At least until the U.S. presidential election, Netanyahu won’t risk angering Obama
(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photos Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Uriel Sinai/Getty Images, and Shutterstock)
Might we wake up one morning between now and November to hear unconfirmed reports of major explosions at Natanz and Fordow, two of Iran’s key uranium-enrichment centers? Or will rumors of a strike trickle out, as they did in September 2007, weeks after the Israeli air force destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor under construction?
No chance.
Although the decision rests in the hands of only two men, and ultimately in Netanyahu’s alone, it can be said with confidence that there will be no Israeli military strike on Iran before America’s Election Day this year. November 6 may not be literally circled on the calendars of Israel’s political and military chiefs, but it might as well be. What makes us so confident?
Officials in the U.S. and Israeli governments told us they believe that President Obama, during private talks at the White House in early March, explicitly requested that Netanyahu not use warplanes or missiles to attack Iran before November. The president may well have used the same words a reporter overheard him saying a few weeks later to his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, at a summit in Seoul: “This is my last election,” Obama said. “After my election I have more flexibility.”
If Netanyahu heeds the president’s request, he’ll be granting Obama time to win a second term without the crisis of a potential oil disruption and Iranian retaliation that might spook American voters enough to question Obama’s foreign-policy credibility.
But will Netanyahu wait? It is no secret that the two leaders do not get along well personally, and the prisms through which they view the Middle East are entirely different. Obama made plain during his first two years in office that he believed the path to progress in the region was by way of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically by halting Israeli settlements and Jewish housing construction in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu, in contrast, warned that Iran is by far the greatest danger confronting the Western world.
The prime minister seems sure that a President Mitt Romney—with whom he’s been friends since their days at the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s—would be supportive of almost anything Israel’s government would decide to do. So, why heed Obama’s request? The simplest answer, of course, is that Obama may be reelected, and Israel’s leader would not want to be branded as the ally who did not cooperate.
There is a more nuanced reality revealed by some Israeli officials who prefer not to be named because their analysis could be seen as undermining Netanyahu-Barak’s tough stand. Some in Jerusalem’s political world, and many in the Israeli military and the intelligence community, say it is highly unlikely that the Jewish state will strike Iran this year for several sound reasons.
First, they say, there is no great urgency. Iran has continued to enrich uranium, but Israeli intelligence estimates suggest that it would take another year—at least—for Iran to assemble its first bomb, and yet another year to fit it into a missile’s warhead.
Second, there is much that Israel can do and is doing, without using its air force and missiles. Israel’s intelligence community, led by the Mossad and the even larger military agency Aman, is enjoying an unprecedentedly strong partnership with the CIA and other Western security agencies. While diplomats led by the United States tried to negotiate with Iran in Istanbul, Baghdad, and Moscow this year, Israel and its covert partners continually pressed ahead with sabotage and other subterfuge meant to delay and divert Iran’s nuclear program.
We now know that the United States and Israel cooperated on highly sophisticated malware called Stuxnet and Flame—and officials we spoke with add that there is more going on that has not been revealed. Israeli responsibility for a string of assassinations in Tehran, aimed at scientists and engineers who worked in their country’s nuclear program, is also barely concealed.
Netanyahu and Barak both have a taste for covert action. They are veterans of an elite and secretive unit of the Israel Defense Forces called Sayeret Matkal that does more than almost anyone can imagine. In the 1970s, Barak was Netanyahu’s commander when soldiers in the unit successfully assaulted a hijacked airliner on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, rescued hostages during other terrorist sieges, slipped into Beirut to assassinate Palestinian militants, and infiltrated Syria to kidnap military officers for use in a prisoner swap.
The two men, now weighing one of the most difficult decisions of their political lives, obviously want to stop Iran’s nuclear program without a military strike or all-out war. They must wonder whether covert action—including, perhaps, more assassinations, sabotage, supplying Iranians with faulty parts, continuing to disrupt their computer programs, and more—can do enough.
Third, most Israeli military analysts, including those in the Israeli air force, agree that Israel’s capabilities are so limited that bombing Iran would only delay its nuclear program, not destroy it. The United States has supplied Israel with 100 GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs in the past six years. But to be much better prepared to strike many targets in Iran, the Israelis want 200 of the improved GBU-31 bombs that have a more precise guidance system. Israel’s air force says it also needs two or three KC-135 midair-refueling tanker planes.
Meir Dagan, the former Mossad espionage chief who is waging an almost one-man campaign against an Israeli military strike, warns that a strike would bolster nationalist pride within Iran and spur the Iranians to rebuild and accelerate their nuclear work. Dagan adds that technological knowledge cannot be wiped out by a series of bombing raids. (On the other hand, in the past Israel has been satisfied with the strategy of achieving a multiyear delay in an enemy’s threatening strategy. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent the air force to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Israeli intelligence believed that it might derail Saddam Hussein’s nuclear project for only two or three years. Still, it was deemed by Israel’s leaders to be well worth doing.)
