WarSclerotic

Editorial – Iran, Sanctions and Mr. Gates’s Memo – NYTimes.com.

Sometime this spring, but still months later than President Obama predicted, Iran may finally face new United Nations sanctions for its illicit nuclear program.

Mr. Obama has done a lot to prepare the ground. He has bolstered American credibility with his — since rebuffed — offer to engage with Iran. He signed a new arms reduction treaty with Russia, improved relations with China and is personally lobbying other United Nations Security Council members to support stronger sanctions.

We are skeptical that even that will be enough to get Moscow and Beijing to sign on to anything with real bite. In the last four years, the Security Council has passed three far-too-modest sanctions resolutions. Tehran has shrugged them all off and kept churning out nuclear fuel.

The good news is that Mr. Obama is also hedging his bets, with an effort — first begun under President George W. Bush — to persuade an ever-widening circle of international corporate interests to eschew business in economically strapped Iran.

Total, the French energy company, and Eni of Italy claim they are planning to end new investments in Iran. Major international banks like Deutsche Bank and HSBC have said that they are withdrawing from Iran. Several oil companies have said they would no longer supply gasoline to Iran, including Royal Dutch Shell, Vitol, Russia’s Lukoil and India’s Reliance. Last week, Malaysia’s state oil firm, Petronas, said it was cutting off shipments. Its prime minister then denied it.

Promises are clearly cheap. The administration will have to keep pressing these companies to live up to their commitments. And it is time for Mr. Obama’s European partners to think about more formal ways to tighten their own sanctions on Iran.

None of this should let the Security Council off the hook. A new resolution would provide important cover for these parallel tracks. Iran is especially vulnerable now, both economically and politically. Its leaders will be watching carefully, especially to see what its longtime trading partners and enablers in Russia and China do.

There, the news is not good. While Russian and Chinese leaders told Mr. Obama that they will work seriously on new sanctions, diplomats say their representatives are already seeking ways to dilute any resolution. Brazil and Turkey, which currently sit on the Security Council and have a lot of international sway, also are resisting. Mr. Obama needs to keep pressing Moscow and Beijing hard. He and his European partners need to make clear that Brazil (which seeks permanent Security Council membership) and Turkey (a NATO member) must step up.

We don’t know if there is any mixture of pressure — or inducements — that will force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. That’s what makes a memo written earlier this year by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and reported by The Times on Sunday so important.

Looking beyond the current maneuvering, he raises some very disturbing and difficult questions that need to be addressed. How will the world contain Iran if it actually produces a weapon? What will Washington and its allies do if Iran acquires all of the parts but decides to stop just short of that?

The United States and its allies need to quietly discuss and prepare for those possibilities — without giving Russia, China and others any more excuses not to act.

As for the military options under review, we are sure that an attack would be a disaster. We urge anyone who has doubts to listen closely to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told reporters on Sunday that while military “options would cause delay” to Iran’s nuclear program, “that doesn’t mean the problem is going to go away.”

Editorial – Iran, Sanctions and Mr. Gates’s Memo – NYTimes.com.

Beware the coming war.

The July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah transformed both Lebanese and Arab politics. Hezbollah emerged as the heroic champion of resistance to Israeli aggression across the Arab and Islamic world. While Hassan Nasrallah claimed “divine victory”, Hezbollah lost its autonomy to operate in south Lebanon to units of UNIFEL and the Lebanese Army.

Israel lost its psychological aura of invincibility in the Middle East when its troops were unable to defeat Hezbollah in the village battlefields and rock strewn hills of south Lebanon even though the northern Galilee border is calm for the first time since the late 1960’s. Unfortunately, the balance of power between Hezbollah and Israel is unstable and the calculus of deterrence cannot last.

