| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"can_o_worms" |
| Date: |
21 Nov 2006 09:04:02 PM |
| Object: |
Israels Domestic Political Game Raises the Danger of a U.S.- Iran War |
Israel’s Domestic Political Game Raises the Danger
of a U.S.-Iran War
From: The Rootless Cosmopolitan
http://tonykaron.com/2006/11/20/israels-domestic-political-game-raises-the-danger-of-a-us-iran-war/
Even if the Democrats could be relied on to hold the
line against insane military adventurism against
Iran - and, frankly, listening to their leading lights
I have my doubts - that's unlikely to make any
difference to the question of whether or not Iran is
attacked. That's because nobody even among the hawks
is talking about a full-blown ground invasion; they're
talking about a series of air strikes that will
supposedly destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. And you
only have to go back to President Clinton's 1998
cruise missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan
and a patch of dust Afghanistan
http://www.cnn.com/US/9808/20/us.strikes.01/
to remember that the first Americans hear about such
attacks will be after the fact.
By then, of course, it will be too late. U.S. intel
and even the Israelis know that the best such strikes
can hope to achieve would be to delay Iran's nuclear
program by a year or two. But it will also prompt a
chain of events throughout the Middle East that will
plunge the region into a war that leaves U.S.
influence - and Israel's prospects of
survival - diminished. The Iranians will hit back, of
course, in Iraq, and elsewhere. And the U.S. will be
compelled to hit back, creating the pattern for a long
war of bloody attrition.
One reason it won't be debated publicly because it's
based on a fallacy promoted by a calculated campaign
of hysteria by Israel's leadership. Iran, right now,
has no nuclear weapons program that anyone knows
of - the Israelis however have opted to paint the very
idea of uranium enrichment in Iran, quite legal under
the NPT, into the first stanza of a new Holocaust.
Israel's demand that Iran be stopped, by force if
necessary, from establishing the nuclear fuel cycle
allowed under the NPT is untenable,
http://tonykaron.com/2006/11/14/james-baker-vs-the-likud-round-ii-this-time-its-persian-al/
I've argued elsewhere - the idea that any nation
in the Middle East that creates the infrastructural
capability to challenge Israel's nuclear monopoly
in the region (creates the infrastructure that would
allow this choice rather than actually pursue
weapons) must face military sanctions is absurd
and unsustainable. The only way to resolve this
problem is to normalize relations in the region to
create a basis for stability. But that's not the
way the Israeli or U.S. leadership sees it, which
is why we're heading for confrontation despite
the U.S. election results.
Seymour Hersh, in a new New Yorker piece,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061127fa_fact
explores the chances of a weakened Bush
administration attacking Iran, and finds them to
be pretty good. And one of the most revealing
aspects of his piece is the fact that the Administration
has been told by U.S. intelligence that there is,
in fact, no evidence of a covert Iranian nuclear
weapons program.
Hersh's writes:
The Administration's planning for a military attack on
Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall
by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A.
challenging the White House's assumptions about how
close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The
C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a
secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel
to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to
the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And in replay of the pre-Iraq war game, the White House
hawks - led by ***** Cheney, who was always far more
dangerous than Rumsfeld [EM] are rejecting the evidence
and probably rallying bureaucratic power in a battle to
override the intel community. Hersh again:
A current senior intelligence official confirmed the
existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the
White House had been hostile to it. The White House's
dismissal of the C.I.A. findings on Iran is widely
known in the intelligence community. Cheney and his
aides discounted the assessment, the former senior
intelligence official said. "They're not looking for a
smoking gun," the official added, referring to specific
intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. "They're
looking for the degree of comfort level they think they
need to accomplish the mission." The Pentagon's Defense
Intelligence Agency also challenged the C.I.A.'s
analysis. "The D.I.A. is fighting the agency's
conclusions, and disputing its approach," the former
senior intelligence official said. Bush and Cheney, he
added, can try to prevent the C.I.A. assessment from
being incorporated into a forthcoming National
Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities,
"but they can't stop the agency from putting it out for
comment inside the intelligence community." The C.I.A.
assessment warned the White House that it would be a
mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret
nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the
Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former
senior intelligence official noted that at the height
of the Cold War the Soviets were equally skilled at
deception and misdirection, yet the American
ntelligence community was readily able to unravel the
details of their long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons
programs. But some in the White House, including in
Cheney's office, had made just such an assumption-that
"the lack of evidence means they must have it," the
former official said.
Iraq all over again, in other words.
Some believe that the Administration is less likely to
go to war after its chastening in the election, and
because Iraq is such a disaster. This is what Richard
Armitage argues to Hersh. Others see the appointment
of Robert Gates to replace Rumsfeld as a sign of the
reassertion of adult supervision. Then again, others
among Hersh's sources fear that Gates could be being
set up to be the new Colin Powell, brought in to add
credibility to a policy train he can't stop.
The neocons are still hard at work, insisting that the
only way Iraq can be salvaged would be to punish Iran.
And their notion that Iran is somehow responsible for
the turmoil in Iraq remains part of administration
conventional wisdom. They're also pushing the idea that
Iran is something Bush will have to do before he leaves
office, trying to push the buttons of his Churchillian
fantasies to goad him into this disastrous course of
action.
