October 26, 2012
Monday's US presidential debate on foreign policy came and went. And we are none the wiser for it.
Not
surprisingly, at the height of the campaign season, neither US
President Barack Obama nor his Republican challenger Gov. Mitt Romney
was interested in revealing his plans for the next four years.
But
from what was said, we can be fairly certain that a second Obama term
will involve no departure from his foreign policy in his current term in
office.
As far as Iran and its nuclear weapons
program is concerned, that policy has involved a combination of
occasional tough talk and a relentless attempt to appease the mullahs.
While Obama denied The New York Times report from last weekend
that he has agreed to carry out new bilateral negotiations with Iran
after the US presidential elections, his administration has acknowledged
that it would be happy to have such talks if they can be arranged.
As
for Romney, his statements of support for tougher sanctions, including
moving to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the crime of
incitement of genocide were certainly welcome.
But they were also rather out of date, given the lateness of the hour.
If
there was ever much to recommend it, the "sanction Iran into abandoning
its nuclear weapons" policy is no longer a relevant option. The
timetables are too short.
On the other hand,
Romney's identification of Iran as the gravest national security threat
facing the US made clear that he understands the severity of the threat
posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program.
And
consequently, if Romney defeats Obama on November 6, it is likely that
on January 21, 2013, the US will adopt a different policy towards Iran.
The
question for Israel now is whether any of this matters. If Romney is
elected and adopts a new policy towards Iran, what if any operational
significance will this policy shift have for Israel?
The short answer is very little.
To
understand why this is the case we need to consider two issues: The
time it would take for a new US policy to be implemented; and the time
Iran requires to become a nuclear power.
In the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001, jihadist attacks on the US,
then-president George W. Bush faced no internal opposition to
overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The US military and
intelligence arms all supported the operation. Congress supported the
operation. The American public supported the operation. The UN supported
the mission.
And still, it took the US four
weeks to plan and launch Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on
October 7, 2001. That is, under optimal conditions, the US needed nearly
a month to respond to the largest foreign attack on the US mainland
since the War of 1812.
Then of course there was
Operation Iraqi Freedom which officially began on March 20, 2003, with
the US-British ground invasion of Iraq from Kuwait.
Bush
and his advisers began seriously considering overthrowing Saddam
Hussein's regime in the spring of 2002. They met with resistance from
the US military. They met with a modicum of political opposition in
Congress, and more serious opposition in the media. Moreover, they met
with harsh opposition from France and Russia and other key players at
the UN and in the international community. So, too, they met with harsh
opposition from senior UN officials.
It took
the administration until November 2002 to get the UN Security Council to
pass Resolution 1441 which found Iraq in material breach of the
cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. The US and Britain began
prepositioning ground forces and war materiel in Kuwait ahead of a
ground invasion that month. It took more than four months for the
Americans and the British to complete the forward deployment of their
forces in Kuwait.
During those long months,
other parties, unsympathetic to the US, Britain and their aims had ample
opportunity to make their own preparations to deny the US and Britain
the ability to win the war quickly and easily and so avoid the
insurgency that ensued in the absence of a clear victory. So, too, the
four months the US required to ready for war enabled Iran to plan and
begin executing its plan to suck the US into a prolonged proxy war with
its surrogates from al-Qaida and Hezbollah protégés.
A
CLEAR Anglo-American victory would have involved the location,
presentation and destruction of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
And this Saddam denied them. By the time US ground forces finally
arrived, despite massive telltale signs that such weapons had been in
Iraq until very recently, no smoking gun was found.
In
the long lead up to the US invasion, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon
warned that satellite data indicated that Iraq was transporting its
chemical weapons arsenal to Syria. Sharon's warnings fell on deaf ears.
So, too, a report by a Syrian journalist that WMD had been transferred
to Syria was ignored.
According to a detailed
report by Ryan Mauro at PJMedia.com from June 2010, after the fall of
Saddam's regime, the Iraq Survey Group, charged with assessing the
status of Iraq's WMD arsenal, received numerous credible reports that
the chemical weapons had been sent to Syria before the invasion.
The
stream of reports about the pre-invasion transfer of Iraq's WMD to
Syria have continued to intermittently surface since the outbreak of the
Syrian civil war last year.
In short, at a
minimum, the time the US required to mount its operation in Iraq enabled
Saddam to prepare the conditions to deny America the ability to achieve
a clear victory.
