This morning President Obama will speak to the American Israel
Political Action Committee’s annual conference, a prelude to his
meeting tomorrow with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
As this
backgrounder from Haaretz on the diplomatic
preparations for tomorrow’s meeting makes clear, what the Israelis
want from Obama is an explicit statement about what redlines would
trigger a US attack on Iran. As
Omri Ceren explains at Commentary — despite Obama’s
suggestion to the contrary in an interview this week — the White
House has refused to give the Israelis assurances that they’ll take
military action if it’s determined that it’s necessary to stop the
Iranian nuclear program. Israeli policy in recent years (in
addition to covert attacks on the Iranian nuclear that have pretty
clearly been directed in part by Mossad) has been to suggest that
they might bomb Iran at any time. That strategy has been
diplomatically successful, as is demonstrated most clearly by the
imposition of European sanctions, but its efficacy is running out,
both because of the boy-who-cried-wolf factor (there are only so
many times one can make a threat and be taken seriously) and
because Israeli air power is simply not extensive enough to do much
damage to the Iranian nuclear program through a strike after this
year.
Even this year, Israel can only hit a few targets, and it’s not
at all clear that the nuclear program would be delayed by all that
much. The consequences would be serious; the Iranian government
could lash out in unpredictable ways, drive up the price of oil,
and so forth.
This, from the New York Times, gives a flavor of the
possible blowback just for Israel:
A former Israeli official said the best way to think about
retaliation against Israel was through a formula he called “1991
plus 2006 plus Buenos Aires times 3 or 5.” The reference was to
three instances in the last two decades when Israel came under
attack: the Scud missiles sent by Saddam Hussein into Israel in
1991 during the first gulf war; the 3,000 rockets fired at Israel
by Hezbollah during their 2006 war; and the attacks on the Israeli
Embassy and a Jewish center in Argentina in the early 1990s. Those
attacks each killed 100 to 200 people, wounded scores more and
caused several billion dollars of property damage. Hundreds of
thousands of Israelis in the north had to be evacuated from their
homes to bomb shelters or further south during the 2006 war.
Still, from the Israeli perspective, even delaying the Iranian
march to nuclearization is worth the consequences if push comes to
shove; no Israeli Prime Minister can allow a regime that talks
about wiping the Jewish State off the face of the Earth to develop
the capability to do so. But can Israel be sure that the US —
which has the military might to do much more serious damage than
Israel could, and thus plenty of time before that becomes a
necessary move — is really, truly unwilling to allow Iran to
nuclear?
Many at AIPAC are
hoping that, in this morning’s speech, Obama will lay out the
kind of explicit statements that would give the Israelis
confidence, and avert a war in the immediate term. Stay tuned for
an assessment later today of whether he’s done that.
