Foreign Policy In Focus

In a disturbing interview with CNN about Iran, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said:

"My biggest worry is they will miscalculate our resolve."

What Iran really has trouble calculating is how Western signatories of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, such as the United States, can insist that Iran refrain from proliferation (one of the requirements of a signatory such as Iran) while itself refusing to initiate substantive disarmament (another requirement of a signatory). In other words, people who live in glass disarmament houses shouldn't throw nonproliferation stones.

Gen. Dempsey also said:

… there is no guarantee that Israel will give the United States warning if it decides to attack Iran. But America is sharing intelligence with Israel, Dempsey said.

"We are trying to establish some confidence on the part of the Israelis that we recognize their concerns and are collaborating with them on addressing them," he said.

First, one can't help but think that the general is trying to weave a spell of plausible deniability in case Israel attacks unilaterally. But the alacrity with which the attack becomes multilateral breaks the spell. Who really believes that as soon as Israel gets in over its head and its soil is retaliated against by tens of thousands of missiles that America won't come to its rescue?

Of course, since Israel and the United States are BFFs (Bickering Friends Forever), that's to be expected. That's why the collaboration with Israel on its concerns about Iran should entail warning Israel in terms that couldn't be more uncertain against attacking Iran.

By now you may have seen the video of the drone that crashed in Iran.  Is it credible? The New York Times reports:

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a consulting firm, said in response to a query from CNN about the video images that the aircraft did not look the way he would expect it to look after a crash, fueling suspicion that the Iranians may have displayed a mock-up.

Adam Rawnsley at Wired's Danger Room cautions:

The footage of the drone released Thursday by Iran seems to show an intact aircraft that seems to roughly conform to the RQ-170′s dimensions and appearance. But it’s a little fishy for an aircraft that would have fallen hundreds or thousands of feet to appear without so much as a scratch on it, as this one does.

But the pride that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh displays in the aircraft is tough to find. Meanwhile, reports the Washington Post, U.S. officials maintained that the incident was

… not a fatal blow to the stealth drone program. … the CIA had used technologies that it could afford to have exposed. Among the main concerns is that Iran could use an intact aircraft to examine the vulnerabilities in stealth technology and take countermeasures with its air defense systems.

According to the Israeli intelligence site Debka, Israel is even more alarmed. (All emphasis added).

The Obama administration's decision … not to send US commando or air units into Iran to retrieve or destroy the secret RQ-170 stealth drone which fell into Iranian hands has strengthened the hands of the Israeli faction which argues the case for striking Iran's nuclear installations without waiting for the Americans to make their move.

Wait, how did Debka come to that conclusion? It explains.

Senior Israeli diplomatic and security officials who followed the discussion in Washington concluded that, by failing to act, the administration has left Iran not only with the secrets of the Sentinel's stealth coating, its sensors and cameras, but also with the data stored in its computer cells on targets marked out by the US and/or Israeli for attack.

Hence

… military sources say that this knowledge compels the US and Israel to revise their plans of attack for aborting the Iranian nuclear program. Like every clandestine weapons system, the RQ-170 had a self-destruct mechanism to prevent its secrets spilling out to the enemy in the event of a crash or capture. This did not happen.

What's more, the

… Obama administration's internal discussion on how to handle the loss of the high-value reconnaissance drone was followed tensely in Jerusalem. The decision it took against mounting a mission to recover or destroy the top-secret Sentinel was perceived in Israel as symptomatic of a wider decision to call off the covert war America has been conducting for some months against Iran's drive for a nuclear bomb – at least until the damage caused by RQ-170 incident is fully assessed.

It's difficult to understand how Israel draws the conclusion from the United States' decision to refrain from chasing down the downed drone that it's abandoning its covert war. Debka again.

A senior Israeli security official had this to say: “Everything that’s happened around the RQ-170 shows that when it comes to Iran and its nuclear program, the Obama administration and Israel have different objectives. On this issue, each country needs to go its own way.” 

One can't help but think that Israel is looking for an excuse to "go its own way" and mount an attack against Iran on its own -- secure, of course, in the knowledge that the United States will come to its rescue when it inevitably gets in over its head.