THIS BRINGS us to Iran. In
the event that Romney is elected to the presidency, upon entering office
he would face a military leadership led by Gen. Martin Dempsey that has
for four years sought to minimize the danger that Iran's nuclear
weapons program poses to the US. Dempsey has personally employed
language to indicate that he believes an Israeli preemptive strike
against Iran's nuclear weapons sites would be an illegal act of
aggression.
Romney would face intelligence,
diplomatic and military establishments that at a minimum have been
complicit in massive leaks of Israeli strike options against Iran and
that have so far failed to present credible military options for a US
strike against Iran's uranium enrichment sites and other nuclear
installations.
He would face a hostile media
establishment that firmly and enthusiastically supports Obama's policy
of relentless appeasement and has sought to discredit as a warmonger and
a racist every politician who has tried to make the case that Iran's
nuclear weapons program constitutes an unacceptable threat to US
national security.
Then, too, Romney would face
a wounded Democratic base, controlled by politicians who have refused
to cooperate with Republicans since 2004.
And
he would face an electorate that has never heard a cogent case for
military action against Iran. (Although, with the goodwill with which
the American public usually greets its new presidents, this last
difficulty would likely be the least of his worries.)
At
the UN, Romney would face the same gridlock faced by his two
predecessors on Iran. Russia and China would block UN Security Council
action against the mullocarcy.
AS FOR the Arab
world, whereas when Obama came into office in 2009, the Sunni Arab world
was united in its opposition to a nuclear-armed Iran, today Muslim
Brotherhood-ruled Egypt favors Iran more than it favors the US. Arguably
only Saudi Arabia would actively support an assault on Iran's nuclear
weapons sites. All the other US allies have either switched sides, or
like Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain are too weak to offer any open
assistance or political support. For its part, Iraq is already acting as
Iran's satrapy, allowing Iran to transfer weapons to Bashar Assad's
henchmen through its territory.
All of this
means that as was the case in Iraq, it would likely take until at least
the summer of 2013, if not the fall, before a Romney administration
would be in a position to take any military action against Iran's
nuclear installations.
And it isn't only US
military campaigns that take a long time to organize. It also takes a
long time for US administrations to change arm sales policies.
For
instance, if a hypothetical Romney administration wished to supply
Israel with certain weapons systems that would make an Israeli strike
against Iran's nuclear installations more successful, it could take
months for such deals to be concluded, approved by Congress, and then
executed.
This then brings us to the question of where will Iran's nuclear weapons program likely stand by next summer?
In
his speech before the UN General Assembly last month, Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu said that by next spring or at the latest next summer
Iran will have reached the final stage of uranium enrichment and will
be able to acquire sufficient quantities of bomb-grade uranium for a
nuclear weapon within a few months or even a few weeks.
Netanyahu
said that the last opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons will be before it reaches the final stage of uranium enrichment -
that is, by the spring. At that point, a hypothetical Romney
administration will have been in office for mere months. A new national
security leadership will just be coming into its own.
It
is extremely difficult to imagine that a new US administration would be
capable of launching a preemptive attack against Iran's nuclear
installations at such an early point in its tenure in office.
Indeed,
it is hard to see how such a new administration would be able to offer
Israel any material support for an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear
installations by next spring.
So this leaves
us with Israel. Over the past several weeks, there has been a spate of
reports indicating that Israel's military and intelligence
establishments forced Netanyahu to take a step back from rhetorical
brinksmanship on Iran. Our commanders are reportedly dead set against
attacking Iran without US support and still insist that Israel can and
must trust the Americans to take action to prevent Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons.
There is great plausibility to
these reports for a number of reasons. The intelligence and military
brass have for years suffered from psychological dependence of the US
and believe that Israel's most important strategic interest is to ensure
US support for the country. Then, too, in the event that an Israeli
strike takes place against the backdrop of a larger military
confrontation with Iran's proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, Israel
would likely require rapid resupply of arms to ensure its ability to
fend off its enemies.
But when we consider the
political realities of the US - in the event that Obama is reelected or
in the event that Romney takes the White House - it is clear that Israel
will remain the only party with the means - such as they are - and the
will to strike Iran's nuclear installations.
Israel
is the only country that can prevent this genocidal regime with
regional and global ambitions from acquiring the means to carry out its
goals.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post,
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