Israel has myriad strategic reasons to launch a preemptive strike against a resurgent Hezbollah. Despite Ehud Olmert’s brutal Dahiya doctrine, Israeli warplanes were unable to terror-bomb the Shia militia into submission, unable to kill or capture its high command. In fact, Israel’s devastating aerial firepower only turned Nasrallah into the first truly popular Arab war hero since President Nasser during the Suez war in 1956. Hezbollah’s defiance of Israel narrowed the Sunni-Shia cleavage in the Arab world created by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Israel has tried its best to wage psychological war against Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons. Mossad agents assassinated top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, the mastermind of suicide bombings attacks against the US Marine barracks and the American embassy in Beirut. To add insult to injury, Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in the Damascus neighbourhood of Kfir Soussa, the citadel of the Syrian secret police. Israeli warplanes bombed an alleged North Korean built nuclear reactor in the western deserts of Syria in September 2007. Israeli F-16’s routinely create sonic booms over Shiite villages in south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Dahiya stronghold of Hezbollah.

In fact, a Syrian-Saudi rapprochement and the procession of Lebanese leaders to Damascus five years after the Cedar Revolution only increases the probability of a preemptive Israeli attack against Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an integral component of the Sunni, Maronite and Druze coalition that now rules Lebanon, no longer a mere “state within a state” whose infrastructure could be safely bombed by the IDF. Hezbollah has rearmed since the July 2006 war. Its military arsenal includes 40,000 long rage rockets and surface to air/anti-tank missiles. Hezbollah’s M-600 rockets have the range to hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, not just Haifa, Tiberias and the north Galilee kibbutz networks. Nasrallah has also been defiant, vowing to destroy Israel in the next war and “change the face of the region”. To the Israeli zealots, Nasrallah and Iran’s President Ahmadinejad are the modern incarnations of Nazis.

The willingness to launch preemptive attacks and use overwhelming force against its enemies has defined the military doctrine of the Haganah and the IDF since the 1948 Palestine war. Israeli deterrence and terror bombing, however, failed against Hezbollah in July 2006. In fact, Hezbollah’s unending attacks in a protracted war of attrition had forced the IDF to humiliatingly withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, a bitter blow to a military machine whose blitzkriegs had once vanquished the Egyptian, Syrian and ordanian armies in the Six Day War. Miscalculation on either side could ignite a new war, as in 2006 when Nasrallah ordered the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers in a cross-border raid.

The Israelis violated the balance of terror when Mossad assassinated Mughniyeh and Netanyahu has publicly threatened to flatten the Dahiya. A war in Lebanon could be the inevitable consequence of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear arsenal or an Iranian Revolutionary Guard attempt to midwife an anti-US Shia coalition in the Middle East. Mired in two wars, unable to broker the peace process, distrusted by its own Lebanese and Arab allies the US is impotent to prevent another war.

The next war will differ from July 2006. The IDF will launch large scale bombing attacks against Shia Beirut, the Bekaa valley and the Shia villages of South Lebanon. A ground offensive on the northern banks of the Litani River to occupy the Nabatiyeh heights, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Sunni, Christian and Druze villages of south Lebanon will not be immune to Israeli attacks nor will the infrastructure of the Lebanese state. Hezbollah’s mobile anti-tank missile batteries will be prime targets, since they can disable even the Merkeva M4, the best armoured battle tank in the Middle East. Israeli tank columns and commonado units could even infiltrate Baalbek and the Hezbollah command nerve centres in Bekaa valley even as UNIFIL units limit Hezbollah’s ability to launch retaliatory rocket attacks against northern Israeli cities. Suicide bombing cells in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem could wreck havoc behind the front line. The next war in Lebanon will be sudden, bloody and protracted, just like the horror show of July 2006.

Jewish leaders caught between criticizing, defending Obama | JTA – Jewish & Israel News.

By Ron Kampeas · April 20, 2010

WASHINGTON (JTA) — With anxiety over the White House’s Middle East policy mounting in some pro-Israel circles, several Jewish organizational leaders have found themselves in a discomfiting position: criticizing the Obama administration in public while stridently defending the president in private against the most extreme attacks.

It’s an upside-down version of what pro-Israel groups usually do: lavishing praise on the U.S. government of the day for sustaining the “unbreakable bond” while making their criticisms known quietly, behind closed doors.

