WarSclerotic

Jamal Dajani: Israel vs. Iran: The Writing Is on the Wall

Iran has agreed to allow international nuclear inspectors to view its recently revealed uranium enrichment plant near the city of Qom, and President Obama has called talks between U.S. diplomats and their Iranian counterparts about the country’s nuclear program a “constructive beginning.”

However, recent events and heated rhetoric concerning Iran’s nuclear program are reminiscent of the final days that lead to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the United Nations Security Council on February 5th of that year with what he called “solid” evidence that showed Iraq had still not complied with resolutions calling for it to disarm and was maintaining a secret WMD program. It seems that history is repeating itself.

Unlike what happened to Iraq in 2003, an invasion of Iran is not on the horizon; however, the prospect of targeting its nuclear facilities is more real than ever. More so than during the Bush Administration. The reason is simple: no amount of pressure or sanctions will force Iran to abandon what it perceives as its “unalienable right” to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

In an article in June, I outlined the drive behind Iran’s nuclear ambition, and this has not changed. But most importantly the Obama Administration, although pursuing diplomatic means, seems to be convinced that the Iranians are conducting a clandestine nuclear program parallel to the public one. The aim of this, though of course not admitted by the Iranians, is clearly the acquisition of nuclear weapons. This position is shared by Israel, which will most likely get the green light to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities by spring of 2010 when all negotiations with Iran will have hit a dead end.

Since April of this year, the Israeli military has been preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The United States and Israel have recently conducted their most complex military exercise ever, jointly testing three ballistic missile defense systems. Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.

The Israeli Air Force has recently been conducting training exercises involving F15 and F16 jets, helicopters and refueling tankers flying to distances of more than 870 miles: the distance between Israel and Iran. Among recent preparations by the air force was the Israeli attack of a weapons convoy in Sudan allegedly bound for militants in the Gaza Strip.

A recent article in the British Daily Express reported that Israeli fighter jets have been allowed to use Saudi airspace to launch go-it-alone air strikes on Iranian nuclear installations. The issue has been discussed in a closed-door meeting in London, where British Intelligence Chief Sir John Scarlett, his Israeli counterpart Meir Dagan, and a Saudi official were present. According to the report, Scarlett has been told that Saudi airspace would be at Israel’s disposal should Tel Aviv decide to move forward with his military plans against Iran. The Saudis have denied such claims; however, for the past few weeks Saudi-sponsored media has been raising concern over the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. No mention of Israel’s 200 plus nuclear warheads.

A survey just released by the American Jewish Committee reports that for the first time ever, a majority of American Jews support using military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Fifty-six percent of American Jews think U.S. should strike Iran, while sixty-six percent of Israeli Jews back such an attack.

How many Americans support an attack on Iran?

Fifty-seven percent of American voters say Israel would be justified in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, given that Iran has publicly threatened to annihilate Israel, according to a McLaughlin poll conducted on May 8-9.

I am not being an alarmist, but the writing is on the wall.

Iran: We reached no deal to ship nuclear fuel

‘Obama won’t press Israel to reveal nuclear arsenal’ – Haaretz – Israel News
U.S. President Barack Obama will not pressure Israel to disclose its nuclear arsenal to international inspection, as reported on Friday by The Washington Times.

The 40-year-old covert agreement between the U.S. and Israel has allegedly permitted Israel to maintain an active nuclear facility without inspection that contains several hundred nuclear bombs.

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The joint understanding was apparently reached during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House in May this year.

The report also said that the senior officials who had confirmed these findings spoke on the condition that they would not be named.

Israel was nervous Obama would retract U.S. understanding of the secret treaty signed in September 1969 in a summit between former U.S. President Richard Nixon and the then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the report added.

To date there is no official documentation of such an agreement nor has it ever been acknowledged by any U.S. or Israeli government.

The report follows a United Nations nuclear assembly resolution which urged Israel earlier this month to put all its atomic sites under the world body’s inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it would not cooperate with it.

The non-binding resolution, which passed for the first time in 18 years of attempts thanks to more developing nation votes, voiced concern about “Israeli nuclear capabilities” and urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to tackle the issue.