But the most dangerous element of the equation, I
believe, is the hysteria being cultivated by the
Israelis. Hersh mentions that Israel is telling the
U.S. they have human intelligence on Iran developing
trigger devices for a nuclear bomb, but U.S.
intelligence is unable to verify these claims. More
worrying, however, is the public campaign being waged
by Israeli leaders. Olmert warns American Jewish leader
that Israel has come to a "pivotal moment" at which its
survival depends on confronting Iran. Bibi Netanyahu
(the Newt Gingrich of Israeli politics; a discredited
crank who manages to grab headlines only by uttering
alarmist rubbish) warns darkly that its 1938 all over again.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1162378393878&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
(Memo to Mark Foley: You ought to try this, it
could be a surefire route to political rehabilitation...)
This fevered scaremongering is all about Israeli
domestic politics, as Aluf Benn explains.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/789144.html
Benn writes:
"A weak prime minister who is dropping in the opinion
polls suddenly found himself faced with Benjamin
Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Effi Eitam, who are
politicizing the issue, and with a public that does
not have faith in the prime minister due to his lack
of security experience," senior officials in Jerusalem
explained. ??"Olmert is under attack for not being
able to deal with the Qassam rockets, so he is under
pressure and is moving away from the low-profile
approach," they added. ??These officials also said
that the Iranian issue had been taken out of their
hands and had been placed on podiums and television
shows. ??Therein lies Olmert's problem: After he made
his bold statements, Netanyahu's warnings that Israel
is faced with a situation similar to that faced by
European Jewry when threatened by Hitler in 1938, and
Shimon Peres' description of Ahmadinejad as "a
Farsi-speaking Hitler," the moment of truth for
Israel's political leadership is nearing. ??The public
will justifiably want to know what has been done to
prevent the threat to its existence posed by Iran, and
to stop the possible mass exodus of Jews from Israel,
as described by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh.
Domestic pressure calling for military action will
intensify. ?
The problem is even more pronounced in the U.S. because
of the default positions on Israel in the political
mainstream, which tend to echo the most hawkish
positions on the Israeli spectrum. Olmert is a weak
character who has shown little grasp of the
requirements of statesmanship, but that doesn't mean
he can't help start a war by insisting that Iran
represents an immediate, mortal threat to Israel - and
making action against Iran the litmus test of American
politicians' loyalty to the Jewish State.
Already you have President Bush saying he'd
"understand" if Israel attacked Iran.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/789940.html
Could this be a replay of the Lebanon war in which
the Americans goaded the Israelis into a military
disaster? Obviously, the Israelis wouldn't act without
a U.S. green light - they'd have to overfly Iraq to get
to Iran, remember.
But Israeli leaders like Netanyahu may be
overestimating Israel's capacity to militarily deal
with the Iran challenge. The intelligence is murky,
and the likely retaliation far more devastating than
anything Iraq could muster when Israel bombed its
facilities in 1981.
No, this would have to be done by the Americans to
ensure success - whatever that means. Sober heads in
Washington have recognized that the path of
confrontation is a disaster, and that the only way to
deal with the challenge a rising Iran represents in
the Middle East is to move to engage with it and
normalize relations. Sober voices in Israel are saying
the same thing.
But as Aluf Benn warns, "The challenge Olmert has set
for himself is not a simple one. But the more his
warnings intensify, the more difficult he will find it
to back down and convince the public that we can live
with an Iranian bomb. Therefore, we can assume that
the confrontation is moving closer."
Olmert showed in the summer that he's a hapless
amateur. Now he's painting himself into a corner in a
game in which the stakes are far higher. And given the
naivete and right-wing ignorance that prevails in
Washington on any matter concerning Israel, I'd say
that means we're entering an exceedingly dangerous
period.
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
http://tonykaron.com/2006/11/20/israels-domestic-political-game-raises-the-danger-of-a-us-iran-war/
--
Recent legislation sponsored by the
"American Israel Public Affairs Committee"
to effect an eventual regime change in Iran.
No energy lobbies pushing this legislation.
***************
FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 105
H R 282 2/3 YEA-AND-NAY 26-Apr-2006
BILL TITLE: To hold the current regime in Iran
accountable for its threatening behavior and to
support a transition to democracy in Iran
YEAS 397
Too numerous to list but include Democrats Jack Murtha,
John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee,
and Lynn Woolsey.
NAYS 21
Tammy Baldwin - Dem
Earl Blumenauer - Dem
Allen Boyd - Dem
Peter DeFazio - Dem
John J. Duncan - Rep
Jeff Flake - Rep
John Hostettler - Rep
Walter B. Jones (NC) - Rep
Dennis Kucinich - Dem
Jim Leach - Rep
Jim McDermott - Dem
Jim McGovern - Dem
Cynthia McKinney - Dem
Jim Oberstar - Dem
Dave Obey - Dem
John Olver - Dem
Ron Paul - Rep
Nick Rahall - Dem
Vic Snyder - Dem
Pete Stark - Dem
Gene Taylor (MS) - Dem
********
Did I mention that this legislation was sponsored by
the "American Israel Public Affairs Committee"
to effect an eventual regime change in Iran ?
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll105.xml
No energy lobbies pushing this legislation.
.
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