The Iranian crisis has given rise to another duel between US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The public platform for the confrontation of the two men was provided by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) policy conference which the two men addressed separately last week.
They duelled in the past over how to achieve peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the Aipac policy conference, they publicly duelled about waging another war in the Middle East.
Achieving peace in the Palestine conflict, or indeed the very task of getting the parties to the negotiation table proved more intractable than resisting the pressure to rush into war against Iran.
In the first confrontation over how to achieve peace with the Palestinians, Obama publicly demanded that Netanyahu agree to stop all colony construction in the Occupied Territories. He also demanded that negotiations with the Palestinians be based on the 1967 lines as a starting point for an agreement on the final borders between Israel and Palestine.
Netanyahu publicly and defiantly rejected both demands. Humiliated, Obama simply decided to give up his pursuit of a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement — at least for the remainder of this term.
The second confrontation between the two men focused on the Iranian crisis and on the appropriate response to it. This confrontation has always been on the two men’s official agenda since they started meeting regularly in Washington.
While Obama agreed that Iranian nuclear weapon development would be a threat to Israel and to American national security, he made it clear that his priority was to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Netanyahu, on the other hand, assigned a low priority to peace with the Palestinians, and dramatised the threat to Israel if Iran were allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Judging by the prominence the Iranian crisis has acquired, the concomitant assignment of the Palestine question to the back burner, and indeed the widespread talk about — and preparations for -- war, it has to be recognised that Netanyahu scored a major, if incomplete, victory.
Netanyahu’s victory was not complete because Obama insisted in giving the sanctions against Iran, and the pursuit of a diplomatic solution more time before resorting to the use of force.
The Obama administration has stated that Iran’s development of nuclear weapons was a ‘red line.’ And Washington was determined to prevent this from happening.
The Israelis have been asking for a stricter ‘red line’ that would justify attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities now to deny it the development of the capacity to build a bomb, rather than delay the American use of force until it is required to prevent it from actually building the bomb.
The Israelis have also been urging Washington to demand that the Iranians suspend all nuclear activities prior to resuming negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the crisis.
Obama rejected both demands, notwithstanding mounting pressure from a hostile Congress and from Republican presidential candidates demanding more forceful support for Israel’s war aims.
Obama struck the right note in his speech to Aipac last week and resisted the pressure from the war camp to be dragged into war with Iran. He presented himself as Israel’s best friend and framed the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran within the larger context as a threat to American national security and to the international community. He presented himself as ready to use force only as a last resort. As a president and a commander-in-chief, he said, “I have a deeply held preference for peace over war.”
The text of Obama’s speech read like a statement of defence urging the powerful Israel lobby not to judge him by the partisan criticisms against his policy, but by his actions.
He reminded his audience that despite a tough budget environment, his administration’s military aid to Israel “has increased every single year.” Obama then went through the myriad examples of his administration’s economic, political and diplomatic support for Israel, and concluded, “So there should not be a shred of doubt by now — when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”
In contrast to the nuanced, multilayered, and sophisticated approach taken by Obama to disarm his opponents and neutralise his critics, Netanyahu’s speech was one-dimensional — pushing for war without making the case for the necessity of war.
His comparison of Obama’s refusal to act more forcefully to president Theodore Roosevelt’s refusal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz was a low point, in a speech full of demagoguery. The editors of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz deplored Netanyahu’s speech’s “vulgarity and bad taste.”
Netanyahu repeated a flawed argument: “A nuclear-armed Iran,” he told the Israel lobby group, “would dramatically increase terrorism by giving terrorists a nuclear umbrella.”
This argument is profoundly flawed because it assumes wrongly that nuclear weapons can be effectively ‘used’ for anything other than for deterring threats to the most sacrosanct possession a country can have: its national existence.
He condescendingly states that he refuses to live in a world in which “the Ayatollahs” have atomic bombs. Why? He answers simply by implying irrationality on the part of the Iranian leaders, “the world’s most dangerous regime.”
Interestingly enough Meir Dagan, the former head of Israeli secret service Mossad, contradicted this simplistic assessment. He told an American television interviewer last week that he believed that the Iranian regime was rational. And that ‘they are considering all the implications of their actions.’
Tellingly, the American interviewer was surprised by that answer.
Interestingly enough Dagan’s assessment that war against Iran would be a bad decision, fraught with difficulties and unlikely to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb, is shared by many in the military and intelligence establishment in Israel and the US.
Obama himself, in a recent television interview, said that an Israeli strike “would delay but not prevent Iran from acquiring a weapon.”
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