Obama’s nightmare in US-Iran relations

In Washington D.C., where I have been for over a fortnight, brisk debates are going on in the inner recesses of the White House and the Pentagon among higher policymakers about what to do about Iran and its nuclear programme. For a change, no details of these sensitive discussions are being leaked out. However, the establishment’s silence is nothing compared with the noise made by US President Barack Obama’s numerous critics who are clamouring for an immediate military strike on Iranian nuclear installations.

Almost every Republican aspirant to the presidency in the November elections, now in the throes of a bitter contest for the party nomination, is denouncing Mr Obama for being pusillanimous about Iran. Commentators, including some that have held senior positions in the Pentagon and the state department, are warning that unless America or Israel or both take prompt military action against Iran, it would end up having the nuclear weapons it so ardently wants, and after that it would be impossible to act against it.
There are voices of sanity, of course, that are pointing out what Mr Obama and his close advisers find it difficult to say in an election year: that war is an option best avoided, if only because the US cannot afford to start a third war in a Muslim country in a decade, especially at a time when it is trying desperately to extricate itself from the quagmire in Afghanistan. An Atlantic Council study has also come to the conclusion that the heavily enhanced sanctions against Iran, especially those directed against its central bank and oil exports, are “preferable to war even though they might not be the silver bullet”. But such voices seem to be in a minority.
The more strident and apparently dominant school of thought holds that Iran has endured US economic penalties since the 1979 Islamic revolution and a total ban on trade and investment since 1995. More of the same wouldn’t deter it from its objective of becoming a nuclear weapons power. According to this school, a nuclear Iran would be “worse for the US, the region and the world” than an outright war. A variation of this theme is the sophistry that what is needed is a sharp, swift military strike, not a prolonged fight. What the innocent authors of this thought do not realise is that once a military strike — an act of war under international law — is launched, the other side, too, has a say in how long its retaliatory action would last. To be sure, Iran may not be able to target the American homeland but it has countless American assets within its easy reach, and it does not lack the will to hit them.
Most importantly, Iraq of Saddam Hussein was alone when President George W. Bush invaded it in 2003 on patently false pretexts. So was Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that was then host to Osama bin Laden after 9/11. Iran is unlikely to be.
It would be unwise to ignore Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s clear-cut warning that if a war against Iran were launched, “the consequences will be dire. It would set off a chain reaction — and there is no knowing how it will end”.
This might explain why some of the “moderates” among Mr Obama’s opponents are prepared to buy the proposition that the heightened sanctions, combined with “targeted assassinations, bombings, cyber attacks and other covert action” might be worth trying for some more time. But most critics reject this.
Convinced that Mr Obama would not go to war, they are now pinning all their hopes on Israel that considers an Iranian nuclear bomb an existential threat to it even though it is the only nuclear weapons power in the region, and possesses no fewer than a hundred bombs that nobody talks about.
The hope of those wanting war is also the US President’s nightmare. Israel may be America’s closet ally enjoying total American support through thick and thin. But it often embarks on reckless action entirely on its own and does not even bother to keep the US informed. In the past, it launched three military strikes — on Iraq’s Osarik nuclear reactor in 1968 and on Tunis twice over the years — without even a whisper to Washington. Only once during the early 1980s did President Ronald Reagan condemn Israel publicly and even imposed some sanctions on it.
Given the power of the pro-Israeli lobby in the US and the importance of the Jewish vote in the presidential elections Mr Obama cannot afford this luxury. At the same time he is painfully aware that relations between him and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, are so strained that there is little scope for a meeting of minds. Last year the wide world witnessed that irked by Mr Obama’s “pressure” to “freeze” the construction of settlements on the West Bank, Mr Netanyahu travelled to Washington and publicly chastised Mr Obama.
This time around the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, paid a day-long visit to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for talks with not only his opposite numbers but also the President, the Prime Minister and defence minister. His mission, in his own words, was to stress the “common interests” of both countries in the region “in these dynamic times”, and to ensure at least minimum coordination between the American and Israeli policies on Iran.
How far did he succeed no one knows. For the Israeli side made no statement after the talks and a statement on Gen. Dempsey’s behalf merely stated that the talks had “served to advance common understanding of the regional security environment”. In any case, nobody in Washington knows whether Israel would act unilaterally, and if so, when. Incidentally, a joke doing the rounds here is: “Netanyahu wants that in November there should be regime change on the Potomac.”