WarSclerotic

U.S. officials don’t believe sanctions will stop Iran’s nuclear program, says U.K.’s Guardian – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

U.K.’s Guardian newspaper cites officials in key parts of Obama administration saying U.S. does not want conflict, but has few options left; say sanctions partly aimed at showing Israel U.S. serious over Iran.

By Haaretz and Reuters

U.S. officials increasingly believe that sanctions are not enough to stop the development of Iran’s nuclear program, and that the U.S will have to launch a military strike on Iran, or support Israeli action, the U.K’s Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.

According to the report, officials in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration say the U.S. does not want a conflict, but that sanctions are not working.

	Iran’s nuclear facility in Bushehr.
	Photo by: AP

“The White House wants to see sanctions work. This is not the Bush White House. It does not need another conflict,” the newspaper cited an official who is knowledgeable on U.S. Middle East policy as saying.

“It’s problem is that the guys in Tehran are behaving like sanctions don’t matter, like their economy isn’t collapsing, like Israel isn’t going to do anything,” the official said. “Sanctions are all we’ve got to throw at the problem. If they fail then it’s hard to see how we don’t move to the ‘in extremis’ option.”

“We don’t see a way forward. The record shows that there is nothing to work with,” the newspaper quoted another U.S. official as saying.

One former U.S. official told the newspaper that the question of how serious Israel is about military action is part of the calculus behind U.S. policy toward Iran, the Guardian said.

“The sanctions are there to pressure Iran and reassure Israel that we are taking this issue seriously,” it quoted one official as saying. “The focus is on demonstrating to Israel that this has a chance of working. Israel is skeptical but appreciates the effort. It is willing to give it a go, but how long will it wait?”

Colin Kahl, who was U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until last December, told the newspaper, “It’s not that the Israelis believe the Iranians are on the brink of a bomb. It’s that the Israelis may fear that the Iranian program is on the brink of becoming out of reach of an Israeli military strike, which means it creates a ‘now-or-never’ moment.”

“That’s what’s actually driving the timeline by the middle of this year. But there’s a countervailing factor that [Ehud] Barak has mentioned – that they’re not very close to making a decision and that they’re also trying to ramp up concerns of an Israeli strike to drive the international community towards putting more pressure on the Iranians,” the newspaper cited Kahl as saying.

“If you look at the calendar, it doesn’t make much sense that the Israelis would jump the gun. They probably need to provide a decent interval for those sanctions to be perceived as failing, because they care about whether an Israeli strike would be seen as philosophically legitimate; that is, as only having happened after other options were exhausted. So I think that will push them a little further into 2012,” he added.

Obama said earlier this month that he did not believe Israel had decided how to respond to its concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, following public discussion within Israel about whether it should attack Tehran to stop it from getting a nuclear bomb.

The newspaper also reported that some criticism of sanctions stems from the belief that the Obama administration is using them to prepare the ground for a military strike.

“The latest drum beat of additional sanctions and war against Iran sounds too much like the lead-up to the Iraq war,” the Guardian cited Congressman Dennis Kucinich as saying this week.

“If the crippling sanctions that the U.S. and Europe have imposed are meant to push the Iranian regime to negotiations, it hasn’t worked,” he said.

“As the war of words between the United States and Iran escalates it’s more critical than ever that we highlight alternatives to war to avoid the same mistakes made in Iraq.”

Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon’s will visit to Israel on Saturday for two-days of talks on regional issues which will include Iran and Syria.

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