DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis April 6, 2015, 11:28 AM (IDT)
Obama's selling points for Israel
“If anyone messes with Israel, America will be
there.” This was the main message US President Barack Obama had for
Israel in his New York Times interview with Thomas Friedman
Monday, April 6. He was trying to fend off the constant stream of
criticism coming from Israel, as well as Washington and the Gulf, of the
nuclear framework deal the US-led group of world powers shaped with
Iran in Lausanne last week.
On his clash with the Israeli prime minister over diplomacy with
Iran, Obama offered a conciliatory note: This deal is “our best bet by
far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“I respect Mr. Netanyahu’s security argument and agree that Israelis
have every right to be concerned about Iran,” a country that has
threatened “to destroy Israel, that has denied the Holocaust, that has
expressed venomous anti-Semitic ideas.”
He went on to say, “I would consider it a failure on my part, a
fundamental failure of my presidency, if on my watch, or as a
consequence of work that I had done, Israel was rendered more
vulnerable,” he said.
“But what I would say to them is that not only am I absolutely
committed to making sure they maintain their qualitative military edge,
and that they can deter any potential future attacks, but what I’m
willing to do is to make the kinds of commitments that would give
everybody in the neighborhood, including Iran, a clarity that if Israel
were to be attacked by any state, that we would stand by them.”
Those words from the US president were certainly welcomed in
Jerusalem, but they failed to address the deep concerns besetting Israel
and the region over Iran’s rising belligerence, which has drawn
encouragement from Obama’s policies:
1. The US president is focusing too narrowly on the nuclear dimension of
the Iranian threat, when Tehran is already in the throes of an
aggressive drive for regional expansion by conventional military means.
It is actively stirring up civil strife and using subversion and terror
to disrupt its neighbors.
Obama talks about Israel’s security concerns in the future tense in
potential terms, when already an Iranian noose is tightening around its
borders. He must have been apprised by his own intelligence advisers
about the tasks Tehran has awarded its proxies, the Lebanese Hizballah,
and the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for turning the heat on the
Jewish state – else why has Tehran raised Hizballah’s rocket-firing
capacity against Israel to 1,000-1,500 rockets per day? And why send
Hamas tens of millions of dollars for rebuilding the terror tunnels
Israel destroyed in the Gaza Strip last summer and replenish its rocket
arsenal?
Israel does not have the luxury of standing by until a foreign power,
however friendly, “has its back.” Prime Minister Netanyahu and the
Israel Defense Forces have made their own preparations for the
worst-case scenario. But they also ask: Is it right for Israel to be
put in this position so that President Obama can claim what he calls “a
historic agreement?”
2. The list of governments skeptical of the value of the nuclear
“framework” or “solutions” – depending on which of the Washington or
Tehran versions they accept – does not end with Netanyahu. The day
before it ran the Obama interview, The New York Times headed a front page story with the caption” Arab allies cry betrayal.”
Saudi King Salman has clearly decided to brush off White House
attempts to sell its nuclear deal with Iran or wait for Obama to catch
up with events in the region. He is forging ahead in the defense of what
he considers the oil kingdom’s interests. His first step was to go
ahead, without consulting with Washington, with military intervention in
Yemen to stall the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
It is worth noting here that even Netanyahu, in his most heated
diatribes against the US president’s policies, never used the term
“betrayal.
3. Obama and his advisers are fond of declaring that a military strike
on Iran’s nuclear facilities would not delay its program more than a
couple of years. For one thing, that theory has never been proved: Iran
could be held back from the nuclear threshold by four or, for that
matter, six years. Who’s to say? By then, Obama would have long been
gone and also, by then, the ayatollahs – if they still ruled Iran -
might have had a change of heart and decide to drop the current regime’s
nuclear bomb aspirations.
All these propositions are equally speculative.
Still more short-sighted is the US president’s determination that the
talks with Iran are a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see whether or
not we can at least take the nuclear issue off the table.”
Even if the issue is resolved to the US president’s satisfaction by
June 30, which most informed opinion doubts, it will still loom large
on the tables of King Salman, Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh el-Sisi,
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
4. There is also a question of credibility. Whereas Obama now questions
the value of tougher sanctions for deterring Iran from violating any
nuclear deals, such as are envisaged Congress, just a year ago he was
all in favor of these penalties for bringing Tehran to the negotiating
table.
5. In his long interview to The New York Times, the president made no mention of the contrasting versions of the Lausanne process produced by Washington and Tehran- as debkafile was the first to disclose in detail on Saturday, April 4.
So which of the two is the correct one? Or were the two different
narratives deliberately cooked up between US Secretary of State John
Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif as a selling
device for their respective home audiences.
6. Getting to the bottom of the real deal concluded in Lausanne will
be further complicated by the secret annexes which were appended and
never intended to see the light of day. Middle East rulers can’t be
expected to take on faith a deal contracted by outside powers with their
neighbor, that includes secret clauses to which they are not privy.
7. Nothing is said in either the US or Iranian version about Tehran’s
long-range ballistic missiles or the “research and development” work
performed to outfit them for carrying nuclear warheads. Iran doesn’t
need these missiles to attack Israel, but they would pose a threat to
America.
The Obama interview and reiterated pledge to Israel’s security followed Netanyahu’s latest broadside.
Saying he sees better options than “this bad deal or war,” the prime minister said to CNN Sunday: "I think there's a third alternative, and that is standing firm,
ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal.” As it stands
now, said the prime minister, "It does not roll back Iran's nuclear
program. It keeps a vast nuclear infrastructure in place. Not a single
centrifuge is destroyed. Not a single nuclear facility is shut down,
including the underground facilities that they built illicitly.
Thousands of centrifuges will keep spinning, enriching uranium. That's a
very bad deal.”
Netanyahu said Iran is a country of "congenital cheating" and that it can't be trusted to abide by the terms of the deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment