Gates Pushing Back on Iran War Fever
Recently, we’ve seen a bit of a renewed outburst of Iran war fever. First, several powerful House Democrats signed a letter telling the Obama administration that any diplomatic approach to Iran had to produce results very quickly or else it should be abandoned in favor of punitive measures. Then Bibi Netanyahu told Obama that unless diplomacy produced results in a few months that Israel would strike away. And CFR Senior Fellow, Bush NSC veteran, and Iran-Contra crook Elliot Abrams tried to assure us that the Iranian people would welcome airstrikes.
Steve Clemons observes that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is offering some pushback:
Mr Gates said he does not expect Israel – which believes the US estimate for when Iran could develop a nuclear weapon is too sanguine – to take military action this year.
“I guess I would say I would be surprised…if they did act this year,” said Mr Gates.
As he was sworn in as the new Israeli prime minister this week, Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the greatest danger to Israel was Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons. But asked whether Iran would cross a nuclear “red line” this year, Mr Gates said: “I don’t know, I would guess probably not”.
“I think we have more time than that. How much more time I don’t know,” said Mr Gates. “It is a year, two years, three years. It is somewhere in that window.”
Of course the question still arises of what happens if Gates’ assessment of Israeli intentions is wrong. Will the United States lean strongly against Israel launching an attack that could have a dire impact on American interests and will likely not do much beyond ensure that Iran develops a nuclear weapon in the near future? We have, in principle, a lot of leverage over Israeli policy. But at the same time, Israeli preferences speak very loudly on Capitol Hill.
26 Responses to “Gates Pushing Back on Iran War Fever”
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April 2nd, 2009 at 11:06 am
Well, the administration better lean heavily because it will be our war whether we want it or not. Realistically speaking, Israel will be mad to mount an offensive without U.S. backing. But then the Bibi/Avi duo is quite mad.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 am
My feeling is that Netanyahu is too smart to play the “communicate through the press” game with Obama. If he’s going to warn the administration that we need to figure out how to reign in the Iranian program in the next year or Israel is going to attack, he’s going to do it privately. To me this looks more like laying down a public marker so that when Israel does move, he can at least say in the ensuing furor that it wasn’t done behind our back. And there are in fact reports in Haaretz that he’s already made up his mind to move. If Barak shares this view that would explain why he dragged Labor into this government.
The only other alternative (slightly less scary) is that Israel is playing a role in a “good cop – bad cop” routine with us as we prepare to negotiate with the Iranians.
But I don’t see this as a “warning” or “pressure” on Obama. I don’t see what point there would be for Netanyahu in doing that in public.
Gates’s statement doesn’t provide a lot of clues as to which of the above models is more likely.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 am
to figure out how to reign in the Iranian program
rein in. Like a horse.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:19 am
I wonder who, at the end of the day, has more credibility with Congress: General Petraeus, or Secretary Gates. Petraeus said that Israel might strike in the next few months, Gates pushes that timeline further down.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:39 am
James, yes, thank you. I looked at it afterwards and thought it seemed a bit off but I wasn’t sure why.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Notice…
Gates…Republican…Realist…Pushing back on Iran.
This is why we needed more Republican realists on the foreign policy team. This is so much more effective in killing the neocons than anything that any democrat could do.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:59 am
Re larry birnbaum at 2: “My feeling is that Netanyahu is too smart to play the “communicate through the press” game with Obama. If he’s going to warn the administration that we need to figure out how to reign in the Iranian program in the next year or Israel is going to attack, he’s going to do it privately.”
—————–
I think past History shows this is bullshit.
When Bill Clinton was pressing both Israel and the Palestinians to make peace, Netanyahu came to Washington DC and openly courted Jerry Falwell as a sign of what Israel’s supporters would do to the Democrats in the next election if Bill Clinton persisted.
Soon afterwards, the world heard about a young Jewish American female named Monica Lewinski.
See http://www.anusha.com/falwell.htm
And of course, who can forget Joe Lieberman inviting Bibi to address Congress in the summer of 2002 –where Bibi helped to lie us into an unnecessary war that killed 4500 of our troops –but which took out Israel’s enemy Saddam Hussein.
Tell me again –why is this man considered an ALLY of the United States?
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
And I think he’s completely right about Israel. When Israel ratchets the rhetoric up…that usually tells me that they don’t intend to do what they’re threatening to do.
In the past, this strategy worked great as they would scare us into doing things. But this team (minus Hillary) is a lot smarter than that.
Frankly, I don’t think they have the capability to significantly slow down the Iranian program.