Apparently the rationale that Israeli war hawks and the Americans who enable them have long harbored for attacking Iran is mutating. They're cassus belli-flopping, as it were. At Media Matters' Political Correction, M.J. Rosenberg reports that this process was

… kicked off this week when Danielle Pletka, head of the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) foreign policy shop and one of the most prominent neoconservatives in Washington, explained what the current obsession with Iran's nuclear program is all about.

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, "See, we told you Iran is a responsible power."

Say what? Rosenberg, too, was baffled at first.

The "biggest problem" with Iran getting a nuclear weapon is not that Iranians will use it but that they won't use it and that they might behave like a "responsible power"? But what about the hysteria about a second Holocaust? … What about all of these pronouncements that … the apocalyptic mullahs would happily commit national suicide in order to destroy Israel?

What, he wonders, became of the "'existential threat' that Iran poses to Israel?" Rosenberg quotes the AEI's director of the Center for Defense Studies, Thomas Donnelly.

We're fixated on the Iranian nuclear program while the Tehran regime has its eyes on the real prize: the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East.

In other words, Rosenberg writes

… preserving the regional balance of power … means ensuring that Israel remains the region's military powerhouse, with Saudi Arabia playing a supporting role. That requires overthrowing the Iranian regime and replacing it with one that will do our bidding (like the Shah) and will not, in any way, prevent Israel from operating with a free reign throughout the region.

Which means war, since U.S. policymakers no longer see diplomacy possible before the presidential election of 2012 lest it leave President Obama vulnerable to charges that he's soft on Iran. Rosenberg writes that

Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a longtime journalist and author who specializes on Iran, noted that the Obama administration has spent a grand total of 45 minutes in direct engagement with the Iranians.

He then points out that

… there is no way of knowing if the Iranian regime wants to talk, but what is the harm of trying [if] the talks go nowhere, then at least we tried. But we won't try out of fear of antagonizing campaign donors who have been told that the alternative to war is the destruction of Israel.

Avner Cohen is probably the leading authority on Israel's nuclear-weapon program. In a piece at Haaretz, which he or an editor cleverly calls "A new nuclear reaction," he writes about the awakening resistance on the part of the Israeli public to an attack on Iran. He contrasts that with the public's acquiescence to and celebration of the strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981. But, according to Cohen, far from preemptive, that attack may actually have acted as an accelerant to Iraq's nuclear program.

During the first Gulf War, about 100 Knesset members sent a letter of praise to [Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who ordered the attack], writing that his persistence in 1981 saved Israel from a Holocaust. [But in] retrospect. … Begin's Holocaust fears surrounding Osirak had precious little foundation on the ground.

According to Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer -- a Norweigan researcher who is an international authority on the Iraqi nuclear topic -- up to the reactor bombing, the Iraqi effort. … was not suited structurally for the production of nuclear weapons.

Worse 

… Begin's determination to [attack Osirak] lacked appropriate justification: The Osirak bombing is what led Saddam to implement an entirely new nuclear project, based on enriched uranium and not on the production of plutonium. … Braut-Hegghammer concludes that the Israeli attack brought damage that outweighed its benefits.

"The irony," Cohen writes, "does not end here."

The fact that Osirak was left in ruins apparently contributed to the stealthy progress of Iraq's subsequent nuclear effort. Only after close to a decade of secret nuclear activity … Israeli intelligence officials awakened from their slumbers, and discovered that Saddam was just a step away from obtaining nuclear weapons. … In the end, Saddam's mistakes, and not the Begin doctrine, are what brought an end to the Iraqi nuclear effort.

It follows then that an attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities might drive a state not currently developing nuclear weapons to embark on that course of action.

Apparently, if Israel should mount an airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran would not only retaliate against it for attacking, but for another reason. To wipe out the Jewish state? Uh, no. Haaretz reports.

Speaking to the semi-official Mehr news agency, [Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad] Vahidi commented on the possibility of an Israeli strike, saying that if Israel tried to carry out its threats Iranian forces would "take revenge on this regime" for what Mehr called "years of atrocities" against "oppressed nations."

The Iranian defense minister added that the "Zionist regime has not yet paid the price" for actions committed in the Gaza Strip, adding that the Islamic Republic would avenge Israel for its policies.

It's nice to know that with Iran at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia and most of the Arab world, it still reserves a soft spot for Palestinians.