Netanyahu (left), and Barak have stressed the seriousness of an Iranian threat. | AP Photo
JERUSALEM – Some Israeli officials say the country’s fingers are off the hair trigger that would launch a strike on the Iranian nuclear program, but that convincing the United States to take a harder line on Iran remains a top national priority.
The apparent willingness of the Israelis to postpone a demand for confrontation by months – at least – represents a success for the Obama administration, which has sought to convince Israel that it should give sanctions a chance to work.
It also, Israelis said, represents the belief on both sides that Iranian technical difficulties – some of them reportedly the result of a computer virus attributed to Israeli intelligence – have slowed the program.
“The Iranians are moving more slowly than they want to – but they are still moving,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, deputy director general of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry. “Everybody understands that you have to give some time for the sanctions to bear their full fruit.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak – the two key decision makers in the possibility that Israel would strike Iran – have both stressed the seriousness of the threat in recent weeks, and the importance of a credible American military threat.
“We have yet to see any signs that the tyrants of Tehran are reconsidering their pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said during a speech in New Orleans earlier this month, offering tepid praise for sanctions and calling for “a credible threat of military action.”
“If the international community, led by the United States, hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action,” he said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed back hard on Netanyahu’s pressure.
"I disagree that only a credible military threat can get Iran to take the actions that it needs to end its nuclear weapons program,” he said, adding that “the political, economic approach we are taking is having an impact in Iran."
But while Israeli leaders continue to publicly stress the immediacy, and urgency, of the Iranian threat, other Israeli officials said more specifically that they are waiting, if without a great deal of optimism, until the summer to see whether sanctions and diplomacy move the Iranian program.
“We think that people are underestimating the effect of the sanctions,” said an aide to a hawkish Israeli minister. “There are indications that the regime is quite beside itself about them and on the defensive more and more.”
“In mid-2011, you will see a debate about whether the sanctions are working,” said one former senior Israeli military official, who noted with some satisfaction that the Iranians had suffered “technical disappointments.”
The Associated Press reported yesterday that the damage from the “Stuxnet” virus may have been many times wider than previously thought, with the consequences being the temporary shutdown of thousands of centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
Iran has insisted it is enriching uranium for civilian purposes, but the Obama administration succeeded in convincing a broad international coalition to levy sanctions against Iran. Israeli officials said the sanctions -- pushed with new energy by American officials -- have succeeded in their estimates of doing serious damage to the Iranian financial sector and deepening dissatisfaction with the ruling regime among the country’s business elite.
Iran’s international isolation is growing: The African nation Gambia this week was the latest to cut ties with the Islamic Republic. Reports in the last three weeks, one senior Israeli political leader said, have offered some optimism about the sanctions regime. And U.S. officials have noted, in making the case for a new arms reduction treaty with Russia, that the country has been an ally against Iran.
“We have the strongest Iran sanctions regime in place that we’ve ever had as a country because of the help of the Russians,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week. “The Russians have taken a missile transaction to the Iranians off the table.”
And the sanctions appear to have produced a political crisis inside the country, with the supreme leader blocking a move in Parliament to impeach President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But Israeli officials distinguished between the effectiveness of sanctions at damaging the Iranian economy and at actually stopping the nuclear program.
The sanctions, Kuperwasser said, “are very efficient and impressive.”
“But the purpose of the sanctions is not” to cripple the Iranian economy, he said. “The purpose of the sanctions is to stop the project.”
Netanyahu also continues to make the case -- into which he has so far failed to direct Obama’s peace-making energies -- that the moment is ripe for a broader regional settlement centered on the fear Israel shares with a range of Arab states.
“You never had the strategic stars so lined up between Israel and the Arabs,” said Ron Dermer, a top Netanyahu adviser. “We do have a window of time where the Arabs and Israeli[s] have a common opponent that can create a strategic alliance.
“Any idea of a broader Arab-Israeli [peace] was Pollyannaish five years ago. But I think, with the rise of Iran, it’s a different situation today,” he said.
Other Israeli officials have adopted a new argument aimed at persuading Obama to act against Iran: His broad, career-long goal of limiting nuclear proliferation appears to be in danger on a number of fronts, and an Iranian bomb could, in particular, launch a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
“Does he want to be the president on whose watch the [nuclear nonproliferation treaty] collapses,” one Israeli official asked.
Israeli officials say the prospect of an attack on Iran will surface again if sanctions don’t have a dramatic effect, and few are willing to predict what decision Netanyahu and Barak would take if presented with intelligence that Iran is on the brink of having the capacity to make a bomb.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45561.html#ixzz16Pk0nlyf
