‘Obama to tell Netanyahu US gearing up for Iran strike’
During upcoming visit, president will convey message that window for American
military operation opens in June, TV report says
By Yifa Yaakov February 25, 2013, 11:22 pm
US President Barack Obama (photo credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
More on this story
* Diplomats: No Iran-IAEA meeting planned this time
* World offers Iran sanctions relief to curb nukes
* Kerry and Cameron say they’ll prevent ‘nuclear-armed Iran’
* Israel’s long-range interceptor passes test in space
When he visits Israel next
month, US President Barack Obama will tell Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu that a “window of opportunity” for a military strike on Iran
will open in June, according to an Israeli TV report Monday evening.
Obama will come bearing the message that if diplomatic efforts and sanctions
don’t bear fruit, Israel should “sit tight” and let Washington take the stage,
even if that
means remaining on the sidelines during a US military operation, Channel 10
reported. Netanyahu will be asked to refrain from any military
action and keep a low profile, avoiding even the mention of a strike,
the report said, citing unnamed officials.
In London Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said an Iran with nuclear
weapons was “simply unacceptable” and warned the time limit for a diplomatic
solution was running out.
“As we have repeatedly made clear, the window
for a diplomatic solution simply cannot remain open forever,” said
Kerry, on his first international tour as America’s top diplomat. “But
it is open today. It is open now and there is still time, but there is
only time if Iran makes the decision to come to the table and to
negotiate in good faith.
“We are prepared to negotiate in good faith,
in mutual respect, in an effort to avoid whatever terrible consequences
could follow failure, and so the choice really is in the hands of the
Iranians. And we hope they will make the right choice,” Kerry added.
A fresh round of high-level diplomatic talks were set to begin Tuesday in
Kazakhstan — the first since last June’s meeting in Moscow failed to convince
Iran
to stop enriching uranium to a level close to that used for nuclear
warheads.
Two weeks
ago, Netanyahu said he was looking forward to Obama’s visit and insisted that
he enjoyed a positive relationship with the American president,
despite reports to the contrary.
“We worked
together closely, closer than how it may look. We worked together on
security, diplomacy and intelligence,” he said, warning that Iran’s
nuclear weapons program “continues unabated” and that “they’ll soon have enough
material to produce a nuclear bomb.”
Netanyahu said earlier this month that he and
Obama had agreed on three key areas of consultation during the
presidential visit — thwarting Iran’s nuclear drive, grappling with the
instability in Syria and the risks of WMD there falling into rogue
hands, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-to-tell-netanyahu-us-gearing-up-for-strike/
..............................................................
Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as US Hegemony
by Gareth Porter, February 26, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of
U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy
toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a
systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as
well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that
may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security
officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just
to criticize U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a
problem of U.S. hegemony.
Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both
served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on
the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one
of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with
Iranian officials.
Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush administration to take
the Iranian “roadmap” proposal for bilateral negotiations
seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or powerless to
influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a connection with the
powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), having
interned with that lobby group as a youth.
After leaving the U.S. government in disagreement with U.S. policy
toward Iran, the Leveretts did not follow the normal pattern of settling into
the jobs where they would support the broad outlines of the U.S.
role in world politics in return for comfortable incomes and continued
access to power.
Instead, they have chosen to take a firm stand in opposition to U.S.
policy toward Iran, criticising the policy of the Barack Obama
administration as far more aggressive than is generally recognised. They went
even farther, however, contesting the consensus view in Washington among policy
wonks, news media and Iran human rights activists that
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2009 was fraudulent.
The Leveretts’ uncompromising posture toward the policymaking system
and those outside the government who support U.S. policy has made them
extremely unpopular in Washington foreign policy elite circles. After
talking to some of their antagonists, The New Republic even passed on
the rumor that the Leveretts had become shills for oil companies and
others who wanted to do business with Iran.
The problem for the establishment, however, is that they turned out
to be immune to the blandishments that normally keep former officials
either safely supportive or quiet on national security issues that call
for heated debate.
In “Going to Tehran”, the Leveretts elaborate on the contrarian
analysis they have been making on their blog (formerly “The Race for
Iran” and now “Going to Tehran”) They take to task those supporting U.S.
systematic pressures on Iran for substituting wishful thinking that
most Iranians long for secular democracy, and offer a hard analysis of
the history of the Iranian revolution.
