Israel Matzav

To have a chance at peace, stop Iran

Both Alan Dershowitz and Robert Satloff make the argument that the Obama administration needs to stop Iran's drive for nuclear weapons in order to have a chance of making peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians.' Here's Dershowitz.

The White House could also try to persuade the Saudis to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu to Saudi Arabia, as The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has suggested. In order to get the Saudis to do this, the White House would have to offer something to the Saudis as well. There is only one thing that the White House can offer both the Saudis and the Israelis: that is an iron-clad commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Such a commitment would do more to assure peace in the Mideast than any other single action by any party.

The real question that Israelis and Saudis are asking is whether the Obama Administration is actually willing to enforce a realistic "red line" that the Iranians will not be allowed to cross.

If the Iranians are allowed to develop deliverable nuclear weapons, the prospects for peace in the Middle East diminish considerably. Even if the Israelis and Palestinians were able to come to some agreement, the Iranians--operating under a nuclear umbrella--could derail any peace by encouraging their surrogates, Hezbollah and Hamas, to make life impossible for Israelis. The Palestinians cannot offer the Israelis a full peace, even if they wanted to. All they could do is assure peace on Israel's eastern border, but not on its volatile northern or western borders. An emboldened Iran, armed with nuclear weapons, would do everything in its power to scuttle any peace with Israel.

And here's Satloff.

Historically, the United States has made its most significant progress in Middle East peacemaking when it operated from a pre-eminent position in the region. That's what convinced Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to chuck the Soviets and turn to Washington to engineer his peace with Israel in the 1970s; it is also what convinced Arabs and Israelis to start the modern era of peacemaking at the Madrid peace conference, following the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait.

But this iteration of peace talks, which will resume on Sept. 14 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, begins with many in the Middle East questioning American strength, not deferring to it. This change has potentially negative implications for our ability to help Arabs and Israelis forge peace.

...

But the real test of whether the president can make progress toward clinching a deal is whether he uses the next year to bring clarity to the regional challenge that poses the most serious consequences for Middle East security and the overall U.S. position in the region: Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

To his credit, the president seems to have abandoned the loopy thesis that Arab-Israeli peace is a prerequisite for resolving the Iranian nuclear problem. But dropping a bad idea is not a strategy. Defining a strategy begins with internalizing the fact that Iran's shadow already looms large over the Middle East and that, with a nuclear umbrella, it will loom larger still. It means recognizing that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are less likely to take proverbial "risks for peace" when an ascendant Iran is able to withstand U.S.-led sanctions and persist with its nuclear weapons program. And it means accepting the reality that the growth of Iran's influence in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip means that it is less likely that Arabs and Israelis are both able to live with a nuclear-armed Iran and live at peace with each other.

If the president is truly committed to a historic peace, he will need to recognize that stopping Iran's nuclear march is an American interest and doing so is an American responsibility. That means resisting the temptation to let Israel address this problem on its own or, even worse, compelling Israel to accept U.S. strategic guarantees and acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran. Both of these outcomes involve shirking U.S. commitments to prevent Iran's nuclear progress and would damage broader U.S. interests, including the ability to broker Arab-Israeli peace. They would also likely convince Israel that it is better off keeping whatever tangible assets it currently has -- such as territory -- rather than rely on the intangibles of American guarantees. The Arab parties, meanwhile, would only grow to believe that the United States only knows how to make commitments, not to fulfill them.

In recent months, the president's Iran policy has certainly moved in the right direction. He deserves applause for pushing through sets of mutually reinforcing sanctions regimes, which seem to have had some impact inside Tehran.

But few experts believe that sanctions, as creatively designed as they may be, will bite hard enough to compel Iran to suspend its march toward a military nuclear capability. That leaves U.S. military power as the last repository of credibility for the claim, stated frequently by the president and his advisors, that the United States is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Obama seems oblivious to the fact that the linkage meme he was pushing for his first 15 months in office is precisely the reverse of what he thought it was. It's not that a settlement between Israel and the 'Palestinians' will allow action against Iran as Obama argued. Rather, Iran has to be neutralized for there to be any chance of an Israeli - 'Palestinian' peace moving ahead. There is no indication that Obama has accepted this reality.

Since Congress forced him to impose sanctions on Iran that went beyond those enacted by the UN Security Council, Obama's Iran policy - to the extent that there is one - seems to have gone on auto-pilot. There is no indication that Obama is willing to use force to stop Iran. In fact, the recent withdrawal from Iraq, and the announcement of a deadline for beginning a withdrawal from Afghanistan, make the Obama administration look even more like it is withdrawing into itself and it is unwilling to unleash American power.

Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to force a settlement between Israel and the 'Palestinians' without first establishing his own credentials to make that settlement a reality. I don't believe that peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians' is going to happen in our lifetimes in any event, but there is no chance of even coming close to an agreement on peace unless Iran is first stopped.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:06 AM