Time to get real and focus on keeping that bomb in the basement.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
“rein in. Like a horse.” I vote for “rain on.” We could have any number of alternative translations of Matt’s typical posts.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
In the Vanity Fair article “American Rapture”, Jerry Falwell boasted of how he and Natanyahu ploted to sabotage Clinton’s attempt to bring peace to Israel:
————–
“But Evangelicals have also played a role in disrupting the peace process. “I was ambassador for four years of the peace process, and the Christian fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the peace process,” says Itamar Rabinovich, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor governments of Rabin and Shimon Peres. “They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a matter of divine right. So they immediately became part of a campaign by the Israeli right to undermine the peace process.”
No one played that card more forcefully than Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who as prime minister used the Christian right to fend off pressure from the Clinton administration to proceed with the peace process.
On a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before his scheduled meeting with Clinton.
“I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,” recalls Falwell. “It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton.”
That evening, Falwell promised Netanyahu that he would mobilize pastors all over the country to resist the return of parts of the occupied West Bank territory to the Palestinians. Televangelist John Hagee, who gave $1 million to the United Jewish Appeal the following month, told the crowd that the Jewish return to the Holy Land signaled the “rapidly approaching … final moments of history,” then brought them to a frenzy chanting, “Not one inch!”—a reference to how much of the West Bank should be transferred to Palestinian control.
The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. “Bibi told me later,” Falwell recalls, “that the next morning Bill Clinton said, ‘I know where you were last night.’ The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.… Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel.”
————-
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/12/rapture200512?currentPage=8
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Maybe, but at this point, I think the neocons and the politicians that buy into their view have been up to their noses in the Kool-Aid for so long that party affiliations no longer matter to them. You’re either for them or against them.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
If Barak shares this view that would explain why he dragged Labor into this government.
I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not like Dayan or Rabin or Sharon ever stopped being generals either. The fact that Barak is a left wing nationalist does not make him less of a nationalist.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Aside from the paranoid international Jewish conspiracy theory aspects of Don Williams’s comment — the Lobby strikes again! — I do enjoy the campiness of portraying Lewinsky as Mata Hari. That’s a new one on me.
Also, blaming Netanyahu because Joe Lieberman invited him to speak before the Senate seems to me to be blaming the wrong person.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Re larry birnbaum’s comment “I do enjoy the campiness of portraying Lewinsky as Mata Hari. That’s a new one on me.”
————–
You don’t get out much, do you larry?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0398/monica.html
“In some Jewish circles, Monica is being referred to as Queen Esther, who was the prettiest girl in Persia and won the beauty pageant, becoming the queen of the realm. She whispered into the ear of her king words that undid Haman, the enemy of the Jews. Single-handedly, though the hand might not have been the pertinent body part, she saved the community from tragic disaster. So, to the Jewish right-wing, Monica Lewinsky is a real Purim pussycat.
But if this were really so, Monica as Esther would have had to tell Bill Clinton not to follow through on the Oslo peace accords and to soften his attitude toward Netanyahu-the-Good, who has the best interests of the Jewish people at heart as he tries, with might and main, to follow through on his promise to Daddy to stall the peace and drive the compromisers into the sea.
It is hard to imagine how Monica could have gotten the opportunity to persuade the President of this version of events, given his reported sexual preferences. But maybe she could have mumbled her message or left it with Betty Currie. “
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Or consider this August 1998 article, from
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0798/jj2.html
“How Monica Lewinsky and her dress destroyed the Middle East Peace Accords
WASHINGTON — Sitting in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel here, the famously quick- tongued Yossi Beilin seemed, for once, almost at a loss for words. What, after all, do Israeli socialists know about cocktail dresses?
One thing, it turns out: that they distract Washington’s attention from urgent problems around the world.
“It’s simply surreal,” said Dr. Beilin, a leader of Israel’s opposition Labor Party.
“To think that the greatest power on earth is out of commission because of Monica Lewinsky’s dress — it’s one of the most surreal episodes in history.”
Last January, when the world first learned of Ms. Lewinsky, the presidential sex scandal triggered a sudden mood swing in U.S.-Israel relations. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had just landed in Washington, expecting to have Bill Clinton read him the riot act for what the Administration saw as foot-dragging on the peace process.
Enter Ms. Lewinsky, and Mr. Clinton was suddenly preoccupied. Mr. Netanyahu had an unexpectedly placid visit and returned to Israel a happy man.
Seven months later, Dr. Beilin was in Washington as part of a four-member delegation of Labour Party leaders. Led by party chairman Ehud Barak, they came in hopes of burnishing their image as a viable alternative to Mr. Netanyahu.