Israel is one of only three countries worldwide along with India and Pakistan outside the nuclear NPT and is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, though it has never confirmed or denied this.

UN Security Council members Russia and China also backed the resolution, which passed by 49 votes to 45 against in a floor vote at the IAEA’s annual member states conference.

The vote split along Western and developing nation lines. There were 16 abstentions.

“Israel will not cooperate in any matter with this resolution which is only aiming at reinforcing political hostilities and lines of division in the Middle East region,” chief Israeli delegate David Danieli told the chamber.

Western states said it was unfair and counterproductive to isolate one member state. They said an IAEA resolution passed on Thursday, urging all Middle East nations to foreswear atomic bombs, included Israel and made Friday’s proposal unnecessary.

Arab nations said Israel had brought the resolution on itself by having never signed the 40-year-old NPT.

Before the vote, U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies said the resolution was “redundant … Such an approach is highly politicized and does not address the complexities at play regarding crucial nuclear-related issues in the Middle East.”

Calling the resolution “unbalanced”, Canada tried to block a vote on the floor with a “no-action motion”. But the procedural maneuver lost by an eight-vote margin. The same motion prevailed in 2007 and 2008.

A senior diplomat from the non-aligned movement of developing nations said times had changed.

“People and countries are bolder now, willing to call a spade a spade. You cannot hide or ignore the truth, the double standards, of Israel’s nuclear capability forever,” he said.

Jackson Diehl – The Coming Failure on Iran – washingtonpost.com

The Obama administration’s positive tone following its first diplomatic encounter with Iran covers a deep and growing gloom in Washington and European capitals. Seven hours of palaver in Geneva haven’t altered an emerging conclusion: None of the steps the West is considering to stop the Iranian nuclear program is likely to work.

Not talks. Not sanctions, even of the “crippling” variety the Obama administration has spoken of. Not military strikes. And probably not support for regime change through the still-vibrant opposition.

For obvious reasons, senior officials won’t state this broad conclusion out loud. But it’s not hard to find pessimistic public statements about three of the four options. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the prospects for diplomacy “very doubtful.” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said military action will do no more than “buy time.” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, echoing private statements I’ve heard from the Obama administration, told me last week that a strategy of backing the Iranian opposition “would take too long” and might well produce a government with the same nuclear policy.

As for sanctions, Western officials rarely disparage them in public. They don’t want to help spoilers in Russia and China who want to block U.N. action against Iran for their own reasons. But many are doubtful about them, and with good reason. Despite hints of cooperation by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the White House is pessimistic that Russia or China will agree to the sort of escalation in sanctions that would command Iran’s attention, such as a ban on gasoline supplies or arms sales or new investments in oil and gas production.

The history of sanctions in the region also is not good: More than a decade of punishment, including regular airstrikes, had no positive impact on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iran’s current rulers, many of whom came of age in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq war, sound convincing when they say they are ready for the country to suffer more austerity for the cause of Iranian greatness.

What of Thursday’s talks in Geneva? Iran agreed to international inspections of its new nuclear facility and to ship out of the country some of the uranium it has enriched. Yet those modest concessions may complicate the negotiations and the prospects for sanctions. The headlines about them already obscured the fact that Tehran’s negotiator declined to respond to the central Western demand: that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment work. Iran has rejected that idea repeatedly, and there is no reason to believe the hard-liners in power will change their position.

In the meantime, talks about the details of inspections and the uranium shipments could easily become protracted, buying the regime valuable time. (On Friday the Associated Press quoted a member of the Iranian delegation as saying it had not, in fact, agreed to the uranium deal.) Meanwhile, Tehran’s tactical retreat has provided Russia and China with an excuse to veto new sanctions — something they would have been hard-pressed to do had Iran struck an entirely defiant tone in Geneva.

The Obama administration and its allies have said repeatedly that they will pursue diplomacy until the end of the year and then seek sanctions if diplomacy hasn’t worked. That sets up a foreseeable and very unpleasant crossroads. “If by early next year we are getting nothing through diplomacy and sanctions,” says scholar Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, “the entire policy is going to be revealed as a charade.”

