Obama, Iran

Israeli television’s Channel 10 reports that President Obama will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reaffirm a promise: come June 2013, the U.S. will use force if Iran does not desist from its nuclear proliferation program. The meeting will take place in either Washington or New York at the end of September or early October, a timeline during which, according to Israeli government spokespersons, Tel Aviv would attack regardless of American support. [Doing so] before this meeting [would be] unthinkable.

For Obama, this is not a simple question of war or peace. If Israel attacks before the November presidential elections, which will decide [Obama’s] re-election, the current occupant of the White House will have a dilemma to confront. If he doesn’t intervene, it is possible that the powerful Jewish lobby will divert its support to Republican candidate Mitt Romney, lending him invaluable support. On the other hand, if he intervenes, who knows what could happen to the votes of the majority of the public, which opposes war against Iran.

A poll conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post indicates that 81 percent of those interviewed were in favor of direct diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran in order to resolve the conflict. It’s just that a thousand American families have paid for Iraq and Afghanistan. In response to the question about the consequences of a solitary Israeli attack, 88 percent opined that it would spark a war throughout the whole region. Exactly.

Obama prefers to call for the U.N. to impose even stronger sanctions on Iran, spy on its nuclear program, support its Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (even though it’s on the Pentagon’s list of terrorist organizations), continue covert CIA actions in Iranian territory that have caused, among other things, the deaths of four nuclear scientists and push established negotiations down a dead-end. This is how he postpones the dilemma until after the elections.

Iran insists that its [nuclear] program has peaceful objectives. The funny thing is that the 16 bodies of the U.S. intelligence community and the Israeli Mossad agree — for now.

“Recent assessments from the American espionage agencies,” The New York Times informs us, match up in large part with those of 2007, which concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear arms programs “years before.” The paper indicates that Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr., Director of the CIA David H. Petraeus, Chief of the Pentagon Leon E. Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey all agree on this. There is consensus.

White House spokesperson Jay Carney recently affirmed: “we have eyes, we have visibility on the [Iranian nuclear] program and we will know if Iran decides to manufacture a weapon and when.” A high-ranking National Security Council official echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “we continue to evaluate whether Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon.” It seems to be a response to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s declarations, which emphasized that the latest information obtained by U.S. intelligence services places more urgency on the “existing danger” from Iran than Israel does.

Ehud Barak is one of the most alarmed, and alarming, Israeli government hawks; nevertheless, he announced on CNN that “the two (U.S. and Israel) know that Khamenei has not given the order to manufacture a weapon, but has decided to deceive and challenge the entire world.” Notable international relations specialist Kenneth N. Waltz threw some light on the strategy of Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, in the Foreign Affairs bimonthly (July-August 2012).

The experts agree that Tehran has the necessary knowledge and materials to construct a nuclear bomb, but holds back and leaves open the possibility of rapidly gaining a dissuasive [international] advantage without it. “This capability could satisfy the internal political needs of Iranian leaders to give to its hardliners the security of having all the benefits of owning a [nuclear] bomb (more security) without major inconveniences (isolation and international condemnation),” Waltz explains.

What is certain is that the absence of an immediate threat, and the nuclear superiority of the U.S. and Israel, negate the justification for an attack on Iran. Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, declared before a Senate commission that “it is improbable that (Iran) would initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict or launch a preventative attack.” So what is the war for? Or is it once again about oil?