SinoChallenger
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US, Iran and Israel in shadow play
THIS year either Israel or the US will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities or the regime of the ayatollahs will move beyond the point of no return in its quest for nuclear weapons.
The victory of right-wing insurgent Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina presidential primary in the US makes an attack more likely. Although Mitt Romney will still likely be the nominee, the Gingrich surge will push him further to the Right on foreign policy.
Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran are locked in an intense, almost desperate and partly invisible struggle over the future of Iran's nuclear weapons program.
After three weeks in the Middle East spent talking to senior officials, government leaders, intelligence analysts, soldiers, politicians and academics of several nationalities, a clear picture of the starkly different calculations in each capital emerges.
In Jerusalem, Washington and Tehran, three different clocks are running, but they are all set to strike midnight this year.
Two weeks ago, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told me in an exclusive interview that for the first time he thought Iran was beginning to wobble under the pressure of international sanctions, especially the threat of sanctions on its central bank.
Natanyahu further said that if the sanctions were coupled with a credible threat of military force should Iran continue with its weapons program, this could cause Tehran to back off.
This story was worldwide news. Netanyahu doesn't give many interviews and it was interpreted in Washington, and reported in the US press, and later cited by the White House, as indicating Netanyahu was supporting the US strategy on Iran and was unlikely to take unilateral action. This was probably a mistake, though an understandable one. In private comments a week later to Israeli politicians, which were strategically leaked, Netanyahu seemed to pull back from this position.
He told the Israeli politicians the sanctions were useful but didn't go far enough and might not stop Iran's nuclear program.
Netanyahu, the most straightforward and at times bluntest of leaders, is not telling lies here, either in his interview or his reported comments to Israeli politicians. But maintaining a real degree of uncertainty about what it might do is central to the Israeli government's strategy.
The Israelis face a series of acute dilemmas. One senior Israeli soldier told me the decision on whether to attack Iran's nuclear facilities would be the toughest any Israeli leader has faced. That sober judgment must be seen against the backdrop that Israel has three times fought full-scale conventional wars.
Nothing about the Israeli decision is easy. Every aspect of it is drenched with risk and uncertainty. The most senior Israelis believe they do have a military option against Iran. It's not a perfect option but they believe that even today they could severely degrade Iran's nuclear program with aerial strikes. Some recall that when they bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 they thought they might delay Iraq's program by three to five years. In fact, they delayed it by 10 years and the US subsequently carried out Operation Desert Storm and put the Iraqi nuclear program out of business for good.
But the Israeli military option is running out for three reasons, two of them technical and one to do with the US political cycle.
First, the Iranians are attempting to immunise their program from aerial strike. They are doing this by moving as much of it as possible deep underground and by creating so many facilities they become too numerous to bomb.
Second, there will come a point at which the Iranians have developed so much nuclear expertise in depth that even if their physical facilities were damaged they could quickly reconstitute these and press ahead to weapons.
The Iranian program is troubled, not least because of Israeli, and presumably US, covert actions against it. The Iranians are having a lot of difficulty producing the next-generation centrifuges. A number of their nuclear scientists have been killed. Some foreign firms have apparently provided them with faulty gear. They are having great difficulty miniaturising weapons to put on missiles and they don't have long-range bombers that could deliver non-miniaturised weapons.
There are two paths Iran could take to a nuclear break-out capacity. One is to continue with its existing, ostensibly peaceful nuclear energy program. This will eventually give them enough nuclear expertise and material to make a sprint for weapons in a relatively short time frame, perhaps in a few years' time.
But there is also the possibility that the Iranians have a parallel secret process in place - another facility - as has been periodically exposed in the past. This could make a final breakout a much shorter process and could mean the Iranians could do this without expelling the international inspectors involved with their program now.
Some intelligence people feel the Iranians are fairly transparent to foreign intelligence agencies, making another secret facility unlikely. Others are not so sure.
The US presidential election dynamic is fundamental to Israeli decision-making. Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama don't get on very well. That's well known, but like the hard-headed political leaders they are, they co-operate.
But in many ways Netanyahu has outplayed Obama, in international politics and in domestic American politics. He has gone around Obama to appeal directly to the Republican-dominated congress where he is a superhero. But he also has strong support among congressional Democrats.
All Republican presidential candidates, except the marginal Ron Paul, have made a hard line on Iran an essential part of their foreign policy pitch. Obama, who authorised the killing of Osama bin Laden, deployed extra troops to Afghanistan and massively increased the killing of targeted terrorists by predator drone strikes, is not, as the Israelis say, a vegetarian. But Iran is the one security issue on which, until the sanctions were announced, he has looked weak.