What then? Pollack, a former Clinton administration official, says there is one obvious Plan B: “containment,” a policy that got its name during the Cold War. The point would be to limit Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons or exercise its influence through the region by every means possible short of war — and to be prepared to sustain the effort over years, maybe decades. It’s an option that has been lurking at the back of the debate about Iran for years. “In their heart of hearts I think the Obama administration knows that this is where this is going,” Pollack says.

I suspect he’s right. I also don’t expect Obama and his aides to begin talking about a policy shift anytime soon. For the next few months we’ll keep hearing about negotiations, sanctions and possibly Israeli military action as ways to stop an Iranian bomb. By far the best chance for a breakthrough, as I see it, lies in a victory by the Iranian opposition over the current regime. If that doesn’t happen, it may soon get harder to disguise the hollowness of Western policy.

• OCTOBER 2, 2009

Iran, it appears, was more cooperative than many expected in its much-anticipated talks with the U.S. and others about its nuclear program.

Now comes the next phase: deciding whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Good, because in Thursday’s talks Iran toed the mark set down for it on at least one important item — opening its newly disclosed covert uranium-enrichment plant to outside eyes — and in general seemed to be taking the talks seriously.

Or bad, because the outcome showed the Iranians know how to give just enough ground to string out the talks, earning international legitimacy without giving up anything essential to their nuclear program.

It’s way too early to know which of those paths is opening up, of course. This is the phase of first impressions, not final outcomes.

Still, expectations were so low heading into Thursday’s talks that anything short of a food fight inside that 18th-century villa in Geneva where they were held would have been judged a success.

And in the end there was more than just the absence of a debacle to show for the day’s work. Most significantly, Iran dealt with the glaring substantive and symbolic problem it was handed last week, when President Barack Obama and his French and British counterparts disclosed the existence of a secret enrichment facility.

The question going in was whether Iran would simply bluster and stonewall about a secret facility with obvious potential military applications — as Iranian officials had hinted they would — or instead do something to come clean. The Iranians did the latter by agreeing to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency into the plant, apparently within two weeks.

Beyond that, Western diplomats said beforehand that, given the deep suspicions on all sides, a simple agreement to hold a second round of talks would be a sign that something serious happened Thursday. And indeed, there was an announcement of another round, later this month.

In addition, there was a surprise: an agreement that Russia and France will enrich uranium on Iran’s behalf for use in a medical-research reactor in Tehran. Iran quietly accepted the idea in talks with the IAEA in recent weeks, but U.S. officials weren’t sure until Thursday that it would follow through. The deal represents a nod toward a path the West has suggested Iran could travel if it genuinely wants nuclear power rather than nuclear weapons: Let other countries enrich nuclear fuel and send it to Tehran, giving Iran fuel for nuclear power plants without developing an enrichment capability that could produce weapons.

So now we know the path just ahead. Longer term, the Obama administration faces the tougher job of deciding what constitutes success — or failure — in this process, and when to decide which is emerging.

The broader proposal the U.S. and its partners — France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany — have put on the table is the “freeze for freeze” plan: Iran agrees to freeze its enrichment of uranium, while the big powers agree to freeze international economic sanctions on Iran at the level now in place.

Then, the goal would be moving beyond a freeze to an actual suspension of Iran’s enrichment program. If things get that far, defining the terms will be tricky. Does suspension mean permanent suspension, including destruction of enrichment equipment? Would Iran indeed be given nuclear fuel from the outside?

More difficult still will be deciding how long to let this process unfold before deciding whether it’s working. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has suggested a deadline of year’s end, at which point the outside powers would move to impose new sanctions if things aren’t working out.

The classic fear about such negotiations is that they become an end in themselves — that the goal of talking becomes continued talking. That’s a particularly acute concern now, because of worries that Iran may string out the process precisely so it can keep enriching uranium, or that an impatient Israel will conclude it has to take military action to stop a nuclear threat that’s only being enabled by diplomacy.

