WarSclerotic

Who will strike first, Israel or Obama – and against whom? | Columnists | Jerusalem Post.

Jan 3, 2010 20:54 | Updated Jan 3, 2010 21:56

By BARRY RUBIN

Of all the questions readers ask, there’s no question about which are the most frequent. First, is Israel about to attack Iran, or when will this happen? Second, do US President Barack Obama and his entourage hate Israel, and will there be a major confrontation or some kind of sellout?

An IAF fighter jet.
Photo: IDF [file]

The first two questions are pretty easy to answer, the third less so.

Israel and an attack on Iran: Israeli policy is quite clear. Its current emphasis is on supporting strong sanctions. There is, of course, skepticism as to whether strong sanctions will be applied and whether such a step would work, but that’s not the determining factor. It is recognized that the West must thoroughly try diplomatic means to satisfy itself that everything short of an armed attack has failed.

Only when the sanctions have been seen to be ineffective at stopping Iran’s march to nuclear weapons would Israel even begin to go into an attack phase, but even then there are two major considerations.

One is that it will only attack when Iran is on the verge of getting weapons. Not only would that situation make the decision about responding an immediate task, but also because that would be when Teheran has the maximum equipment installed and the most damage can be done. There is no sense bombing half-empty buildings.

The disadvantage is that this would give the regime more time to disperse the facilities. And that introduces the other problem. A cabinet meeting would be held to determine whether an attack could be carried out, whether the political and security costs would be acceptable and whether an attack would succeed in setting back the Iranian program by a big margin.

IS ISRAEL capable of launching an effective attack? Without going into all the complex details, the basic answer is “yes.”

If destroying Iran’s nuclear capability is an existential imperative, could Israel weather the diplomatic criticism and terrorist or other attacks? Again, yes. Hamas and Hizbullah would escalate and launch rockets, but they could be deterred or defeated.

It is the last point, however, that is critical: Would an attack achieve considerable success in putting back Iran’s nuclear program by years? That cannot be taken for granted. In military action lots can go wrong. Planes can crash; mechanical breakdowns or bad weather may cause failure. The distances involved are huge, the margin of error very fine.

What if the bombs miss and hit civilians? (Yes, Israel cares a lot about this despite all the slander and lies regarding its behavior.) Will dispersion of facilities mean that only a small portion of Iran’s facilities will be damaged or destroyed?

In short, is it worth launching an attack that only inflames the situation further, costs lots of diplomatic capital and doesn’t do any good?

This is a question that can only be raised and decided in a cabinet meeting at the proper time. There is no determined choice already made and that is as it should be.

THE SECOND question relates to Obama and Israel. In my opinion, Obama has absolutely no warm feelings toward Israel and, if anything, his instincts are hostile. But previous American presidents – notably Richard Nixon – have followed pro-Israel policies despite being personally unfriendly. What is important is that Obama and his entourage have learned two things.

One of them is that bashing Israel is politically costly. American public opinion is very strongly pro-Israel. Congress is as friendly to Israel as ever. For an administration that is more conscious of its future reelection campaign than any previous one, holding onto Jewish voters and ensuring Jewish donations is very important. There will almost certainly not be a visit of Obama to Israel this year; he’ll wait until it will do him some good at the polls (which is a good thing, since the less attention he pays to this issue the less harm he’ll do).

The other point is that the administration has seen that bashing Israel doesn’t get it anywhere. For one thing, the current Israeli government won’t give in easily and is very adept at protecting its country’s interests. This administration has a great deal of trouble being tough with anyone.

If in fact the Palestinians and Arabs were eager to make a deal and energetic about supporting other US policies, the administration might well be tempted to press for an arrangement that largely ignored Israeli interests. But this is not the case. It is the Palestinians who refuse even to come to the negotiating table – and that is unlikely to change quickly or easily. Arab states won’t lift a finger to help the US on Iran, Iraq or Arab-Israeli issues. So why bother?

MOREOVER, NO matter how much noise the administration makes about being engaged on the Israel-Palestinian front, it knows that not much is going to happen. Its envoy, George Mitchell, will run around and make plans, but the top brass in Washington isn’t going to devote all that much time to this issue.

The hostility to Israel of the administration’s overall personnel can also be exaggerated. A couple of names come to mind of officials who are hostile, but there are also many – arguably more in number – who are reasonably friendly, including the secretaries of state and defense.

The idea that David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel constitute some anti-Israel cabal is misleading, too. If there were a serious peace process, they’d certainly push Israel harder to make more concessions than others would, but they are focused on domestic affairs and also know that this issue is a non-winner for them in terms of success, glory or political advantage.

These two factors form the basic framework for understanding the Middle East this year. Putting down a smoke screen of diplomatic activity and proposals, the US government is likely to place the “peace process,” whose nonexistence is too real to ignore, on the back burner. Meanwhile, Israel is doing the same thing with an attack on Iran. The next year’s events in the region will come from other crises and issues.

‘Iran asked Hamas, Hizbullah to coordinate Israel attacks’ | Headlines News | Jerusalem Post.

