Woodward Academy 2011-2012 File Title

AT: Iran Strikes Impact

Having written a fair bit about the pros and cons (mostly the latter) of a war with Iran, I feel compelled to offer a brief comment on Ronan Bergman's alarmist article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine. I say this even though I think the article was essentially worthless. It's a vivid and readable piece of reportage, but it doesn't provide readers with new or interesting information and it tells you almost nothing about the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran.

First off, the article is essentially a reprise of Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 Atlantic Monthly article on the same subject. The research method is identical: a reporter interviews a lot of big-shots in the Israeli security establishment, writes down what they say, and concludes that that Israel is very likely to attack. Bergman doesn't present new evidence or arguments, pro or con; it's just an updated version of the same old story.

Second, the central flaw in this approach is that there is no way of knowing if the testimony of these various officials reflects their true beliefs or not. There are lots of obvious reasons why Israeli officials might want to exaggerate their willingness to use force against Iran, and this simple fact makes it unwise to take their testimony at face value. Maybe they really mean what they say. Or maybe they just want to keep Tehran off-balance Maybe they want to distract everyone from their continued expansion of West Bank settlements and other brutalities against Palestinians. Maybe they want to encourage Europe to support tougher economic sanctions against Iran, and they know that occasional saber-rattling helps makes sanctions look like an attractive alternative. Maybe it's several of these things at once, depending on who's talking. Who knows?

By the way, I'm not accusing the officials that Bergman interviewed of doing anything wrong. I don't expect top officials of any country to tell the truth all the time, and I'm neither surprised nor upset when foreign officials try to manipulate fears of war in order to advance what they see as their interests. My point is that it is impossible to tell if they mean what they are saying or not, which is why an article based on interviews of this kind just isn't very informative. They might be telling the truth, or they might be lying, and nobody knows for sure.
Neither Israel nor the U.S. will attack Iran—their evidence is wrong.

Karon 11 — Tony Karon, Senior Editor and World Affairs Commentator at Time.com, holds a degree in Economic History from the University of Cape Town, 2011 (“A moratorium for military action but not for settlements,” The National, January 3^rd, Available Online at http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/news-comment/a-moratorium-for-military-action-but-not-for-settlements?pageCount=0, Accessed 01-03-2011)

Republicans in Congress berate the US president Barack Obama for failing to respond adequately to this "crisis". Those in the US military and intelligence establishments who push back with a more realistic picture of Iran's capabilities are often painted as appeasers. But the recent news that Iran's nuclear programme is not the immediate peril that some suggest comes from an impeccably hawkish source: Israel's deputy prime minister, the former general Moshe Yaalon, who advocates military action to stop Iran getting hold of the bomb. Iran had encountered difficulties in its nuclear efforts, Mr Yaalon told Israeli radio last week, and would not pass any point of no return for the next three years, adding, "Iran does not currently have the ability to make a nuclear bomb on its own".

The conspiracy-minded may be tempted to see Mr Yaalon's remarks as a rope-a-dope trick to lull the Iranians into a false sense of complacency over Israel's intentions so as to give it an edge of surprise in the coming air raid. Then again, there's always been a certain elasticity in the deadlines Israel has cited over Iran's nuclear programme. A US diplomatic cable in 2005 released by WikiLeaks quoted an Israeli government official as warning US officials to take Israeli time-lines on Iranian capabilities with a pinch of salt. The cable quotes a senior Israeli foreign ministry official as noting wryly that his government, in 1993, had "predicted that Iran would possess an atomic bomb by 1998 at the latest".

A second cable covering a 2009 meeting in which an Israeli general warns that Iran will be able to build its first weapon by 2012, a US official observes: "It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States."

The assessments offered by Israeli leaders to American officials over the past two decades have certainly been heavy on unfounded alarmism. "The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and five years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons," the current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in 1995. Nor was such scare-mongering confined to his Likud party. Ehud Barak, leader of the Labour party and then foreign minister, warned members of the UN Security Council in February 1996 that Iran would have nuclear weapons within eight years. The then prime minister Shimon Peres in April 1996 put the timeline at just four years.

And when those deadlines were passed with no sign of Iranian nukes, Israeli leaders simply updated their time-lines. In February 2009, Mr Netanyahu told a US Congressional delegation that Iran is "one to two years away" from nuclear weapons capability; in June of the same year Mr Barak told US legislators that the world had "between 6 and 18 months" to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And so, as 2011 dawns with no sign of an Iranian nuclear arsenal, Mr Yaalon steps forward to extend the deadline and concede that Iran will not be able to build nuclear weapons for at least another three years. What has prompted this sudden outburst of sobriety?

Americans have often heard the message that Israel will be forced to plunge the Middle East into a disastrous war if the US doesn't force Iran to heel. Americans are routinely told that Israel sees Iran as a reincarnation of Nazi Germany, seeking the means to annihilate the Jewish state. But that message carries great risks for Israel's own leaders.

Washington remains unlikely to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran over its nuclear programme. The US defence secretary Robert Gates has long argued that the potentially catastrophic risks of such action outweigh the gains, which are temporary at best. Therein lies the problem: Israel's voters have been told, to quote Mr Netanyahu in 2006, that "it's 1938 and Iran is Germany". So they'll expect their leaders to act if Washington doesn't. After all, the very idea of Israel is that Jews can't depend on others to save them from annihilation, so if its citizens believe that Iran is a reincarnation of Auschwitz, they will demand action.

Alarmist Israeli rhetoric may be designed to press Washington, but it potentially paints Israel's own leaders into a corner. They, too, know that Iran is not the threat painted in the more apocalyptic rhetoric. A little over a year ago, Mr Barak said publicly that "Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel," adding that "Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat."

