Dempsey muscle forces Israeli
rethink Analysis by Jim Lobe
and Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Explicit
moves by United States President Barack Obama make
it clear that there will be no accommodation of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
ostensible threats of unilateral war against Iran.
The steps even may be enough to force Netanyahu to
step back from his long campaign of belligerence
towards Tehran.
Netanyahu had hoped that
the Obama administration could be put under enough
domestic political pressure during the election
campaign to shift his policy on Iran to the much
more confrontational stance that Netanyahu and
Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been demanding.
But that political pressure has not
materialized, and Obama has gone further than ever
before in warning Netanyahu not to expect
US backing in any war
with Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Martin Dempsey told reporters in Britain
last Thursday 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 US
official had made such an explicit 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 February 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-defense systems in
late October.
Originally scheduled for
last spring, the exercise was delayed in January
following an earlier round of Israeli
saber-rattling and the apparent Israeli
assassination of an Iranian scientist, which had
further increased tensions between Netanyahu and
President Barack Obama.
Former Israeli
national security adviser Giora Eiland suggested
in an interview with Reuters on 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 US President," Eiland said. So they
are exploring what space is left to operate."
Eiland explained that Netanyahu had
maintained that the US "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."
The
Netanyahu campaign to leverage a shift in US
policy toward confrontation appeared to climax
during the first two weeks of August amid a
torrent of stories in 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 be 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 Mitt Romney have failed to
signal that Obama's rejection of Netanyahu's
belligerence on Iran will be a central campaign
issue.
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,
Republican nominee Governor Mitt Romney did not
embrace the threat to go to war unless Iran agrees
to shut down its nuclear program, 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 neo-conservative 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 UN
Ambassador John Bolton, had seemed 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 favorites - 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, 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 US
That argument, which resonates
strongly in Israeli politics, was given much
greater after Dempsey's remarks 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 US-Israel
relationship," especially if Iran retaliated
against US 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.
The growing mood
of impatience in Israel with Netanyahu and Barak's
constant beating of war drums on Iran was
expressed by columnist Ben Caspit of Maariv, a
center-right newspaper. "When one looks around,"
he wrote, "the impression received is that it
isn't only in Israel that they aren't being taken
seriously any longer, Israel that they aren't
being taken seriously any longer, but the world
refuses to get worked up over them either."
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