There’s also a risk that the embattled Iranian regime may hope to use protracted negotiations for another reason: Its leaders could decide that being seen talking with world powers helps them “recoup the enormous legitimacy they’ve ceded domestically” because of the summer’s disputed presidential election, says Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Meanwhile, some in the U.S. will question what the real goal of policy toward Iran ought to be. Previously, there was little dispute that stopping Tehran’s nuclear program was the goal. Now, some analysts are starting to ask whether all those Iranians protesting the presidential election indicate the regime is more seriously imperiled than was thought — and whether the goal of American policy and international sanctions ought to be changing the regime rather than just its nuclear program. That, of course, is hardly a subject for negotiation at all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125444010185757743.html

Bruno Pellaud

Former Deputy Director General, IAEA and President, Swiss Nuclear Forum

Posted: September 29, 2009 05:26 AM

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The current Indian Summer over the Lake of Geneva will not ensure a smooth launching next Thursday of the international negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program. Too many participants have decided to make them fail. Provocation and contempt, threats and sanctions without underlying negotiable proposals, an Orwellian stage pitting the Five Nuclear Weapons States — standing on their self-assigned moral high ground — against a paranoiac, but still Non-Nuclear Weapons State. To secure an Iran without nuclear weapons, a more rational approach will be needed, an approach with strong sanctions complemented by specific technical proposals potentially acceptable to Iran, negotiated in a bilateral framework rather than the now chosen international extravaganza involving too many parties that disagree openly among themselves on how to proceed.

Iran provokes foolishly — with the launching of missiles and with even more silly sound bites from its president. Tipped by the Russians about the imminent Western announcement of the Qom enrichment site, Iran sends only late September a last-minute letter to the IAEA declaring Qom — like a rebelling child displaying stolen cookies. Exposure is inescapable in the age of satellite surveillance; the Iranians would have been clever-and-a-half to declare their second enrichment facility much earlier if eager to pre-empt Western accusation of non-compliance with safeguards obligations. But confusion prevails in Tehran.

Fellow-blogger Joe Cirincione has pointed out here the strategically correct approach adopted by the Obama administration, namely to keep confidential all new intelligence information on Iranian activities until bargaining time. Regrettably, last week, tactical considerations got priority when Obama, Brown and Sarkozy went public frenetically with the short-term hope to enlist Russian and Chinese support for subsequent stringent sanctions. Illusion. The Russians will continue to play double games. As an only ally, they keep the Iranians on a short political leash, while extorting horrendous prices for the nuclear fuel services they provide. In a broader context, the Russians will do whatever they can to foil a grand bargain between the US, Europe and Iran, a bargain that could see Iranian natural gas flowing to Europe, thereby helping Europe to reduce its dependency on Russia. As to the Chinese, they do not care; they only want Iranian gas to continue flowing their way.

What to expect from the forthcoming Geneva negotiations? Not much. For sure, the negotiating framework is ludicrous. On one side of the table, the Iranian delegation alone. On the other side, a big crowd: the Five Nuclear Weapons States, and Germany, and the European Union. The P5, those who carry the day at the Security Council, will claim the main seats (like five noisy drunkards threatening a boisterous youngster tempted by his first glass of wine). Well, without the presence of Germany, the so-called P5+1 have little moral authority on nuclear proliferation. As to the European Union, it disagrees fundamentally within itself on how to handle Iran. Most members oppose the British and French claim of speaking on behalf of Europe, and most oppose decisive sanctions. As with the North Korean negotiations, the presence of so many people across the table will not impress the Iranians.

Quite clearly, the Obama administration needs to revert to a strategically more sensible approach, a road map that would see the US engage Iran with a credible Plan B containing specific technical proposals meant to pull the rug from under an emerging nuclear weapons program in Iran. To be realistic, with Iran in political disarray, with its incompetent and quixotic government, the diplomatic logjam could only be broken through a discrete channel that would involve two experienced negotiators enjoying the trust of their respective leaders, personalities with the authority to move an agenda forward. On the Iranian side, there are not too many candidates; the most obvious being Ali Larijani, Speaker of Parliament, a knowledgeable man in an independent position with a direct link to the Supreme Leader. In the US, the former Under Secretary of State, Thomas R. Pickering, would be the best among many possible candidates.