The criticism has come in the form of mostly polite statements and newspaper ads questioning Obama administration pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, particularly regarding building in eastern Jerusalem. Such criticisms are voiced as well in private meetings with administration officials.

The defense comes up in dealings with irate donors and constituents, in phone calls, e-mails, addresses to small Jewish groups, shul talk. The theme of the complaints is consistent, and shocking, said multiple leaders, who all spoke off the record, and reflect the subterranean rumblings about the president heard during the campaign: His sympathy lies with the Muslims, he doesn’t care about Israel, he’s an anti-Semite.

The Jewish Federations of North America is sufficiently concerned about the phenomenon to have convened a “fly-in” of Jewish organizational leaders to Washington for an as yet unannounced date in May. The leaders will meet with White House, State Department and congressional officials, in part to “to convey concerns about U.S.-Israel relations” — but also, insiders say, to allay those concerns.

One recent flood of anxious queries followed the Obama administration’s announcement earlier this month of its long-awaited nuclear policy. The reality of the policy was a pledge not to threaten with nuclear weapons those nations that provably disavow their nuclear weapons capability. Nations that continued to maintain a threatening nuclear posture, the policy made clear, would still face the prospect of a U.S. nuclear response should they attack the United States or its allies.

Obama named Iran as such a nation.

Yet instead of being reassured, donors and members of national Jewish groups flooded Jewish leaders with anxious queries about a posture that they interpreted as being aimed at embracing a nuclear Iran and forcing Israel to abandon its own reported nuclear capability.

Another persistent — and unfounded — rumor has it that Obama removed the phrase “Next Year in Jerusalem” from the White House seder in March.

“Where the **** are they getting this?” asked a senior official at an organization that has been publicly critical of Obama since last summer.

Angst was stoked, too, when Obama spoke last week of peacemaking throughout the world necessitated by the cost of “American blood and treasure” through involvement in conflicts. It didn’t help that a New York Times analysis suggested the president had said that the lack of Israeli-Palestinian peace threatened U.S. troops in other parts of the globe — even though the transcript of Obama’s remarks did not bear out any such linkage and other Obama administration officials flatly denied one existed.

Jewish officials said a share of the blame lay with the Obama administration, partly for not adequately reaching out to Jews and to Israel, and partly because of the emergence of what appears to be internecine policy wars.

“The real story of The New York Times story is not that he’s changing Israel policy,” said another leader of an organization that has not been shy about criticizing the Obama administration. “The real story is, why are officials leaking” misrepresentations of his policy “to The New York Times?”

On the other side, one leader blamed the Netanyahu government for sending mixed signals on how to handle the tensions between Israel and the United States over settlement policy.

“Some are saying quiet is the best answer and others are saying loud noise is the best answer,” the Jewish organizational official said.

The official cited reports that Netanyahu personally approved public letters — from Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and Elie Wiesel, the internationally known Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace laureate — criticizing Obama’s demand for a halt in Jerusalem building.

Despite mounting criticism by some Jewish leaders, polls show that Obama’s support among Jews in general remains strong. His backing has dropped from astronomical highs after he was elected, but remains about 10 points stronger than in the general population. Moreover, to the degree that it has eroded, the dissatisfaction with Obama appears to have more to do with unhappiness over his handling of health care and the economy than it does Israel.

Those who are expressing their concerns, however, are among the most active members of the pro-Israel community and help set the tone for the trilateral U.S.-Israel-Jewish leadership ties. Some are acquiring their information from anti-Obama e-mail blasts and consistently partisan critics of Obama.

Richard Baehr, writing in the conservative online magazine The American Thinker, cited The New York Times’ misreading of Obama’s remarks in arguing that “this president is the greatest threat to the strategic alliance of the U.S. and Israel since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.”

McLaughlin & Associates, a GOP polling firm, touted signs last week that Jewish support for Obama was eroding, but the survey questions were premised on shaky assertions. One question posited that Obama would support a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence, although U.S. officials have consistently said they would oppose such a move. Another suggested that Obama was ready to force Israel to give up the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, although there has been no such pressure.