The prime minister and the defense minister are treating Dagan as an enemy, probably because they are annoyed that his public remarks rob them of the strongest tool they posses to command the world’s attention. Netanyahu and Barak have been using the threat of an Israeli strike as a lever to push the international community into imposing harsher sanctions against Iran. But now, a respected man such as Dagan, who has only recently stepped out of the shadows, calls the military option “stupid,” and other senior figures in military and intelligence agencies are beginning to privately agree with him.
Netanyahu and Barak surely realize the potential dangers stemming from a strike on Iran: Retaliation could include terrorism most anywhere around the globe, a lethal rain of thousands of missiles hitting Israel, and the possibility of an all-out war that could disrupt oil supplies and trigger widespread criticism of Israel.
They also know the dangers of accepting Iran as a nuclear-armed state. Almost without exception, Israeli politicians, military leaders, and intelligence chiefs say that their country cannot tolerate living within a thousand miles of a radical enemy armed with nuclear bombs. There is too much of a chance, they argue, that the Iranians would actually use them; or, at the least, that Iran would be propelled into an unchallengeable role as a regional super-power.
The Iranians may not budge, and a military attack may well happen eventually. But it is far more likely that an American president, either Obama or Romney, will be the one to order attacks aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities after the election. That would be a last resort after exhausting options like covert actions, harsher sanctions, and diplomacy. Whatever their disagreements on tactics, on timing, and on Palestinian issues, U.S. and Israeli leaders are united in their conclusion that the world cannot comfortably live in the shadow of a nuclear-armed Iran.
***
Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent, and Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist, are co-authors of Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars. They blog at IsraelSpy.com.
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Middle East
Why the U.S. Could Bomb Iran
The White House’s line—that a strike can only delay the program—is an attempt to downplay our military capability
(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photo Shutterstock,
and, left to right, Uriel Sinai/AFP/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty
Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, and Ariel Hermoni/Israeli
Ministry of Defence via Getty Images.)
In late May, at a major security conference in Tel Aviv, former Obama Pentagon official Michelle Flournoy assured
her mostly Israeli audience that a military strike against Iran was
very much on the table. But she hastened to add that “any military
strike in its most wildly successful incarnation” would set back Iran’s
nuclear weapons program only one to three years.
That one-to-three year caveat has become more than an estimate. Over the past several years, as Defense Sec. Leon Panetta, his predecessor Robert Gates, former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, and other officials have recited it at press conferences and think tanks, it has become received wisdom.
But is it true? It’s hard to believe that the United States lacks the military might to destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program—if not in one campaign, then in a series of campaigns to ensure that it doesn’t get the bomb.
“I always felt the time frame was very conservative,” (Ret.) Gen. Jack Keane, former vice chief of staff of the United States Army, said. “My judgment tells me that if we did something as devastating as we could do, taking down their major sites, which also means their engineers and scientists, I think the setback would be greater than five years. I don’t like to read too much into people’s motivations, but at times when we don’t want to do something, we build a case in terms of our interpretation that it is too hard or it isn’t worth the payoff.”
Indeed, the assessment that Iran’s program could only be delayed began with the George W. Bush White House, as former CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden recently explained. It’s hard not to conclude that the assessment was driven by political calculations: Because Bush could not embark on a third theater of conflict in the Middle East, it was convenient to say a military strike would not make much difference.
In contrast, the Obama Administration has pulled out of Iraq and will soon pull out of Afghanistan. Yet the White House continues to repeat the trope that the program can, at best, be delayed a few years. Just as politics informed the Bush White House’s insistence on the delay-not-destroy mantra, politics of a different sort are informing this White House: This administration is conducting a public diplomacy campaign with the purpose of undermining the capability of a U.S. attack because the administration has no intention of striking.
“It’s not unknown for folks in the military to inflate difficulties in order to not do it,” a former Pentagon official told me. “The assessment may reflect the idea that the military has not much appetite to be involved in the Middle East if they don’t have to. In reality, no one knows how long a military strike could set back the Iranians.”
Part of the assessment describing only a one-to-three-year delay, the official explained, is based on the fact that nuclear facilities are spread out across Iran and buried deeper than those at the Osirak reactor in Iraq and al-Kibar in Syria, both of which the Israelis successfully destroyed in one day. A strike against Iran might last a month. Then there’s the notion that you can’t bomb the scientific know-how that produced the program. And yet, the former official noted, citing the campaign of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists, “you can kill an awful lot of it.”