If the Israelis strike Iran this year Obama will be almost forced to support them by the pressure of his own congress and the position of his Republican challenger, whether that's ultimately Romney or Gingrich. Such an outcome would probably destroy Obama's outreach to the Muslim Middle East. If Obama is re-elected in November, especially with a less Republican congress, he would be more at liberty to oppose the Israeli action.
So the US electoral cycle is another clock ticking loudly for the Israelis.
There is, in Israel, an alternative view that, ticking clocks notwithstanding, this is all a giant bluff by Jerusalem. This could be a bluff on two levels. One, the Israelis may be trying to bluff the Americans into action. Some Americans believe if the Israelis strike Iran, the US will pay the political costs anyway, so it would be better for the Americans to do the job and do it properly.
Their clock is a bit different from the one the Israelis hear. Because of their vastly superior firepower, the Americans could strike Iran later, more devastatingly and more sustainably.
If the Americans carry out the strike, they will probably get European, Canadian, Japanese, South Korean and Australian support, in other words the bulk of the US alliance system. If the Israelis do it, even with US support, they will get less international backing than that, with Europe certain to be divided and Japan and South Korea likely to stay on the sidelines.
The Israelis could be bluffing in another way, too. No Israeli official will say this, but some Israeli analysts believe their government has decided to live with a nuclear-armed Iran and rely on the certainty of terrible retribution, the normal logic of deterrence, to make sure Iran never uses any nuclear weapons it acquires.
In this case the threat of early military action is really designed only to scare the world into comprehensive sanctions. The sanctions have strong benefits even if Iran goes ahead with its nuclear program. As well as delaying Iran's nuclear program, they make Iran a substantially weaker enemy for Israel. Imposing a big cost for Iran in going nuclear is also important to discourage other nations - Saudi Arabia and Egypt come to mind - from following suit.
The equation, then, would be that although possessing nuclear weapons does insulate a nation from full-frontal military assault, it carries with it enormous economic cost.
The idea that Israel has accepted a nuclear-armed Iran is based on several considerations, among them the enormous damage Iran could do in retaliation to an early strike and the tremendous success the Israeli economy and society are enjoying right now. There is a deep reluctance to disturb that. Some Israelis also believe that Washington simply will not countenance another Middle East conflict and that Israel's position could be gravely weakened by unilateral action.
For Obama the calculations are scarcely less complex than they are for Netanyahu.
His nation does not face existential threat from Iran, but he profoundly wants to avoid becoming the president who failed to deliver a Palestinian state but who did preside over Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state.
Although his administration is divided on this, there is a real chance that if he is convinced that everything else has failed, he would countenance a US strike on Iran.
But because of America's technical superiority he has longer time lines than Netanyahu. The problem, though, is that if the Israeli military option disappears, as it might by the end of this year, the pressure for US action would be much less.
Within Iran itself there is real evidence of economic distress and internal division. But no significant part of the ruling group is in favour of abandoning the nuclear program. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is in a losing struggle with the supreme leader, Ayatalloh Ali Khamenei. Parliamentary elections are due next March and analysts discern volcanic dissatisfaction among the Iranian public with a government that has delivered them nothing.
Nonetheless, the remaining ideological props for the ayatollahs are religious zealotry, ultra-nationalism expressed largely through nuclear defiance, and being in the business of destroying Israel.
This does not mean Iran's leaders would court their own destruction by launching a war against Israel. But their ideological and religious hatred of Israel is real and, more importantly, continual expression of this hatred is essential to their position within Iran.
One scenario is that Iran just keeps going with its existing program, making it ever harder to hit but stopping short of developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. This makes justification for a strike against it more difficult, it means that when it finally decides to break out it can do so quickly and it develops most of what Tehran sees as the strategic benefits of nuclear weapons without yet incurring their full costs.
Taken altogether, this is the most explosive mixture the world has seen probably since the Cuban missile crisis. There are so many moving and interlocked parts no one can predict the outcome.
But if by the end of this year Iran has not negotiated the abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, if sanctions have not comprehensively crippled its economy and if its nuclear program has not been degraded by Israeli or US air strikes, then it becomes overwhelmingly likely that Iran has survived the Western bluff and will in due course acquire nuclear weapons.
What that means for the world is not pretty to contemplate. As Julia Gillard might remark, 2012 will indeed be the year of decision and delivery.
