Newsweek is reporting that with Iran approaching a nuclear weapon, President Obama refuses to commit to Israel that he will go to war to stop Iran, and both Israel and the United States are withholding intelligence information from each other on Iran. Newsweek also reports that while the Mossad tried feeling out Obama on Israel going it alone on Iran, Obama regards his reelection as being at least as important as the other prongs of his equation: handling Israel, keeping Iran from going nuclear and keeping world oil prices in check.
Well before he moved into the White House, Barack Obama began talking to Israel about Iran’s nuclear program, and even then there was mistrust. He met in 2008 with several leading Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu—before Netanyahu was elected prime minister—and impressed everyone with his determination to stop Iran from going nuclear. Netanyahu liked much of what he heard, according to a source in his inner circle. What troubled him, however, was that Obama didn’t talk specifically about Israel’s security.
Rather, he discussed Iran in the context of a broader non-proliferation policy. “He showed much command of the issues, even though it was months before he got elected,” says the Netanyahu source. “It was clear that he read and internalized things. But when he spoke about Iran and his opposition to the nuclearization of Iran ... the Israeli factor did not play prominently.”
That's a very accurate read of Obama, as we will see throughout - and have been seeing for the last five years. Obama could care less about Israel. He does care about nuclear non-proliferation. He wishes to avoid a war at all costs - including (God forbid) the destruction of the State of Israel.
According to an American official who was involved, [Mossad Director General] Tamir Pardo [who was in Washington recently. CiJ] wanted to take the pulse of the Obama administration and determine what the consequences would be if Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites over American objections. Pardo raised many questions, according to this source: “What is our posture on Iran? Are we ready to bomb? Would we [do so later]? What does it mean if [Israel] does it anyway?” As it is, Israel has stopped sharing a significant amount of information with Washington regarding its own military preparations.
Israel stopped sharing that information in June - shortly after Obama called on Israel to agree to give the 'Palestinians' everything outside the 1949 armistice lines before going to the table to 'negotiate.' There's a connection - not surprisingly. But let's see how we got to where we are today.
The American intelligence and security establishment had worries of its own about Iran—and about Obama. The generals and spies fretted that the new president might put an end to an elaborate shadow war they had been waging. The Bush administration, together with Israeli counterparts, had engaged in a supersecret campaign to set back Iran’s nuclear development. The program involved what are known in the spy world as “delaying actions” or “foiling operations.” Agents posing as black-market vendors would sell to Iranian buyers nuclear-use items designed to fail under high stress, or items with tracking devices to reveal the locations of secret labs. Software engineers worked to develop sophisticated cyber-warfare programs that could penetrate the computers in Iran’s nuclear plants and cause harm to vital equipment like centrifuges. The spies didn’t want any of that put on hold, and the CIA was particularly worried that Iranian assets they’d worked so hard to cultivate would fade away.
In the first days of the administration, deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes and Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, went to see Tom Donilon, one of Obama’s most trusted aides. They knew the National Security Council was reviewing all presidential covert findings in light of Obama’s promises on the campaign trail, and wanted to know what the president’s intentions were. They asked Donilon not to stop the covert program. Donilon responded that he was not yet fully “read into” the covert files, so Cartwright took his request up the chain—directly to the new president.
Obama listened intently. He understood Cartwright’s concern, and yet his diplomatic strategy hinged on the Iranians believing that American outreach was genuine. The president mulled the question of whether covert activities might compromise his nascent effort to engage with Iran’s leaders. “He was trying to weigh the slowing down of our covert activities—when that meant Iran would be able to reprocess [uranium] faster—against the risk to the outstretched-hand policy,” recalls one adviser. “That was the tricky balance.”
In the end, Obama concluded that he could pursue both—the covert and diplomatic tracks—simultaneously. He told his advisers that a successful campaign to disrupt Iran’s nuclear plans, in fact, would buy more time for diplomacy.
Can you imagine what would have happened if Obama had put a stop to the covert efforts to disrupt Iran's nuclear program?
The United States, moreover, has conducted regular reviews of cooperation with Israel to make sure that American intelligence does not leak into operations that violate U.S. law. “We were always careful about what we said to the Israelis in meetings, and they knew why,” says the Pentagon source. “They knew that if we gave them certain kinds of information we’d run the risk of breaking the law. We often held things back from them—satellite imagery and other kinds of intelligence that could have helped them with their activities.”
In other words, it's not just Israel that is withholding intelligence information: It's the United States too.
From the get-go, Obama had a frosty relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
...
That trust deficit was exacerbated in May of last year when Obama delivered a landmark speech outlining his wider Middle East policy. Netanyahu was preparing to fly to Washington at the time and was surprised when he heard the president state that the 1967 borders should be a basis for negotiating the final frontiers of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu believed he had an understanding with Obama that some Jewish settlements built in areas occupied by Israel in the 1967 war would remain inside Israel, a position detailed in a 2004 letter from President Bush to then–prime minister Ariel Sharon. When Netanyahu finally arrived at the Oval Office, he was furious. At a photo op with the two leaders, Netanyahu began to lecture the president on Israel’s security needs before the gathered journalists.