As to the substance, the US must realize that Plan A is a non-starter — that is, the complete suspension of sensitive nuclear activities in Iran through sanctions alone or military options alone. In the New York Times of September 17, 2009, Roger Cohen wrote concisely what I have advocated for many years: “I cannot see any deal that will not at some point trade controlled Iranian enrichment on its soil against insistence that Iran accept the vigorous inspections of the I.A.E.A. Additional Protocol and a 24/7 I.A.E.A. presence. The time is approaching for the United States and its allies to abandon “zero enrichment” as a goal — it’s no longer feasible — and concentrate on how to exclude weaponization, cap enrichment and ensure Iran believes the price for breaking any accord will be heavy.” An in-depth 2006 report of the International Crisis Group — of which I was a co-author — dealt with one particular option to cap enrichment in Iran. There are indeed several options to forestall weaponization and to cap enrichment; they deserve consideration, because they could open the door to Iran’s acceptance of the vigorous inspections associated with the Additional Protocol to the existing Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. I will deal with the pros and cons of various options in the coming weeks.

Iran Decision Time approaches for Israel_English_Xinhua

Iran Decision Time approaches for Israel_English_Xinhua

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Jackson Deihl talks about his editorial below on NPR’s Opinion Page.

Op-Ed: Israel’s Gaza Vindication : NPR

When it was launched last December, Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. Not only pundits like me but senior officials of the Bush administration predicted that the Israeli army would not succeed either in toppling Gaza’s Hamas government or in eliminating its capacity to launch missiles at Israeli cities. Instead it would subject the Jewish state to another tidal wave of international opprobrium and risk its relations with West Bank Palestinians and Egypt.
This Story

Mostly, we were right. But today, Operation Cast Lead, as the three-week operation is known in Israel, is generally regarded by the country’s military and political elite as a success. The reasons for that are worth examining now that a new and even more hawkish Israeli government is weighing whether to flout Washington’s prevailing opposition to a military attack on Iran.

Israel’s satisfaction starts with a simple set of facts. Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Meanwhile, between late 2000 and the end of 2008, Israeli forces killed some 3,000 Gazans.

Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes — or less than on many single days before the war. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal. Israeli attacks in Gaza have almost ceased, too: Since the end of the mini-war, 29 Palestinians, two of whom were civilians, have been killed by Israeli action.

Hamas, of course, remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.

The point, however, is that Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its costly 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. From the Israeli perspective, a respite from conflict is the most that can be expected from either group — or from their mutual sponsor, Iran.

“They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel,” a senior government official told me last week. “But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war.”

But what of the grievous Palestinian suffering in the invasion — Israel itself counted 1,166 dead Gazans, including more than 450 civilians — and the international backlash that has caused? Just last week a U.N. commission headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone condemned what it called “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” and suggested that responsible Israelis be hauled before the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.

Israel’s leaders worried a lot about losing the war that way. But as they see it, they suffered only scratches. Egypt, which quietly collaborates with Israel’s blockade of Gaza, came under pressure to change its policy but held firm. No Arab country toughened its stance toward Israel: According to the Obama administration, as many as five may be willing to offer diplomatic and economic concessions if Israel freezes its West Bank settlement construction.

Perhaps most significant, Hamas’s rival for Palestinian leadership, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, is considerably stronger than it was before the war. Probably it will renew peace talks with Israel within weeks. As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized U.N. Human Rights Council.

The Gaza invasion was the second military operation Israel embarked on in less than 18 months despite disapproval from Washington. The other was its bombing of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in September 2007. Then, too, officials in Washington feared a dire diplomatic backlash or even a war between Israel and Syria. Nothing happened.

As they quietly debate the pros and cons of launching a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel’s political and military leaders no doubt will be thinking about that history. That doesn’t mean they will discount American objections — Iran would be a far harder and more complex target, with direct repercussions for U.S. troops and critical interests in the region. But, as with Gaza, even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit — and the potential blowback overblown.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092001295.html