In an analysis of the roots of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime,
they point to evidence that the single most important factor that swept
the Khomeini movement into power in 1979 was “the Shah’s indifference to the
religious sensibilities of Iranians”. That point, which conflicts
with just about everything that has appeared in the mass media on Iran
for decades, certainly has far-reaching analytical significance.
The Leveretts’ 56-page review of the evidence regarding the
legitimacy of the 2009 election emphasises polls done by U.S.-based
Terror Free Tomorrow and World Public Opinon and Canadian-based Globe
Scan and 10 surveys by the University of Tehran. All of the polls were
consistent with one another and with official election data on both a
wide margin of victory by Ahmadinejad and turnout rates.
The Leveretts also point out that the leading opposition candidate,
Hossein Mir Mousavi, did not produce “a single one of his 40,676
observers to claim that the count at his or her station had been
incorrect, and none came forward independently”.
“Going to Tehran” has chapters analyzing Iran’s “Grand Strategy” and
on the role of negotiating with the United States that debunk much of
which passes for expert opinion in Washington’s think tank world. They
view Iran’s nuclear program as aimed at achieving the same status as
Japan, Canada and other “threshold nuclear states” which have the
capability to become nuclear powers but forego that option.
The Leveretts also point out that it is a status that is not
forbidden by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – much to the chagrin
of the United States and its anti-Iran allies.
In a later chapter, they allude briefly to what is surely the
best-kept secret about the Iranian nuclear program and Iranian foreign
policy: the Iranian leadership’s calculation that the enrichment program is the
only incentive the United States has to reach a strategic
accommodation with Tehran. That one fact helps to explain most of the
twists and turns in Iran’s nuclear program and its nuclear diplomacy
over the past decade.
One of the propaganda themes most popular inside the Washington
beltway is that the Islamic regime in Iran cannot negotiate seriously
with the United States because the survival of the regime depends on
hostility toward the United States.
The Leveretts debunk that notion by detailing a series of episodes
beginning with President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s effort to improve
relations in 1991 and again in 1995 and Iran’s offer to cooperate
against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, more generally after 9/11, about
which Hillary Mann Leverett had personal experience.
Finally, they provide the most detailed analysis available on the
2003 Iranian proposal for a “roadmap” for negotiations with the United
States, which the Bush administration gave the back of its hand.
The central message of “Going to Tehran” is that the United States
has been unwilling to let go of the demand for Iran’s subordination to
dominant U.S. power in the region. The Leveretts identify the decisive
turning point in the U.S. “quest for dominance in the Middle East” as
the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they say “liberated the United
States from balance of power constraints”.
They cite the recollection of senior advisers to Secretary of State
James Baker that the George H. W. Bush administration considered
engagement with Iran as part of a post-Gulf War strategy but decided in
the aftermath of the Soviet adversary’s disappearance that “it didn’t
need to”.
Subsequent U.S. policy in the region, including what former national
security adviser Bent Scowcroft called “the nutty idea” of “dual
containment” of Iraq and Iran, they argue, has flowed from the new
incentive for Washington to maintain and enhance its dominance in the
Middle East.
The authors offer a succinct analysis of the Clinton administration’s regional
and Iran policies as precursors to Bush’s Iraq War and Iran
regime change policy. Their account suggests that the role of Republican
neoconservatives in those policies should not be exaggerated, and that
more fundamental political-institutional interests were already pushing
the U.S. national security state in that direction before 2001.
They analyse the Bush administration’s flirtation with regime change
and the Obama administration’s less-than-half-hearted diplomatic
engagement with Iran as both motivated by a refusal to budge from a
stance of maintaining the status quo of U.S.-Israeli hegemony.
Consistent with but going beyond the Leveretts’ analysis is the Bush
conviction that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had shaken the
Iranians, and that there was no need to make the slightest concession to the
regime. The Obama administration has apparently fallen into the
same conceptual trap, believing that the United States and its allies
have Iran by the throat because of its “crippling sanctions”.
Thanks to the Leveretts, opponents of U.S. policies of domination and
intervention in the Middle East have a new and rich source of analysis
to argue against those policies more effectively.
*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based
Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in
Afghanistan.
This article was originally published at IPS News.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2013/02/25/former-insiders-criticise-iran-policy-as-us-hegemony/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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