Cookies must be enabled | The Australian
THIS year either Israel or the US will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities or the regime of the ayatollahs will move beyond the point of no return in its quest for nuclear weapons.
The victory of right-wing insurgent Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina presidential primary in the US makes an attack more likely. Although Mitt Romney will still likely be the nominee, the Gingrich surge will push him further to the Right on foreign policy.
Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran are locked in an intense, almost desperate and partly invisible struggle over the future of Iran's nuclear weapons program.
After three weeks in the Middle East spent talking to senior officials, government leaders, intelligence analysts, soldiers, politicians and academics of several nationalities, a clear picture of the starkly different calculations in each capital emerges.
In Jerusalem, Washington and Tehran, three different clocks are running, but they are all set to strike midnight this year.
Two weeks ago, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told me in an exclusive interview that for the first time he thought Iran was beginning to wobble under the pressure of international sanctions, especially the threat of sanctions on its central bank.
Natanyahu further said that if the sanctions were coupled with a credible threat of military force should Iran continue with its weapons program, this could cause Tehran to back off.
This story was worldwide news. Netanyahu doesn't give many interviews and it was interpreted in Washington, and reported in the US press, and later cited by the White House, as indicating Netanyahu was supporting the US strategy on Iran and was unlikely to take unilateral action. This was probably a mistake, though an understandable one. In private comments a week later to Israeli politicians, which were strategically leaked, Netanyahu seemed to pull back from this position.
He told the Israeli politicians the sanctions were useful but didn't go far enough and might not stop Iran's nuclear program.
Netanyahu, the most straightforward and at times bluntest of leaders, is not telling lies here, either in his interview or his reported comments to Israeli politicians. But maintaining a real degree of uncertainty about what it might do is central to the Israeli government's strategy.
The Israelis face a series of acute dilemmas. One senior Israeli soldier told me the decision on whether to attack Iran's nuclear facilities would be the toughest any Israeli leader has faced. That sober judgment must be seen against the backdrop that Israel has three times fought full-scale conventional wars.
Nothing about the Israeli decision is easy. Every aspect of it is drenched with risk and uncertainty. The most senior Israelis believe they do have a military option against Iran. It's not a perfect option but they believe that even today they could severely degrade Iran's nuclear program with aerial strikes. Some recall that when they bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 they thought they might delay Iraq's program by three to five years. In fact, they delayed it by 10 years and the US subsequently carried out Operation Desert Storm and put the Iraqi nuclear program out of business for good.
But the Israeli military option is running out for three reasons, two of them technical and one to do with the US political cycle.
First, the Iranians are attempting to immunise their program from aerial strike. They are doing this by moving as much of it as possible deep underground and by creating so many facilities they become too numerous to bomb.
Second, there will come a point at which the Iranians have developed so much nuclear expertise in depth that even if their physical facilities were damaged they could quickly reconstitute these and press ahead to weapons.
The Iranian program is troubled, not least because of Israeli, and presumably US, covert actions against it. The Iranians are having a lot of difficulty producing the next-generation centrifuges. A number of their nuclear scientists have been killed. Some foreign firms have apparently provided them with faulty gear. They are having great difficulty miniaturising weapons to put on missiles and they don't have long-range bombers that could deliver non-miniaturised weapons.
There are two paths Iran could take to a nuclear break-out capacity. One is to continue with its existing, ostensibly peaceful nuclear energy program. This will eventually give them enough nuclear expertise and material to make a sprint for weapons in a relatively short time frame, perhaps in a few years' time.
But there is also the possibility that the Iranians have a parallel secret process in place - another facility - as has been periodically exposed in the past. This could make a final breakout a much shorter process and could mean the Iranians could do this without expelling the international inspectors involved with their program now.
Some intelligence people feel the Iranians are fairly transparent to foreign intelligence agencies, making another secret facility unlikely. Others are not so sure.
The US presidential election dynamic is fundamental to Israeli decision-making. Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama don't get on very well. That's well known, but like the hard-headed political leaders they are, they co-operate.
But in many ways Netanyahu has outplayed Obama, in international politics and in domestic American politics. He has gone around Obama to appeal directly to the Republican-dominated congress where he is a superhero. But he also has strong support among congressional Democrats.
All Republican presidential candidates, except the marginal Ron Paul, have made a hard line on Iran an essential part of their foreign policy pitch. Obama, who authorised the killing of Osama bin Laden, deployed extra troops to Afghanistan and massively increased the killing of targeted terrorists by predator drone strikes, is not, as the Israelis say, a vegetarian. But Iran is the one security issue on which, until the sanctions were announced, he has looked weak.
