(Nearly) all bets are off over Iran
strike By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The threat of a military
attack on Iran's nuclear facilities this year
appears to have substantially subsided over the
past several weeks as a result of several
developments, including the biting criticisms
voiced recently by former top national security
figures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
That a war seems significantly more remote
than during the winter months, when tensions
reached an all-time high, was confirmed to some
extent on Monday when the US "newspaper of
record", the New York Times, ran a front-page
article entitled "Experts Believe Iran Conflict is
Less Likely".
But, judging by actual bets
placed on the online trading exchange, Intrade,
the chances that the US or Israel will indeed
conduct air strikes against Iran before the end of
the year have
fallen by more than half
since the high reached in mid-February - from just
over 60% to about 28% as of Monday.
That's
still a substantial percentage - about twice what
it was before the latest round of Israeli
saber-rattling was launched in November.
And it's difficult to find any close
observer of US-Israeli-Iran relations who believes
that war clouds could not suddenly reappear,
particularly if the next meeting of the so-called
P5+1 (also known as the "Iran Six" - the five
permanent members of the United Nations Security
Council - the US, Russia, China, Britain and
France - plus Germany) with Iran scheduled for May
23 in Baghdad should break down or be delayed.
For its part, the administration of
President Barack Obama has shown little
inclination to reduce pressure - and the threat of
military action - on Tehran over its nuclear
program.
Not only has it moved more
minesweepers and F-15 fighter jets into the Gulf
region, but the US Air Force announced Friday that
it had deployed an undisclosed number of advanced
F-22 stealth fighter-bombers to the area,
specifically to the United Arab Emirates (UAE),
according to the industry publication Aviation
Week.
Despite those moves, fears of a US
or Israeli attack on Iran this year have clearly
receded, especially since all sides left the last
P5+1 meeting in Istanbul April 14 seemingly
satisfied with the seriousness of the exchanges
and guardedly optimistic that a diplomatic
solution could yet be achieved.
The
meeting's success was made possible by signaling
on both sides of their readiness to make
concessions on key issues: on Tehran's part, by
stating explicitly that it could halt its
enrichment of uranium to 20%, transfer its
stockpile of 20% enriched uranium out of the
country, and accept greater scrutiny by
international weapons inspectors under the right
circumstances; on Washington's, by stating more
clearly than ever that it could accept Iran's
continued uranium enrichment of up to 5% under the
right circumstances.
Whether the "right
circumstances" can be accommodated by all sides
will determine the ultimate success or failure of
the negotiations.
Meanwhile, however,
those voices, both here and in Israel, that have
been most disdainful of the diplomatic route and
most insistent that only military action can
dispose of the alleged threat posed by Iran's
nuclear program have found themselves increasingly
on the defensive since tensions reached a peak in
early March.
It was then that Obama
declared to the annual convention of the powerful
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
that "the loose talk of war" by the main
Republican presidential candidates was dangerous
and counter-productive.
At the time, AIPAC
was pressing congress for quick passage of both a
new round of unilateral sanctions against Iran and
a senate resolution that would define the US "red
line" for taking military action as Tehran's
development of a "nuclear-weapons capability"
rather than the administration's "red line" of
developing an actual nuclear weapon.
"Once
the president put the argument about the 'loose
talk of war', the momentum shifted quite
dramatically," according to Jamal Abdi, policy
director of the National Iranian American Council
(NIAC). He noted that Democrats who had previously
bowed to AIPAC's hawkish line have since become
more deferential to the White House.
One
token of the change was an anti-war ad run last
week by former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, a
cheerleader for the Iraq invasion 10 years ago and
who is now running to reclaim his old seat. In it,
he warned that a war against Iran would make "Iraq
and Afghanistan look like a cakewalk".
"It's a much different debate now," Abdi
told Inter Press Service (IPS). "It's now
'diplomacy versus war', not 'war now or later'."
While sanctions legislation is still pending, he
said, "There doesn't seem to be much of a push to
get it done, at least before the Baghdad meeting
anyway. Congress is in a kind of 'wait-and-see'
mode."
Ironically, the hawks have also
been set back by the intensifying appeals by
neo-conservatives, in particular, for Washington
to intervene militarily in Syria.
Not only
has that debate diverted time and energy that many
of the fiercest hawks would otherwise devote to
Iran. It has also exposed divides, similar to
those that surfaced last year over the
intervention in Libya, between interventionists on
one hand and realists and libertarians on the
other within the Republican Party.
"Talking about war with Iran at the same
time that you want us to get involved in a civil
war in Syria is not a popular message this year,"
according to one congressional staffer who cited
recent public opinion polls suggesting that
Republicans have become almost as war-weary as
Democrats. "Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya,
it's a bit much."
Similarly, the
unprecedented public criticism by former senior
Israeli national security officials of Netanyahu
and Barak has given new ammunition to those who
favor diplomacy.
In recent weeks, the
former head of the Israel's Mossad spy agency,
Meir Dagan, reiterated his long-held views that an
Israeli attack on Iran would be "stupid" on the
most-watched US public affairs television program,
60 Minutes.
His successor and
current Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, subsequently
publicly questioned whether an Iranian nuclear
weapon would pose an "existential" threat to
Israel, as repeatedly alleged by Netanyahu.
Last week, the head of the Israel Defense
Forces, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, offered
that Iranian leaders, contrary to Netanyahu's
views, were "very rational" and were likely to
stop short of developing a nuclear weapon.
But perhaps the most damaging attack to
date came on Friday when Yuval Diskin, the
immediate past chief of the Shin Bet, Israel's
domestic intelligence agency, denounced both
Netanyahu and Barak as acting out of "messianic
feelings" and predicted that an Israeli attack
would likely accelerate Tehran's nuclear program.
"I saw them up close, they are not messiahs,"
he said. "My main problem on this issue is that I
don't have confidence in the current leadership of
the State of Israel - that [they] could lead
Israel into something of the order of magnitude of
a war with Iran or a regional war."
Diskin's remarks, which were defended by
former prime minister Ehud Olmert and Gantz's
predecessor, General Gabi Ashkenazi (retired) at a
rancorous conference in New York this weekend,
will almost certainly give pause to Netanyahu who,
despite his messianism, is also famously
risk-averse as a politician, according to Daniel
Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator.
"He knows that if anything goes wrong [in
an attack on Iran], there are very well-respected
non-political Israeli figures who will be there to
ferociously attack him," he said, adding that
Netanyahu in the coming weeks will likely call an
election for September or October.
"That
makes the relative unlikelihood of a strike in
2012 even less likely," he told IPS.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com
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