For all it has done to promote confrontation between the United States and Iran, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has worked to avoid the public perception that AIPAC is openly promoting war. In AIPAC's public documents, the emphasis has always been on tougher sanctions. (If you make sanctions "tough" enough -- an effective embargo -- that is an act of war, but it is still at one remove from saying that the U.S. should start bombing.)
But a new Senate effort to move the goalposts of U.S. policy to declare it "unacceptable" for Iran to develop a nuclear weapons *capability* -- not a nuclear weapon, but the technical capacity to create one -- gives AIPAC the opportunity to make a choice which all can observe. If the Lieberman resolution becomes an ask for AIPAC lobbyists at the March AIPAC policy conference, then the world will know: AIPAC is lobbying Congress for war with Iran. Sponsors of the Lieberman resolution<http://www.scribd.com/doc/81857609/2012-02-15-Updated-Iran-Resolution> deny<http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/16/32_senators_call_for_no_containment_strategy_for_iran> that it is an "authorization for military force," and in a legal, technical sense, they are absolutely correct: it is not a *legal* authorization for military force. But it is an attempt to enact a *political* authorization for military force. It is an attempt to pressure the administration politically to move forward the tripwire for war, to a place indistinguishable from the status quo that exists today. If successful, this political move would make it impossible for the administration to pursue meaningful diplomatic engagement with Iran, shutting down the most plausible alternative to war. The first "resolved" paragraph of the Lieberman resolution affirms that it is a "vital national interest" of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a "nuclear weapons *capability*." The phrase "vital national interest" is a "term of art." It means something that the U.S. should be willing to go to war for. Recall the debate over whether the U.S. military intervention in Libya was a "vital national interest" of the United States (which Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it wasn't.) It was a debate over whether the bar was met to justify the United States going to war. [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/us-iran-relations_b_1285276.html Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected]
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