Will Israel Strike Iran Before the Election?
by RAY McGOVERN
August 13, 2012
More Washington insiders are coming to the conclusion that Israel’s
leaders are planning to attack Iran before the U.S. election in
November in the expectation that American forces will be drawn in.
There is widespread recognition that, without U.S. military
involvement, an Israeli attack would be highly risky and, at best,
only marginally successful.
At this point, to dissuade Israeli leaders from mounting such an
attack might require a public statement by President Barack Obama
warning Israel not to count on U.S. forces – not even for the
`clean-up.’ Though Obama has done pretty much everything short of
making such a public statement, he clearly wants to avoid a
confrontation with Israel in the weeks before the election.
However, Obama’s silence regarding a public warning speaks volumes to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The recent pilgrimages to Israel by very senior U.S. officials –
including the Secretaries of State and Defense carrying identical
`PLEASE DON’T BOMB IRAN JUST YET’ banners – has met stony faces and
stone walls.
Like the Guns of August in 1914, the dynamic for war appears
inexorable. Senior U.S. and Israeli officials focus publicly on a
`window of opportunity,’ but different ones.
On Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney emphasized the need to
allow the `most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country time
to work.’ That, said Carney, is the `window of opportunity to persuade
Iran … to forgo its nuclear weapons ambitions.’
That same day a National Security Council spokesman dismissed Israeli
claims that U.S. intelligence had received alarming new information
about Iran’s nuclear program. `We continue to assess that Iran is not
on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon,’ the spokesman said.
Still, Israel’s window of opportunity (what it calls the `zone of
immunity’ for Iran building a nuclear bomb without Israel alone being
able to prevent it) is ostensibly focused on Iran’s continued
burrowing under mountains to render its nuclear facilities immune to
Israeli air strikes, attacks that would seek to maintain Israel’s
regional nuclear-weapons monopoly.
But another Israeli `window’ or `zone’ has to do with the pre-election
period of the next 12 weeks in the United States. Last week, former
Mossad chief Efraim Halevi told Israeli TV viewers, `The next 12 weeks
are very critical in trying to assess whether Israel will attack
Iran, with or without American backup.’
It would be all too understandable, given Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s experience with President Obama, that Netanyahu has come
away with the impression that Obama can be bullied, particularly when
he finds himself in a tight political spot.
For Netanyahu, the President’s perceived need to outdistance
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the love-for-Israel
department puts Obama in a box. This, I believe, is the key `window of
opportunity’ that is uppermost in Netanyahu’s calculations.
Virtually precluded, in Netanyahu’s view, is any possibility that
Obama could keep U.S. military forces on the sidelines if Israel and
Iran became embroiled in serious hostilities. What I believe the
Israeli leader worries most about is the possibility that a
second-term Obama would feel much freer not to commit U.S. forces on
Israel’s side. A second-term Obama also might use U.S. leverage to
force Israeli concessions on thorny issues relating to Palestine.
If preventing Obama from getting that second term is also part of
Netanyahu’s calculation, then he also surely knows that even a minor
dustup with Iran, whether it escalates or not, would drive up the
price of gasoline just before the election – an unwelcome prospect for
Team Obama.
It’s obvious that hard-line Israeli leaders would much rather have
Mitt Romney to deal with for the next four years. The former
Massachusetts governor recently was given a warm reception when he
traveled to Jerusalem with a number of Jewish-American financial
backers in tow to express his solidarity with Netanyahu and his
policies.
Against this high-stakes political background, I’ve personally come by
some new anecdotal information that I find particularly troubling. On
July 30, the Baltimore Sun posted my op-ed, `Is Israel fixing the
intelligence to justify an attack on Iran?’ Information acquired the
very next day increased my suspicion and concern.
Former intelligence analysts and I were preparing a proposal to
establish direct communications links between the U.S. and Iranian
navies, in order to prevent an accident or provocation in the Persian
Gulf from spiraling out of control. Learning that an official Pentagon
draft paper on that same issue has been languishing in the Senate for
more than a month did not make us feel any better when our own
proposal was ignored. (Still, it is difficult to understand why anyone
wishing to avoid escalation in the Persian Gulf would delay, or
outright oppose, such fail-safe measures.)
Seeking input from other sources with insight into U.S. military
preparations, I learned that, although many U.S. military moves have
been announced, others, with the express purpose of preparation for
hostilities with Iran, have not been made public.
One source reported that U.S. forces are on hair-trigger alert and
that covert operations inside Iran (many of them acts of war, by any
reasonable standard) have been increased. Bottom line: we were warned
that the train had left the station; that any initiative to prevent
miscalculation or provocation in the Gulf was bound to be far too late
to prevent escalation into a shooting war.