Administration defenders cite signs suggesting that beyond the settlement rhetoric, the relationship is improving: Obama has increased defense cooperation, for instance, and strategic consultations between officials of both nations are more frequent than they have been in a decade.

“Our bond with Israel is unshakable and unbreakable both as it relates to security, as it relates to a common set of values and also as a common strategic vision because the threats to Israel are similar to some of the threats the United States faces,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, said Monday on Bloomberg TV.

Jewish leaders welcome such reassurances but say they are made defensively, and repeatedly call on the Obama administration to become proactive.

Robert Wexler, the former Florida congressman who was Obama’s chief Jewish proxy during the election and now heads the Center for Middle East peace, suggested a more proactive posture was in the offing.

“Actions in the next several months will begin to reflect it,” he told JTA.

Notably, Emanuel held a behind-closed-doors meeting Tuesday with a group of leading Orthodox rabbis.

Meantime, Jewish leaders are walking a tightrope trying to balance traditional deference to the administration with concerns over the tensions. They also object to what they see as the unwarranted pressure on Netanyahu as opposed to relatively little pressure on the Palestinians to join talks that Israel has embraced with enthusiasm. Israel, they hasten to argue, remains America’s best friend in the region.

Lee Rosenberg, the president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, made the Israel-is-our-best-friend case last week at Israel Independence Day celebrations, sharing the stage with Obama’s top political adviser, David Axelrod.

“Israel stood by America in spirit and in action after the tragic events of 9-11,” Rosenberg said. “As both our great nations fight the same scourge of terrorism and Islamic extremism, it is Israel which serves on the front lines as an outpost of American interests in a dangerous part of the world.”

The Wiesel and Lauder letters offered a suggestive contrast over how to handle the tensions.

Wiesel’s critique was oblique, not naming Obama, and deferred to U.S. orthodoxy that a final-status agreement must accommodate Palestinian claims to the city.

“What is the solution?” Wiesel asked. “Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be.”

Lauder, by contrast, directly addressed Obama and suggested that the president was sacrificing Israel to improve relations with the Muslim world.

“The Administration’s desire to improve relations with the Muslim world is well known,” said Lauder, an active Republican. “But is friction with Israel part of this new strategy? Is it assumed worsening relations with Israel can improve relations with Muslims?”

One of the Jewish leaders said the contrast was instructive.

“For all intents and purposes, the WJC’s relationship with the White House ended last week,” he said of the group Lauder heads. “That’s not a relationship that pro-Israel groups can afford to have over the next couple of years.”

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has publicly criticized the administration on several Israel-related fronts. Still, he said, Jewish leaders have a responsibility to defend the president “when talking to those who accuse him of being an enemy of Israel or a Muslim.”

“For many years, you had a lot of Jews who didn’t vote for President Bush who would say, ‘I don’t like Bush but I love what he’s doing on Israel,’” Foxman said.

“Now the paradigm is changing. A lot of Jews are saying, ‘I like Obama, but I don’t like what he is doing on Israel.”

Foxman added that the most frequent question he hears when speaking to Jewish audiences is whether Obama is a friend of Israel.

“I say yes — but what’s wrong is the implementation of what he promised. What’s flawed is the strategy, not the goal,” Foxman said.

The ADL leader quickly added that despite promises to learn from past mistakes, the administration’s handling of Israel-related issues is “going from bad to worse.”

Israelis Debate Striking Iran Without U.S. Consent – WSJ.com.

By CHARLES LEVINSON

JERUSALEM—The Israeli security establishment is divided over whether it needs Washington’s blessing if Israel decides to attack Iran, Israeli officials say, as the U.S. campaign for sanctions drags on and Tehran steadily develops greater nuclear capability.

