Did Mitt Romney's hawkish posture in Israel last week increase the
likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran? Unlikely. Will Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta's visit to Israel to discuss "various
contingencies and how we would respond" hasten the prospect of
confrontation over Iran's nuclear program? Probably not. And will Iran
capitulate in response to the increasingly painful economic sanctions
tightened by the Obama Administration on Tuesday? Don't bet on it.
Although surprises are always possible, all indications are that the
Iran nuclear standoff will remain locked in an increasingly tense
stalemate at least through November's U.S. presidential election.
The Obama Administration is tightening the sanctions chokehold in the
hope that declining living standards in Iran will force its leadership
to accept Western terms for resolving the nuclear dispute. But there's
no sign of Iran capitulating, and the two sides negotiating positions
are so far apart that they're able to agree only to keep open a
perfunctory channel of communication. Iran appears willing to
compromise, but only in exchange for compromises from the Western side
that President Obama is unable to make in an election year. Instead,
he offers Israel and its supporters on Capitol Hill ever-tighter
sanctions, and a promise to take military action to stop Iran if it
tried to build a nuclear weapon. (Currently it is assembling the
necessary infrastructure, but has not moved to build a weapon, nor
made a decision to do so.)
In a familiar ritual, U.S. officials were last week again pleading for
Israel to allow more time for sanctions to impact on Iran, while
Israeli leaders expressed their customary skepticism of sanctions and
diplomacy in changing Tehran's calculations -- always threatening to
take matters into their own hands by bombing Iran. Whereas Obama has
vowed to use force only if Iran tries to build a nuclear weapon,
Israel insists that Iran can't be allowed to possess the capability to
do so -- a capability it already has. Thus the ongoing tension over
timetables and red lines between the US and Israel, with Netanyahu
insisting that time is running out while Obama insists that, in fact,
there's still plenty of time to resolve the issue through sanctions
and diplomacy.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, for example, has insisted that Iran's
nuclear program can't be allowed to enter a "zone of immunity" where,
even if it hasn't moved to weaponize nuclear material, it has placed
enough of its nuclear infrastructure inside the hardened facility at
Fordow, buried deep in a mountainside near Qom, to put it beyond the
reach of Israel's aerial-bombardment capabilities. Although the "zone
of immunity" is a fuzzy indicator with no time line attached, the
implication is that Israel will have to strike before Iran reaches
that point or else forfeit its own military option for dealing with
Tehran's nuclear program.
Romney, looking for votes and donations from pro-Israel Americans,
raised eyebrows when one of his aides said that if elected, Romney
would "respect" an Israeli decision to take unilateral military action
against Iran. But Israel is not looking for the US to respect a
decision to unilaterally strike Iran; it needs the US to do the job.
Despite the posturing of Netanyahu and Barak, it's well known that
Israel's military capacities are substantially more limited than those
of the US, and that the sustained barrage that would be required to
delay Iran's nuclear program for even a couple of years might be
beyond Israel's capacities. Even with US support, Israel would be
isolated diplomatically if it launched a war with Iran, and the
sanctions and other follow-up mechanisms required to prevent Iran
building nuclear weapons following a strike would likely crumble.
Israeli public opinion, moreover, is opposed to a strike on Iran
unless Washington was taking the lead. And Israel's military chiefs
reportedly also view taking military action at this stage as a
mistake.
But with little prospect of a diplomatic breakthrough any time soon,
Obama is relying simply on escalating sanctions. Next year may be a
better moment for diplomacy. The problem, of course, is that Iran
responds to the pain of sanctions not by capitulating, but through
provocations designed to create a crisis. If that happens in an
election year, all bets are off.