SEARCHING FOR A CASUS BELLI
A casus belli – real or contrived – would be highly desirable prior to
an attack on Iran. A provocation in the Gulf would be one way to
achieve this. Iran’s alleged fomenting of terrorism would be another.
In my op-ed of July 30, I suggested that Netanyahu’s incredibly swift
blaming of Iran for the terrorist killing of five Israelis in Bulgaria
on July 18 may have been intended as a pretext for attacking Iran. If
so, sadly for Netanyahu, it didn’t work. It seems the Obama
administration didn’t buy the `rock-solid evidence’ Netanyahu adduced
to tie Iran to the attack in Bulgaria.
If at first you don’t succeed … Here’s another idea: let’s say there
is new reporting that shows Iran to be dangerously close to getting a
nuclear weapon, and that previous estimates that Iran had stopped work
on weaponization was either wrong or overtaken by new evidence.
According to recent Israeli and Western media reports, citing Western
diplomats and senior Israeli officials, U.S. intelligence has acquired
new information – `a bombshell’ report – that shows precisely that.
Imagine.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Radio that the new
report is `very close to our [Israel’s] own estimates, I would say, as
opposed to earlier American estimates. It transforms the Iranian
situation to an even more urgent one.’
Washington Post neocon pundit Jennifer Rubin was quick to pick up the
cue, expressing a wistful hope on Thursday that the new report on the
Iranian nuclear program `would be a complete turnabout from the
infamous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that asserted that Iran
had dropped its nuclear weapons program.’
`Infamous?’ Indeed. Rubin warned, `The 2007 NIE report stands as a
tribute and warning regarding the determined obliviousness of our
national intelligence apparatus,’ adding that `no responsible
policymaker thinks the 2007 NIE is accurate.’
Yet, the NIE still stands as the prevailing U.S. intelligence
assessment on Iran’s nuclear intentions, reaffirmed by top U.S.
officials repeatedly over the past five years. Rubin’s definition of
`responsible’ seems to apply only to U.S. policymakers who would cede
control of U.S. foreign policy to Netanyahu.
The 2007 NIE reported, with `high confidence,’ the unanimous judgment
of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran stopped working on a
nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003 and had not restarted it. George W.
Bush’s own memoir and remarks by Dick Cheney make it clear that this
honest NIE shoved a steel rod into the wheels of the juggernaut that
had begun rolling off toward war on Iran in 2008, the last year of the
Bush/Cheney administration.
The key judgments of the 2007 NIE have been re-asserted every year
since by the Director of National Intelligence in formal testimony to
Congress.
And, unfortunately for Rubin and others hoping to parlay the
reportedly `new,’ more alarmist `intelligence’ into an even more
bellicose posture toward Iran, a National Security Council spokesman
on Thursday threw cold water on the `new’ information, saying that
`the U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities had not
changed.’
Relying on the unconfirmed Israeli claim about `new’ U.S. information
regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Rubin had already declared the Obama
administration’s Iran policy a failure, writing:
`Foreign policy experts can debate whether a sanctions strategy was
flawed from its inception, incorrectly assessing the motivations of
the Iranian regime, or they can debate whether the execution of
sanctions policy (too slow, too porous) was to blame. But we are more
than 3 1/2 years into the Obama administration, and Iran is much
closer to its goal than at the start. By any reasonable measure, the
Obama approach has been a failure, whatever the NIE report might say.’
Pressures Will Persist
The NSC’s putdown of the Israeli report does not necessarily
guarantee, however, that President Obama will continue to withstand
pressure from Israel and its supporters to `fix’ the intelligence to
`justify’ supporting an attack on Iran.
Promise can be seen in Obama’s refusal to buy Netanyahu’s new
`rock-solid evidence’ on Iran’s responsibility for the terrorist
attack in Bulgaria. Hope can also be seen in White House reluctance so
far to give credulity to the latest `evidence’ on Iran’s nuclear
weapons plans.
An agreed-upon casus belli can be hard to create when one partner
wants war within the next 12 weeks and the other does not. The
pressure from Netanyahu and neocon cheerleaders like Jennifer Rubin –
not to mention Mitt Romney – will increase as the election draws
nearer, agreed-upon casus belli or not.
Netanyahu gives every evidence of believing that – for the next 12
weeks – he is in the catbird seat and that, if he provokes hostilities
with Iran, Obama will feel compelled to jump in with both feet, i. e.,
selecting from the vast array of forces already assembled in the area.
Sadly, I believe Netanyahu is probably correct in that calculation.
Batten down the hatches.
Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year.
He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack
Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).