Israel Matzav

Betting on Iran

Robin Wright wants to bet that neither the US nor Israel will attack Iran in the coming year. She lays out many things that would have to happen before such an attack would take place.

The United States and the many other parties now consumed with Iran's controversial nuclear program have at least a year of intense diplomacy -- and possibly much longer -- before they even consider military options. And that assumes diplomacy totally collapses, the Iranians can be clearly blamed, and reliable intelligence proves Tehran's program has crossed a critical threshold.

With Iran, the state-of-play is rarely that straightforward. First, Iranians are masters at brinksmanship. Diplomacy always gets dragged out, and even negotiations that appear dead have a way of miraculously reviving -- like an Iranian merchant chasing a customer down the dusty alleyways of Tehran's Grand Bazaar to renegotiate a price and avoid losing the sale.

Iran has called for talks with its Western interlocutors after Ramadan, the holy month of fasting that ends in mid-September. (Last week, The New Yorker published an interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivering that message yet again.) The Obama administration is currently preparing for those talks -- and taking them seriously. The main focus would be an interim deal, which would in turn open the way for comprehensive talks on Iran's nuclear program. If Iran is also serious, this two-phase diplomatic process could go into late 2011 or longer.

Second, the Islamic Republic is also adept at not saying no. If diplomacy ultimately breaks down, Tehran has a long history of making it appear (sometimes accurately) that the impatient West walked away first -- and should be blamed for failure. The perception about who is to blame is critical to the next step -- returning to the United Nations for another resolution imposing more stringent sanctions or endorsing other punitive action. For the United States and its European allies to win backing for meaningful measures -- and not face a Russian or Chinese veto -- Iran must be seen as the guilty party. The shrewd Iranians know that. It's hard to see the Obama administration ordering waves of bombers to strike Iran--or turning a blind eye to an Israeli attack -- without at least trying another round at the United Nations. The last U.N. resolution took a full year to negotiate. The next one could be even tougher.

Third, among the many things being debated in many capitals is just what the threshold for military action should be. Should it be Iran building a bomb, like Pakistan? Or having a quick turn-around capability, like Japan? Or achieving a certain number of centrifuges? Or gaining some murkier level of knowledge? Capitals currently disagree.

Amassing accurate intelligence on any of these questions is also tough, one reason for the delay in a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which was originally due last year. Since 2003, when Iran was forced to admit it had secret facilities, much of U.S. intelligence has been based on deductive reasoning rather than tangible proof. Revelations last fall about another secret facility in Qom to enrich uranium changed that somewhat -- but not on a lot of other fundamental questions about what Iran is really up to. After the intelligence fiasco over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, hopefully the United States will not again undertake an act of war on the basis of guestimates [sic] and questionable sources.

The bottom line: It's not nearly as simple as this [Goldberg's. CiJ] article portrays.

Wright goes on to describe all the players who would then need to be satisfied before such an attack could take place, including another year of diplomacy at the UN to work out yet another set of sanctions. And her article may well reflect the Obama administration's thinking. But it doesn't reflect Israel's. Here's what she says about us:

The Point of No Return" frames the tough decisions ahead from only a single prism -- Israel and its hawkish prime minister. Throughout most of the piece, Operation Strike Iran is portrayed as a virtual fait accompli. Only at the end does it acknowledge that the Israeli army chief of staff has doubts about the usefulness of bombing Iran (as do many in the American military) and that Israeli President Shimon Peres is "uncomfortable" with unilateral action and thinks Israel "can afford to recognize its limitations." Israeli politicians are not naïve about the costs and consequences of attacking Iran, which Goldberg rightly suggests stand "a good chance of changing the Middle East forever." Other Israelis surely accept that the real danger is unleashing an even graver existential threat from a wider array of sources than Israel already faces.

Peres is an 87-year old figurehead who has a rich past but no political power. The Defense Minister is in the process of selecting a new IDF chief of staff, who is more likely to reflect Prime Minister Netanyahu's 'hawkishness' than the current chief of staff whose contract did not receive a routine one-year extension.

And while Wright may be correct about the Obama administration's thinking, there's another factor she did not consider: If we wait to jump through all the hoops she throws out, Iran will be nuclear long before the decision is made.

What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:12 AM