Christopher Ford, a former State Department official who worked on nuclear proliferation issues, told me that the evidence on which the standard assessment is based could have various loopholes. “There are so many assumptions built into the idea that it’s only one to three years,” said Ford. “For instance, it’s true to a degree that you can’t really get rid of the knowledge, but the nuclear-weapons scientists themselves aren’t the only link in chain. There’s other human capital that might be part of your destruction package, like some minor metallurgy specialists, who maybe aren’t working on the most sophisticated parts of the nuclear program, but without it they can’t have one.”
Obama officials aren’t telegraphing any of this. Instead, top intelligence and military officials, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Adm. Mullen, keep saying that the Iranians can be only minimally delayed. Keane, the retired four-star general, believes that’s because the White House, as much as it claims it won’t allow Iran to get a bomb, isn’t willing to strike. “I don’t believe this administration has any intention, ever, of attacking Iran,” says Keane. “I don’t believe it, the Israelis don’t believe it, and the Iranians don’t believe it.”
But Uzi Arad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, strongly disagrees. “I don’t belong to the camp of skeptics who have little faith in the president taking action if necessary,” he said. “I think the president has recognized, for reasons that have to do with U.S. national security, economic interests, and his conviction regarding proliferation, that if all other measures fail to stop Iran from going nuclear he has to take coercive action.”
Arad said he sees no contradiction in the Obama administration’s stated policy (Iran can’t get a bomb) and its caveats (an attack will only delay the nuclear program). “The declared objective, as the president has termed it, is that the U.S. is determined to prevent Iran from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons,” said Arad. “It is inconceivable that the American military would say ‘we can strike but we cannot accomplish our objective.’ The assessment of one to three years assumes one blow but that is not what the reasonable American option is, which calls for repeated attacks if the Iranians restart the program. It is unreasonable to assume that after the strikes the U.S. would sit pat and Iran would rebuild. It’s absolutely imperative that if the U.S. strikes, its posture should be, ‘Dear Iranians, please do not proceed to rebuild the program, or we will strike again.’”
Ford, the former State Department official, pointed to a number of variables that might affect Iran’s ability to reconstitute its nuclear program in the event of an American strike. “If you’re just talking about the various nuclear facilities and bombing those things once, then it’s a pretty straightforward calculation: How long would it take to rebuild those things? But those estimates would change under a number of different circumstances. For instance, would you keep sanctions on Iran after attacking? Then it’s a different calculation.” He sees Iran’s air defenses as a key variable. “If you go after the nuclear program you need to go after how they defend themselves. If you succeed in degrading their defenses, it’s not the sort of thing that can be immediately repaired, and Iran has to choose whether they would prioritize reconstituting their nuclear program or rebuilding their air defenses. And if you’ve destroyed a lot of their potential delivery system and missile-production infrastructure, they might want to rebuild that too, which might be more expensive than replacing the nuclear weapons effort itself.”
Most important, Ford added, “there is the question of whether you’re willing and able to go back. That is, to hit reconstitution efforts on an ongoing basis. If it’s not a ‘snapshot’ hit but a campaign—that can change the reconstitution equation too.”
Perhaps so, but long before the United States decides to attack Iran, we need to communicate our seriousness to the regime. “There is only one guy you need to convince here to voluntarily give up the nuclear program and that is the Supreme Leader Khameini,” Jack Keane argues. “He must know we are dead serious about a military strike, as a last resort, and this is not just about the nuclear facilities—their military will be decapitated. This is the U.S. military. Believe me, we will destroy you.”
***
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.
That one-to-three year caveat has become more than an estimate. Over the past several years, as Defense Sec. Leon Panetta, his predecessor Robert Gates, former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, and other officials have recited it at press conferences and think tanks, it has become received wisdom.
But is it true? It’s hard to believe that the United States lacks the military might to destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program—if not in one campaign, then in a series of campaigns to ensure that it doesn’t get the bomb.
“I always felt the time frame was very conservative,” (Ret.) Gen. Jack Keane, former vice chief of staff of the United States Army, said. “My judgment tells me that if we did something as devastating as we could do, taking down their major sites, which also means their engineers and scientists, I think the setback would be greater than five years. I don’t like to read too much into people’s motivations, but at times when we don’t want to do something, we build a case in terms of our interpretation that it is too hard or it isn’t worth the payoff.”
Indeed, the assessment that Iran’s program could only be delayed began with the George W. Bush White House, as former CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden recently explained. It’s hard not to conclude that the assessment was driven by political calculations: Because Bush could not embark on a third theater of conflict in the Middle East, it was convenient to say a military strike would not make much difference.
