War with Iran: A US dilemma
It's unlikely that President Barack Obama intends to go to the polls in November with the United States engaged in a hot war with Iran, but there is a growing danger that events could conspire to make the decision for him.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that ”US defence leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over US objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard US facilities in the region in case of a conflict.”
The Journal also reported that Administration officials from President Obama have urged their Israeli counterparts to refrain from unilateral military action. The Israeli response, says the paper, has been “non-committal.” Indeed, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen Martin Dempsey is due to visit Israel on Thursday with the purpose, according to Israeli reports, of ascertaining Israel's intentions.
The Iranians would likely hold the US accountable for any Israeli military action, and any retaliation against US assets (or even attacks on Israel) might prompt the US to escalate the confrontation in order to disable Iran's military capability and perhaps strike at its nuclear program in the process.
Restraining Israel from unilateral action by escalating sanctions pressure has been a dominant theme of the Obama Administration's Iran policy. And current and former Administration officials have said that President Obama would take military action if other methods failed to stop Iran building a nuclear weapon, although the US intelligence assessment is that Iran has not yet decided, let alone begun, to build nuclear weapons despite steadily acquiring the means to do so.
The latest round sanctions, which aim to stop Iran selling oil and importing gasoline, are being treated by the Iranians as a sign that the US and its partners are seeking to overthrow the clerical regime. The Washington Post caused a stir last week by reporting that it had been told by a “senior US intelligence official” that the goal of the new sanctions was, indeed, to bring down the regime in Tehran.
President Obama appears to have little say over whether Israel attacks Iran, but even his control over US sanctions policy may be less than he might like.
In an election year in which painting Obama as weak on Iran is the centerpiece of the Republican foreign policy discussion, and with congressional Democrats far more hawkish on the issue than the White House is, putting the brakes on a sanctions policy to which Iran may respond as if to an act of war carries a heavy political cost to the president.
The realization that the Administration's options are being narrowed by the actions of others may account for the vehemence with which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week condemned the murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran. The general assumption, both in Tehran and in Western capitals, is that Israel is behind the attacks.
Even more alarming, if true, were the claims made in Foreign Policy magazine by military analyst Mark Perry, last week, alleging that an internal CIA assessment had concluded that Israeli Mossad agents masqueraded as CIA operatives while recruiting members of a Sunni jihadist group to wage proxy operations in Iran.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has repeatedly warned Iran that closing the Strait, through which some 40% of global oil traffic passes, is a “red line” that would draw a military response. The New York Times reported Friday that the US had used a secret channel to send that same message to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei.
But the sanctions have pushed Iran to the wire and experts have indicated that Iran's retaliation of some sort is imminent. If things move the way it is moving , war maky rage over the Gulf again. A war that President Obama hoped to avoid.
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