Their prospects seemed bright on the eve of departure. The Knesset had taken a key step towards dissolving itself and calling new elections, handing Mr. Netanyahu one of the worst political reverses of his tenure.
“That means we’re here as a group that could come to power in the near future,” Dr. Beilin maintained.
To their dismay, they arrived to find that President Clinton, too, had just been handed one of the worst political reverses of his tenure: Ms. Lewinsky’s decision to testify about the alleged affair and to hand over a certain cocktail dress. Nobody in Washington was talking about anything else.
“It’s depressing,” the usually ebullient Dr. Beilin said.
“The news begins and ends with Monica’s dress. It feels as though reality has been shoved aside in favor of some virtual reality.”
The Labour MS’s message was that the Administration should keep pushing for an Israeli-Palestinian deal. Washington has been pressing Jerusalem for months to give the Palestinians 13.1 percent of the West Bank in exchange for a string of concessions.
Israel has resisted mightily. A few weeks ago Washington effectively stopped pushing. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright now says the sides should work things out by themselves. …
… The bottom line, Dr. Beilin and like-minded Jewish activists maintain, is that Monica Lewinsky once again has the last word in Middle East diplomacy.
Last January this prompted jokes about Monica as Queen Esther, giving herself to save her people.
Now the jokes are about blue dresses with white stains, about 20th century Jewish history ending right where it began, in the women’s garment business.
Dr. Beilin isn’t laughing. “You can make jokes about it,” he says. “We can’t, because we’re the ones paying the price.”
————–
Pretty sad when you have to get the news from a goy, Larry. How are you going to explain this to your mother?
April 2nd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
daveNYC,
Fair enough, but having a Republican go out there and say this stuff gives you a hell of a lot of cover. Moreover (and most importantly), this is what you need to build a durable (and realistic) foreign policy…
April 2nd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Re Robert Gates
The general tenor of the comments assume that Gates is a Republican. It’s my understanding that he is a registered independent.
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
SLC,
I don’t know how he registered…but trust me on this…the guy is a real Republican…especially when it comes to foreign and defense policy.
It’s really too bad that we’re at the point where nobody remembers what real Republicans used to be like.
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I’d be more interested in this if Gates actually had some REASONS for his estimates. It sounds to me like he’s guessing one, two, three, years. That’s a 300% range – which means he has no clue what Israel will do.
The problem, as I’ve said all along, is that somebody has to blink – and it won’t be the Iranians.
So that means Obama has to blink, or the Israelis have to blink. For the Israelis, that means being seen as a paper tiger – able to stomp on Palestinians who have no serious means to resist, but unable to do anything about Hizballah or Iran. How long do you think the Israelis want to be in that position?
Israel has to either attack Iran or convince the US to do so within the next four years. They can’t afford to see another debacle like George Bush, who kept putting it off despite Cheney offering them $30 billion in new arms sales to do for us.
The bottom line is this: The Israelis don’t want to be blamed for starting another war for the US to fight for them, like they did Iraq. The US doesn’t want to be blamed for starting another war in the Middle East. This has gone on for the last four to seven years.
So somebody has to pony up. The question is: Do the Israelis really want Iran taken out, or don’t they? If they don’t, then everybody babbles threats for the next four years and Iran continues to enrich. If they do, then somebody – either the Israelis or Obama – has to make a move on Iran.
It’s that simple.
The problem is that nobody outside of Israel or the US really believes Iran has a nuclear weapons program. The Europeans act like they do, but they have no clue either. The Russians know it’s all BS. So do the Chinese. So does most of the Non-Aligned Nations. Everybody supports Iran having its own nuclear energy program except the US and Israel.
So whoever makes the first move is going to be blamed for destabilizing the Middle East. So the US wants Israel to do it, and Israel wants the US to do it.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:42 pm
It’s my understanding that he is a registered independent.
Gates is on the record saying something like ‘I’m registered as an independent [or not registered with a party] but prior to Obama, the only people appointing me to senior govt positions were Republicans’
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:36 pm
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 am
You know, I was really skeptical about Bob Gates. His past history didn’t inspire my confidence. But he has completely won me over. I now think he represents the best that America can offer. I’m sure he voted against the current president, but now he’s serving Obama with dignity, intelligence and poise. His approach to defense policy is spot on. I never thought I’d say this about him, but he’s the perfect person for this job. It’s a tough job, but he’s the kind of person that can rise to the challenge. Bless him.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:05 am
No, I’m sorry Matt, I think you got Israeli preferences confused with Chinese human rights preferences.
April 4th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
thanks for all
April 8th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
If you want to hear a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thanks, anyway!
April 15th, 2009 at 8:50 am
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