That incident was treated as a small blip in U.S.-Israel relations at the time. Obama soon clarified his position at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, stating that negotiated borders should be based on the 1967 lines “with mutually agreed swaps.” But resentment persisted. In June Israeli intelligence and military officers stopped discussing any details of their planning, analysis, and training cycles for a possible attack on Iran. Until then cooperation had been close: a regular video teleconference between U.S. and Israeli national-security advisers to discuss Iran was established during the first Netanyahu visit to Washington, in 2009. As one senior Israeli official puts it, “We ... both wanted no surprises.”
For about four months, however, the Israelis went mum. Meetings continued, but they weren’t substantive. “I knew they were upset; when they stopped talking, we said, ‘We got a problem,’?” a senior U.S. intelligence official tells Newsweek. (This was confirmed by a military officer working on the Iran file.) The blackout was mostly lifted by Israel in October. But by that time the Obama administration had already been spooked, and with good reason: it’s possible that Israel could start a war with Iran that the United States would be compelled to finish. (As it is, Israel continues to withhold a “top layer of information” regarding Iran, says the U.S. intelligence official.)
There's a basic difference here between how the US and Israel see this. There's a huge difference in stakes. The United States could suffer a lot of casualties if God forbid it is attacked by Iran, but it's not likely to go anywhere. If Israel is God forbid attacked by Iran, it wouldn't take more than 2-3 nuclear bombs to - God forbid - wipe us out. The issue is existential. And to the extent that the Israeli government - with plenty of justification - doesn't see Obama as totally committed to defending Israel before it is attacked, it is unsurprising that Israel would want to retain for itself the option of going to war to stop Iran. If this were still George W. Bush in the White House - especially between 2002-04 - things might be different.
Israeli officials now insist that Obama has undergone what they regard as a positive evolution in his views on Iran. “The rhetoric from the United States today is different from what it was a year ago,” says an Israeli in Netanyahu’s inner circle. “Today, when you listen to Obama ... you get the feeling the Americans are ready to attack if worse comes to worst.” Another official privy to discussions on Iran at the highest levels in Israel says, “It becomes clearer and clearer that America is on the course of a growing conflict, growing friction, growing risk of a big conflict with Iran.”
I disagree with this completely. I don't think Obama gets it any more now than he did before. The rhetoric is the rhetoric of reelection. If God forbid Israel is wiped out between now and November by Iran, any Republican candidate will wipe the floor with Obama, and Obama knows it. All of the bellicose language coming out of Washington has nothing to do with a sudden realization that Iran is really pursuing nuclear weapons. It has to do with Obama's reelection campaign.
American and Israeli officials attribute Obama’s toughening stance to several factors, among them the Iranian regime’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in June 2009. The discovery the same year of a secretly constructed underground nuclear facility near Qum “was the real turning point,” says former assistant secretary of state P.J. Crowley, who was in office at the time. “Whereas prior to 2009 there was hope that there could be dialogue, after Qum significant action shifted toward the pressure track. We’ve never closed the door to engagement, but clearly after September 2009 there was acceleration of other activities.” Then came the news in January of this year that the facility near Qum was being used to process 20 percent enriched uranium. That announcement, combined with intelligence about weapons development detailed in a November 2011 report by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, led many to see the danger as increasingly clear and present.
That's also nonsense. Obama sat and did nothing to help the pro-democracy protesters (not that it would have mattered - the other side is equally as intent on pushing the nuclear file). And as to Qom, Obama didn't even want to disclose it. Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy - the Prime Minister of England at the time, and the President of France, respectively, forced him to disclose it before the G-20 meeting that year.
Obama is also thinking more broadly—about a possible nuclear-arms race in the region and the reputation of the United States. One of the senior Israeli officials interviewed for this article says he has heard U.S. counterparts express concern that a failure to stop Iran could lead to an eclipse of American power in the Middle East. “You stand to lose a very wide area of influence that was yours for 60 years,” says the official. “If Iran did [develop nukes] in spite of America, how would Obama look? How would America look?”
Again, I disagree. Obama has done everything possible to degrade America militarily and to deny its exceptionalism. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, that's fine with him, so long as he is reelected first and so long as they don't use them on anyone other than Israel. Sadly, that is the truth. And the proof is in the fact that Obama will not commit to Israel that he will stop Iran.
The key question now is how much time is left to achieve a negotiated solution. Israeli officials say that the United States thinks it can afford to wait until Iran is on the very verge of weaponizing, because U.S. forces have the capacity to carry out multiple bombing sorties and cripple the Iranian program at that point. Israel, however, would not be able to carry out such a sustained attack and would need to hit much sooner to be effective—before Iran could shelter much of its program deep underground. One former Israeli official tells Newsweek he heard this explanation directly from Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “If Israel will miss its last opportunity [to attack], then we will have to lean only on the United States, and if the United States decides not to attack, then we will face an Iran with a bomb,” says the former Israeli official. This source says that Israel has asked Obama for assurances that if sanctions fail, he will use force against Iran. Obama’s refusal to provide that assurance has helped shape Israel’s posture: a refusal to promise restraint, or even to give the United States advance notice.
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