Israel pushes US to share red-line
on Iran By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Two recent interviews
apparently given by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud
Barak provide evidence that the new wave of
reports in the Israeli press about a possible
Israeli attack on Iran is a means by which Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak hope to
leverage a US shift toward Israel's "red lines" on
Iran's nuclear program.
An interview given
by a "senior official in Jerusalem" to Ynet News
on Wednesday Israeli time makes the first explicit
linkage between the unilateral Israeli option and
the objective of securing the agreement of
President Barack Obama to the Israeli position
that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear
weapons "capability".
In the Ynet News
interview, the unnamed official is reported as
explicitly offering a
deal to the Obama administration: if Obama were to
"toughen its stance" with regard to the Iranian
nuclear program, Israel "may rule out a unilateral
attack".
Ynet News reporter Ron Ben Yishai
writes that Obama "must repeat publicly (at the UN
General Assembly, for instance), that the US will
not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that
Israel has a right to defend itself,
independently."
Obama made both
statements, in effect, at the conference of the
influential American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), but has not repeated them since
then.
But the official added a more
far-reaching condition for dropping the option of
a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, according to
Ben Yishai: Obama must also make it clear that his
"red line" is no longer evidence of an intention
to enrich to weapons-grade levels but the Israeli
red line that Iran must not be allowed to have the
enrichment capability to do so if Iran were to
make the decision."
In the context of that
radical shift in the US red line, the Netanyahu
government would view the public statements
demanded by the official as "a virtual commitment
by the US to act, militarily if needed," according
to Ben Yishai.
"The senior Israeli
official estimated that should Washington accept
the main demands, Israel would reconsider its
unilateral measures and coordinate them with the
US," Ben Yishai writes.
The interview
indicates that what Netanyahu and Barak are
seeking is a US posture on Iran's nuclear program
that Israel could use to maximize domestic
pressure on Obama to attack Iran if he is
re-elected.
That Israeli interest in
leveraging the threat of a unilateral military
option to change the US public posture toward Iran
is also suggested in an August 10 interview by
Ha'aretz with an official whom interviewer Ari
Shavit calls "the decision-maker". The unnamed
senior official was described in a way that left
little doubt that it was in fact Barak.
The unnamed official explicitly linked the
Netanyahu effort to keep the unilateral option in
play with the need to influence US policy. "If
Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes
clear that it no longer has the power to act," he
said, "the likelihood of an American action will
decrease."
He also hinted at a debate
within the Israeli government - presumably between
Netanyahu and Barak themselves - over what could
realistically be expected from the Obama
administration on Iran. "So we cannot wait a year
to find out who was right," said the official,
"the one who said that the likelihood of an
American action is high or the one who said the
likelihood of an American action is low."
That allusion to different assessments of
US action by the Obama administration suggests
that Barak may have been arguing that the threat
of a unilateral Israeli attack could be used to
leverage a shift in US declaratory policy short of
an outright US threat to attack Iran. Barak has
generally characterized the policy of the Obama
administration as tougher toward Iran than has
Netanyahu, who has described it in pejorative
terms.
Invoking "a genuine built-in gap"
between differing US and Israeli "red lines", the
senior official said, "Ostensibly the Americans
could easily bridge this gap. They could say
clearly that if by next spring the Iranians still
have a nuclear program, they will destroy it."
But he suggested that such a simple US
threat is not realistic. "Americans are not making
this simple statement because countries don't make
these kinds of statements to each other," said the
official, adding, "The American president cannot
commit now to a decision that he will or will not
make six months from now." The implication was
that someone else had been insisting on such an
Obama commitment.
The conditions for a
deal outlined in the Ynet News interview may
represent the more indirect stance Barak was
hoping would be a more realistic possibility. But
there is no reason to believe that Obama, who has
resisted pressure from his own administration to
shift his red line in the direction of Israel's
position, would accept such a deal.
The
evidence from these two interviews that Israel is
eager, if not desperate, for a deal with the Obama
administration on Iran suggests that the new wave
of reports in the Israeli press in the first two
weeks of August about the unilateral Israeli
option cannot be taken at face value.
The
New York Times reported on August 12 "a frenzy of
newspaper articles and television reports over the
weekend suggesting Netanyahu has all but made the
decision to attack Iran unilaterally this fall."
But Netanyahu and Barak have always been careful
to distinguish between consideration of a
unilateral military option and a commitment to
carrying it out.
A central objective of
the recent press reports and of the larger
Netanyahu-Barak campaign that began earlier this
year - has been to make the idea of a unilateral
Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites credible,
despite all evidence to the contrary.
On
August 10, for example, Israel's television
Channel 2 reported that Netanyahu and Barak had
been saying in recent conversations that there is
"relatively slight chance" that an attack on Iran
"would result in a full-scale regional war in the
circumstances that have emerged in the Middle East
in last few weeks or months". The report said the
"working assumption" is that, although Hezbollah
and Hamas would retaliate, "it is assessed that
Syria will not react."
It is neither Syria
nor Hezbollah, however, but Iran itself that that
worries Israeli military and intelligence
officials the most. When challenged by Ha'aretz's
Shavit on the likely serious consequences of war
with Iran, given the hundreds of Iranian missiles
capable of hitting Israeli cities, "the
decision-maker" argued, "(W)hat characterizes the
Iranians all along is caution and patience."
That argument, aimed at making the
threatened attack seem reasonable, involves an
obvious contradiction: on one hand, Iran is too
cautious to retaliate against an Israeli attack,
but on the other hand, it is too irrational to
refrain from going nuclear, despite the obvious
risks.
The Barak argument on Iran
contradicted Netanyahu's assertion, most recently
reported in an August 5 Channel 2 report, that
Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is "an
irrational leader".
Barak also argued in
the Ha'aretz interview that Israel could delay the
Iranian nuclear program for eight to 10 years -
enough time, he suggested, for regime change to
take place. Top Israeli military and intelligence
officials of Israel have been reported as
believing, however, that an attack on Iran would
Barak even suggested that Iran's nuclear program
was not aimed at Israel. ensure and accelerate
Iran's move toward a nuclear weapon rather than
delay it.
In fact, Barak declared on
September 17, 2009, "I am not among those who
believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."
And in a November 17, 2011, interview with Charlie
Rose, he even denied that the Iranian nuclear
program was aimed at Israel.
Gareth
Porter, an investigative historian and
journalist specializing in US national security
policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for
journalism for 2011 for articles on the US war in
Afghanistan.
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