In contrast, the Obama Administration has pulled out of Iraq and will soon pull out of Afghanistan. Yet the White House continues to repeat the trope that the program can, at best, be delayed a few years. Just as politics informed the Bush White House’s insistence on the delay-not-destroy mantra, politics of a different sort are informing this White House: This administration is conducting a public diplomacy campaign with the purpose of undermining the capability of a U.S. attack because the administration has no intention of striking.
“It’s not unknown for folks in the military to inflate difficulties in order to not do it,” a former Pentagon official told me. “The assessment may reflect the idea that the military has not much appetite to be involved in the Middle East if they don’t have to. In reality, no one knows how long a military strike could set back the Iranians.”
Part of the assessment describing only a one-to-three-year delay, the official explained, is based on the fact that nuclear facilities are spread out across Iran and buried deeper than those at the Osirak reactor in Iraq and al-Kibar in Syria, both of which the Israelis successfully destroyed in one day. A strike against Iran might last a month. Then there’s the notion that you can’t bomb the scientific know-how that produced the program. And yet, the former official noted, citing the campaign of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists, “you can kill an awful lot of it.”
Christopher Ford, a former State Department official who worked on nuclear proliferation issues, told me that the evidence on which the standard assessment is based could have various loopholes. “There are so many assumptions built into the idea that it’s only one to three years,” said Ford. “For instance, it’s true to a degree that you can’t really get rid of the knowledge, but the nuclear-weapons scientists themselves aren’t the only link in chain. There’s other human capital that might be part of your destruction package, like some minor metallurgy specialists, who maybe aren’t working on the most sophisticated parts of the nuclear program, but without it they can’t have one.”
Obama officials aren’t telegraphing any of this. Instead, top intelligence and military officials, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Adm. Mullen, keep saying that the Iranians can be only minimally delayed. Keane, the retired four-star general, believes that’s because the White House, as much as it claims it won’t allow Iran to get a bomb, isn’t willing to strike. “I don’t believe this administration has any intention, ever, of attacking Iran,” says Keane. “I don’t believe it, the Israelis don’t believe it, and the Iranians don’t believe it.”
But Uzi Arad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, strongly disagrees. “I don’t belong to the camp of skeptics who have little faith in the president taking action if necessary,” he said. “I think the president has recognized, for reasons that have to do with U.S. national security, economic interests, and his conviction regarding proliferation, that if all other measures fail to stop Iran from going nuclear he has to take coercive action.”
Arad said he sees no contradiction in the Obama administration’s stated policy (Iran can’t get a bomb) and its caveats (an attack will only delay the nuclear program). “The declared objective, as the president has termed it, is that the U.S. is determined to prevent Iran from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons,” said Arad. “It is inconceivable that the American military would say ‘we can strike but we cannot accomplish our objective.’ The assessment of one to three years assumes one blow but that is not what the reasonable American option is, which calls for repeated attacks if the Iranians restart the program. It is unreasonable to assume that after the strikes the U.S. would sit pat and Iran would rebuild. It’s absolutely imperative that if the U.S. strikes, its posture should be, ‘Dear Iranians, please do not proceed to rebuild the program, or we will strike again.’”
Ford, the former State Department official, pointed to a number of variables that might affect Iran’s ability to reconstitute its nuclear program in the event of an American strike. “If you’re just talking about the various nuclear facilities and bombing those things once, then it’s a pretty straightforward calculation: How long would it take to rebuild those things? But those estimates would change under a number of different circumstances. For instance, would you keep sanctions on Iran after attacking? Then it’s a different calculation.” He sees Iran’s air defenses as a key variable. “If you go after the nuclear program you need to go after how they defend themselves. If you succeed in degrading their defenses, it’s not the sort of thing that can be immediately repaired, and Iran has to choose whether they would prioritize reconstituting their nuclear program or rebuilding their air defenses. And if you’ve destroyed a lot of their potential delivery system and missile-production infrastructure, they might want to rebuild that too, which might be more expensive than replacing the nuclear weapons effort itself.”
Most important, Ford added, “there is the question of whether you’re willing and able to go back. That is, to hit reconstitution efforts on an ongoing basis. If it’s not a ‘snapshot’ hit but a campaign—that can change the reconstitution equation too.”
Perhaps so, but long before the United States decides to attack Iran, we need to communicate our seriousness to the regime. “There is only one guy you need to convince here to voluntarily give up the nuclear program and that is the Supreme Leader Khameini,” Jack Keane argues. “He must know we are dead serious about a military strike, as a last resort, and this is not just about the nuclear facilities—their military will be decapitated. This is the U.S. military. Believe me, we will destroy you.”
***
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.
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