Then again, Mr Barak had made clear to Goldberg that he believed that the greatest danger was that alarm at the idea of an Iranian nuclear weapon would prompt Israel's best and brightest to emigrate. If Israeli voters believe, as Goldberg suggests, that a "point of no return" was passed with the New Year and there are no air strikes in the spring, they may begin to doubt their government's ability to protect them.

But now some in the Israeli leadership are resetting the clock. While Mr Obama failed to convince the Israelis to extend their moratorium on settlement construction, they may be signing up, unprompted, to a moratorium on bombing Iran for the next three years.

Sure, a long piece in Foreign Policy this month, sourced entirely to unnamed US officials, makes the case that Israel has extensive influence in Azerbaijan, which could make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran easier.

But that story appears to be but one salvo in a broader Obama administration strategy to signal through the press that it doesn't want Israel to strike Iran's nuclear program, even as it seeks to assure Israel that it is committed to its defense.

At every turn, the US has hemmed Israel in (probably the reason so many "anonymous" officials fed the Azerbaijan story to FP). They have made it clear that they will truly be on their own if they attack unilaterally (read: You won't force us into a war of your own choosing).

John Bolton, the hawkish former US ambassador to the UN, characterized the story as an intentional Obama effort to undermine Israel. "Clearly, this is an administration-orchestrated leak.... it's just unprecedented to reveal this kind of information about one of your own allies,” he told Fox.

Mr. Bolton is wrong about the "unprecedented" part; the US has frequently acted to hem in close allies, like Britain or France, when it deemed their military activities a threat to its interests, as the Eisenhower administration did against the joint Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

But he's certainly right that the Obama administration is worried about the damage to US interests that could be done by a solo Israeli attack on Iran.

In that context, it's hard not to see the Foreign Policy piece as anything other than an Obama administration attempt to stave off an Israeli attack through highlighting growing Israeli ties with the country. (Israel has certainly been seeking warm relations with Azerbaijan; in February, Israel said it had signed a $1.6 billion deal to provide drones and missile defense systems to the country.)

No carte blanche for Israel in Azerbaijan

The piece didn't say that Israel has been given bases of its own in Azerbaijan, or that it has been given carte blanche to use Azeri bases when it sees fit. The piece's central claim is that "four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran's northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear."

The FP story led to immediate denials from Azeri officials. An Azeri defense spokesmen told a press conference on Friday that Israel will not be allowed to use the country's territory to attack Iran and said that unspecified press reports were designed to increase tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan.

That makes sense. While Iran's conventional military is puny compared to the US military, it dwarfs Azerbaijan's. Iran is a major trading partner for the country, and has a variety of means at its disposal to make life difficult for its northern neighbor in retaliation for an attack.

The story generated plenty of heavy breathing in the press. The Sydney Morning Herald says: "Unlikely alliance between Israel and Azerbaijan raises heat over Iran." Haaretz writes: "Azerbaijan granted Israel access to air bases on Iran border." A headline in this paper asks "Did US just torpedo Israeli deal for a base in Azerbaijan?"

Another leak

The FP story is far from the first emanating from unnamed US officials that appear designed to push Israel farther away from war. On March 19, The New York Times reported that the US military had just finished a secret war game to test the repercussions of an Israeli attack, and concluded that the chances were high that the US would end up drawn into a broader regional war that would leave hundreds of Americans dead.

"The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results," the Times wrote. "When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there."

The message was clear: The US is highly unlikely to support an Israeli strike.

Amir Oren, writing in Haaretz, concludes that that war-game, coupled with renewed American promises to fund Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system (mostly deployed with great success against the unsophisticated rockets fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip), guarantees that Israel won't attack Iran until the spring of next year, at the earliest.

"Israelis may be the world champions of chutzpah, but even biting the hand that feeds you has its limits when the bitten hand is liable to hit back," he writes. "When [Israeli Defense Minister Ehud] Barak thanked the Obama administration 'for helping strengthen Israel's security,' he was abandoning the pretension to act against Iran without permission before the US presidential elections in November."

The US spent $204 million on Israel's Iron Dome system in fiscal year 2011, and last week the Pentagon indicated that more money should be provided in the current budget year, a plan that has bipartisan support in Congress. The Pentagon says the system successfully shot down 80 percent of rockets recently fired from Gaza. The continued US commitment to Israel's defense can be seen as the carrot in this scenario.

Why the US is worried about an Israeli strike

Gary Sick, who coordinated the White House response to the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80 and who served on the National Security Councils of presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, made the case for why the US is worried about unilateral Israeli action in an opinion piece Friday. He says it could lead to the collapse of the sanctions regime that President Bush and President Obama have constructed against Iran, and leave the US on the hook for the aggression in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether the US gave the green light or not, "for Iran and just about everyone else, the fact that most of the Israeli aircraft and bombs were made in the US would be all they needed to know," Sick writes. "On that first morning, the UN Security Council would convene in emergency session to consider a resolution denouncing the Israeli raid. If the United States vetoed the resolution, that would remove any lingering doubt of U.S. complicity.

"Perhaps more significant, however, would be European support of the resolution. This would signal the beginning of the collapse of the sanctions coalition against Iran that had been so laboriously assembled over the past several years. Both the Europeans and the Americans had operated on the tacit belief that crippling sanctions were an alternative to war. With the outbreak of war, that assumption would no longer be valid."

Everything is tea-leaf reading at the moment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many on the country's right insist that Iran is a major threat to the Jewish state's existence, and fear can push people to do surprising things. But the leaves are almost overwhelmingly telling us no war soon.