source of tension.
On Monday, Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are to meet in Washington. Of all their encounters, this could be the most critical. Asking Israel’s leaders to abide by America’s timetable, and hence allowing Israel’s window of opportunity to be closed, is to make Washington a de facto proxy for Israel’s security—a tremendous leap of faith for Israelis faced with a looming Iranian bomb. It doesn’t help when American officials warn Israel against acting without clarifying what America intends to do once its own red lines are crossed.
Mr. Obama will therefore have to shift the Israeli defense establishment’s thinking from a focus on the “zone of immunity” to a “zone of trust.” What is needed is an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity—and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest—Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so. I hope Mr. Obama will make this clear. If he does not, Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can.
(Amos Yadlin is a former chief of Israeli military intelligence.)