Some senior Israeli officials say in interviews that they see signs Washington may be willing to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, an eventuality that Israel says it won’t accept. Compounding Israeli concerns were U.S. statements this past weekend that underscored U.S. resistance to a military option. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Sunday discussed a memo to National Security Adviser James Jones warning that the U.S. needed new strategies, including how to contain a nuclear Iran—suggesting that Iran could reach nuclear capability without any foreign military force trying to stop it.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated Sunday the U.S. position that a military strike against Iran is a “last option.”

Israel says it supports the U.S.-led push for new economic sanctions against Iran. But Israeli officials have increasingly voiced frustration over the slow pace of diplomatic efforts to get sanctions in place.

Relations between the two allies have soured in recent weeks, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government pushing back against Obama administration pressure to freeze building in Jewish areas of East Jerusalem, which Washington says is counterproductive to its Mideast peace efforts.

In another sign of a split, Israeli officials say they believe Iran—whose president has called for the destruction of Israel—could develop a warhead to strike the country within a year if it decides to, though outside experts say such capability is years away. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses.

Such divisions have played into fears in Israel that if Washington’s sanctions effort fails, the Israeli and American positions on Iran could rapidly diverge—and Israel, if it chooses to attack Iran, would have no choice but to do so on its own.

U.S. commanders say an attack would invite retaliation by Iran against American military interests in the region, or wider terrorist attacks by Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas. Adm. Mullen said Sunday a strike could have “unintended consequences,” and has long warned it could destabilize the region at a time the U.S. has troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which neighbor Iran.

A senior U.S. official said the U.S. has stated to Israel its opposition to unilateral Israeli action, but that there were still fears within the administration that Israel could strike Iran despite Washington’s objections.

Some Israeli officials worry a unilateral strike would cause a break with Washington that would threaten Israeli national interests even more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

Israel’s track record of coordinating such strikes with the U.S. is mixed. The country caught the U.S. by surprise with its attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. When Israel attacked a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in 2007, Washington was given advanced warning, according to U.S. officials at the time.

The decision of whether to strike Iran ultimately rests with the prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu. In the past, however, senior military commanders have had significant say in such decisions. A spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Defense declined to comment on internal deliberations concerning Iran.

There are a number of routes Israeli attack jets can fly to attack Iran. They all would require Israeli planes to fly through U.S.-controlled airspace in Iraq or through the airspace of U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey, which could cause serious political consequences for Israel.

Many Israeli military experts say Israel can easily cope with any military retaliation by Iran in response to a strike. Iran’s medium-range rockets would cause damage and casualties in Israel, but they aren’t very accurate, and Israel’s sophisticated missile-defense system would likely knock many out midflight. Israel has similarly proved it can handle attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel also hosts a contingent of U.S. troops attached to a radar system to help give early warning against incoming rocket attacks.

More worrying to Israeli strategic planners examining possible attack scenarios is the possibility that Iran would respond to an Israeli attack by ramping up support to groups battling U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to recently retired officials familiar with the military’s thinking on Iran. If American soldiers start dying in greater numbers as a result of an Israeli unilateral attack, Americans could turn against Israel.

Iran could also disrupt the world’s oil supply by cutting off exports through the Persian Gulf, roiling international oil markets.

“What will Americans say if Israel drags the U.S. into a war it didn’t want, or when they are suddenly paying $10 a gallon for gasoline and Israel is the reason for it,” says retired Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom, former director of the Israeli army’s Strategic Planning Division.

Former senior members of Israel’s defense establishment have weighed in recently on both sides of the debate.

“We don’t have permission and we don’t need permission from the U.S.,” says Ephraim Sneh, who served as deputy minister of defense under former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. But Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, says Israel wouldn’t jeopardize its relationship with the U.S. by launching a military strike against Iran without an American nod.

Late last month, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak seemed to acknowledge publicly the opposing viewpoints inside the administration.

“Only we have the exclusive responsibility when it comes to the fate and security of Israel, and only we can determine the matters pertaining to the fate of Israel and the Jewish people,” Mr. Barak said. “But we must never lose sight of how important these relations are, or the ability to act in harmony and unity with the United States.”