If the Israelis strike Iran this year Obama will be almost forced to support them by the pressure of his own congress and the position of his Republican challenger, whether that's ultimately Romney or Gingrich. Such an outcome would probably destroy Obama's outreach to the Muslim Middle East. If Obama is re-elected in November, especially with a less Republican congress, he would be more at liberty to oppose the Israeli action.
So the US electoral cycle is another clock ticking loudly for the Israelis.
There is, in Israel, an alternative view that, ticking clocks notwithstanding, this is all a giant bluff by Jerusalem. This could be a bluff on two levels. One, the Israelis may be trying to bluff the Americans into action. Some Americans believe if the Israelis strike Iran, the US will pay the political costs anyway, so it would be better for the Americans to do the job and do it properly.
Their clock is a bit different from the one the Israelis hear. Because of their vastly superior firepower, the Americans could strike Iran later, more devastatingly and more sustainably.
If the Americans carry out the strike, they will probably get European, Canadian, Japanese, South Korean and Australian support, in other words the bulk of the US alliance system. If the Israelis do it, even with US support, they will get less international backing than that, with Europe certain to be divided and Japan and South Korea likely to stay on the sidelines.
The Israelis could be bluffing in another way, too. No Israeli official will say this, but some Israeli analysts believe their government has decided to live with a nuclear-armed Iran and rely on the certainty of terrible retribution, the normal logic of deterrence, to make sure Iran never uses any nuclear weapons it acquires.
In this case the threat of early military action is really designed only to scare the world into comprehensive sanctions. The sanctions have strong benefits even if Iran goes ahead with its nuclear program. As well as delaying Iran's nuclear program, they make Iran a substantially weaker enemy for Israel. Imposing a big cost for Iran in going nuclear is also important to discourage other nations - Saudi Arabia and Egypt come to mind - from following suit.
The equation, then, would be that although possessing nuclear weapons does insulate a nation from full-frontal military assault, it carries with it enormous economic cost.
The idea that Israel has accepted a nuclear-armed Iran is based on several considerations, among them the enormous damage Iran could do in retaliation to an early strike and the tremendous success the Israeli economy and society are enjoying right now. There is a deep reluctance to disturb that. Some Israelis also believe that Washington simply will not countenance another Middle East conflict and that Israel's position could be gravely weakened by unilateral action.
For Obama the calculations are scarcely less complex than they are for Netanyahu.
His nation does not face existential threat from Iran, but he profoundly wants to avoid becoming the president who failed to deliver a Palestinian state but who did preside over Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state.
Although his administration is divided on this, there is a real chance that if he is convinced that everything else has failed, he would countenance a US strike on Iran.
But because of America's technical superiority he has longer time lines than Netanyahu. The problem, though, is that if the Israeli military option disappears, as it might by the end of this year, the pressure for US action would be much less.
Within Iran itself there is real evidence of economic distress and internal division. But no significant part of the ruling group is in favour of abandoning the nuclear program. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is in a losing struggle with the supreme leader, Ayatalloh Ali Khamenei. Parliamentary elections are due next March and analysts discern volcanic dissatisfaction among the Iranian public with a government that has delivered them nothing.
Nonetheless, the remaining ideological props for the ayatollahs are religious zealotry, ultra-nationalism expressed largely through nuclear defiance, and being in the business of destroying Israel.
This does not mean Iran's leaders would court their own destruction by launching a war against Israel. But their ideological and religious hatred of Israel is real and, more importantly, continual expression of this hatred is essential to their position within Iran.
One scenario is that Iran just keeps going with its existing program, making it ever harder to hit but stopping short of developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. This makes justification for a strike against it more difficult, it means that when it finally decides to break out it can do so quickly and it develops most of what Tehran sees as the strategic benefits of nuclear weapons without yet incurring their full costs.
Taken altogether, this is the most explosive mixture the world has seen probably since the Cuban missile crisis. There are so many moving and interlocked parts no one can predict the outcome.
But if by the end of this year Iran has not negotiated the abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, if sanctions have not comprehensively crippled its economy and if its nuclear program has not been degraded by Israeli or US air strikes, then it becomes overwhelmingly likely that Iran has survived the Western bluff and will in due course acquire nuclear weapons.
What that means for the world is not pretty to contemplate. As Julia Gillard might remark, 2012 will indeed be the year of decision and delivery.
Cookies must be enabled | The Australian