A Lebanese Web site on Sunday quoted Saudi newspaper al-Madina as reporting that Iran nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili met with Hamas and Hizbullah officials, including Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal, in Damasucs and asked them to orchestrate “operations” against Israel.

The report said that Jalili also traveled to Beirut and urged Hizbullah and Amal representatives to launch attacks.

Jalili reportedly also asked Hamas and Hizbullah to coordinate their attacks.

U.S. Sees an Opportunity to Press Iran on Nuclear Fuel – NYTimes.com.

WASHINGTON — As President Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions.

The long-discussed sanctions would initiate the latest phase in a strategy to force Iran to comply with United Nations demands to halt production of nuclear fuel. It comes as the administration has completed a fresh review of Iran’s nuclear progress.

In interviews, Mr. Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.

The White House wants to focus the new sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the military force believed to run the nuclear weapons effort. That force has also played a crucial role in the repression of antigovernment demonstrators since the disputed presidential election in June.

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”

While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum. Exposure of the site deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems. Others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure.

These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon.

“For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. The administration has told allies that the longer time frame would allow the sanctions to have an effect before Iran could develop its nuclear ability.

Another administration official said that Israeli officials, while still publicly hinting that they might take military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, “now feel that what’s happening in Iran makes the country vulnerable to real sanctions,” and might give Mr. Obama more time to persuade China and Russia to go along. A senior Israeli diplomat in Washington said that in back-channel conversations “Obama has convinced us that it’s worth trying the sanctions, at least for a few months.”

Sanctions will be a difficult balancing act for the administration, since it acknowledges that three previous rounds of sanctions have failed to deter Iran, and it also wants to avoid angering Iranians protesting in the streets by depriving them of Western goods. That is why the administration is focusing on the Revolutionary Guards, who are increasingly detested by the protesters, and who have built up billions of dollars of business interests in telecommunications, oil and construction.

The administration aims to get Arab and Asian nations to join Europe in cutting off financial transactions with front companies for the Revolutionary Guards.

China and Russia have been particularly reluctant and could seize on the Obama administration’s view of Iran’s nuclear troubles to resist Mr. Obama’s argument that new sanctions are needed now to punish Iran’s defiance of the United Nations Security Council mandate that it cease enriching uranium.

Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only is roundly rejected by Western officials and, in internal reports, by international nuclear inspectors. Yet Washington’s assessments of how much progress Iran has made toward a weapon have varied greatly over the past two years, partly a reflection of how little is known about the inner workings of the country’s nuclear programs.

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale — the same assessment reached by Britain, France, Germany and Israel.

In early September, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Glyn Davies, warned that Iran had “possible breakout capacity.” Administration officials say that Mr. Davies’ assessment was technically accurate, yet the new evidence suggests that Iran is less likely to use its uranium stockpile to assemble one or two bombs, a move officials say would be likely to provoke an Israeli strike.

The administration’s current view of Iran’s nuclear program was provided by six senior administration officials advising Mr. Obama on his strategy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. The administration’s review of Iran’s program, which they said was based on intelligence reports, information from allies, and their own analysis, did not amount to a new formal intelligence assessment.

In interviews, those officials as well as European officials engaged in the Iran issue and private experts described Iran’s nuclear program as being in some disarray.

The biggest disruption came in late September when Mr. Obama, along with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, publicly exposed Iran’s covert effort to build an enrichment plant near Qum.

Western intelligence agencies had been studying the underground plant from afar for nearly a year, and two European officials say that Iranian nuclear spies recruited by Europe and Israel provided some confirming evidence about the purpose of the plant.

International inspectors who were granted access to the underground site in October found that the plant was about a year away from operation and that it was designed for just 3,000 centrifuges — not enough to produce the large amounts of fuel needed for commercial reactors, but sufficient for the stealthy production of highly enriched bomb fuel. (By comparison, the Natanz plant, which is ostensibly for producing reactor fuel, is designed for 54,000 centrifuges.)

American officials say that the Qum plant is now useless to the Iranians. “They spent three years and tens of millions of dollars on a covert plant that they will probably never turn on,” said the senior official involved in the White House strategy.

The official added, “It would take Iran three to four years to build a duplicate of Qum,” although he acknowledged that Iran could have another secret facility that Western intelligence had missed.

Both administration officials and experts say that another factor slowing Iran’s nuclear development is that it is working with older centrifuge technology that keeps breaking down.

By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran’s enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz — down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June.

Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and they have made a series of manufacturing errors.

R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Mr. Kemp said. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”

If Mr. Kemp and others are right, it suggests that Iran has a long way to go before it can make good on its recent vow to open 10 new enrichment plants. Iranian officials have said publicly that those plants will use a new version of the centrifuges. But Paul K. Kerr, a nuclear analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said research on the new generation of centrifuges had apparently proved “less successful” than the original, primitive design.

Another possible problem for Iran is the Western sabotage efforts. In January, The New York Times reported that President Bush had ordered a broad covert program against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including efforts to undermine electrical and computer systems that keep the nuclear program running. The Obama administration has been silent about the progress of that program, one of the most heavily classified of the United States government.