U.S. and Israel Remain Split on Speed of Iran Threat

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obama-netanyahuAmid mounting tensions over whether Israel will carry out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and Israel remain at odds over a fundamental question: whether Iran’s crucial nuclear facilities are about to become impregnable.

Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, coined the phrase “zone of immunity” to define the circumstances under which Israel would judge it could no longer hold off from an attack because Iran’s effort to produce a bomb would be invulnerable to any strike. But judging when that moment will arrive has set off an intense debate with the Obama administration, whose officials counter that there are other ways to make Iran vulnerable.

Senior Israeli officials, including the foreign minister and leader of the Mossad, have traveled to Washington in recent weeks to make the case that this point is fast approaching. American officials have made reciprocal visits to Jerusalem, arguing that Israel and the West have more time and should allow sanctions and covert actions to deter Iran’s plans.

The Americans have also used the discussions to test their belief, based on a series of public statements by Israeli officials, that an Israeli strike against Iran could come as early as spring, according to an official familiar with the discussions.

President Obama tried to defuse arguments for military action in a telephone call last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the substance of which was confirmed by an Obama administration official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the conversation. While the two men have had an often contentious relationship over Middle East diplomacy, American officials emerged from that exchange persuaded that Mr. Netanyahu was willing to give economic sanctions and other steps time to work.

The difference of opinion over Iran’s nuclear “immunity” is critical because it plays into not just the timing – or bluffing – about a possible military strike, but the calculations about how deeply and quickly sanctions against Iran must bite. If the Israeli argument is right, the question of how fast the Iranians can assemble a weapon becomes less important than whether there is any way to stop them.

” ‘Zone of immunity’ is an ill-defined term,” said a senior Obama administration official, expressing frustration that the Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly, given the many kinds of pressure being placed on Tehran and the increasing evidence that far tougher sanctions are having an effect.

The Israelis have zeroed in on Iran’s plan to put much of its uranium enrichment near Qum in an underground facility beneath so many layers of granite that even the Pentagon acknowledges it would be out of the reach of its best bunker-busting bombs. Once enrichment activities are under way at Qum, the Israelis argue, Iran could throw out United Nations inspectors and produce bomb-grade fuel without fear the facility would be destroyed.

At its core, the official said, the argument the Israelis make is that once the Iranians get an “impregnable breakout capability” – that is, a place that is protected from a military strike – “it makes no difference whether it will take Iran six months or a year or five years” to fabricate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The Americans have a very different view, according to a second senior official who has discussed the concept with Israelis. He said “there are many other options” to slow Iran’s march to a completed weapon, like shutting off Iran’s oil revenues, taking out facilities that supply centrifuge parts or singling out installations where the Iranians would turn the fuel into a weapon.

Administration officials cite this more complex picture in pressing the Israelis to give the latest sanctions a chance to inflict enough pain on the Iranian leadership to force it back to the negotiating table, or to make the decision that the nuclear program is not worth the cost.

Iran’s currency has plunged, they note; its oil is piling up in storage tanks because it cannot find buyers, and there is growing evidence of fissures among the country’s leadership.

After a period of doubt about Israel’s intentions at the end of last year, administration officials said the two sides were now communicating better. Mr. Obama, they said, reflected that when he said in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, “I don’t think that Israel has made a decision on what they need to do.”

This is not the first time that the Israelis have invented a phrase that suggests a hard deadline before an attack. At the end of the Bush administration, they said they could not allow Iran to go past “the point of no return.” That phrase was also ill-defined, but seemed to suggest that once Iran had the know-how and the basic materials to make a bomb, it would be inevitable.

While nuclear experts believe Iran now has enough uranium to fuel four or more weapons, it would have to enrich it to bomb-grade levels, which would take months. Beyond that, Iran would have to produce a warhead that could fit atop an Iranian missile – a process that could take one to three years, most experts say.

Still, Mr. Barak’s theory of “immunity” has gained a lot of attention in recent weeks, complicating a debate charged with bellicose language – in Israel and Iran and among Republicans on the presidential campaign trail, where Mitt Romney and other candidates have pledged Israel full support in any military confrontation with Iran.

Disputes between the United States and Israel are inevitable, according to experts, given the radically different stakes of a nuclear Iran for a distant superpower and for a neighbor whose very existence the leaders in Tehran have pledged to eradicate.

“No end of consultations can remove that asymmetry,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Next month, Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Washington to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying group, to whom he and other Israeli leaders have regularly spoken about Iran’s “existential threat.” The White House has not yet announced whether Mr. Netanyahu will meet with Mr. Obama, though officials say it is likely.

Officials said that for all the friction between the United States and Israel over issues like Jewish settlements in the West Bank, it had not spilled over into the dialogue over Iran, in part because Mr. Obama has ordered it “walled off” from politics.

Administration officials also noted a distinction in the tone of Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu, who does not publicly favor the phrase “zone of immunity.” This week, an American official noted, Mr. Netanyahu declared that on the topic of Iran, officials should just “shut up.”

“I think that’s good advice,” the American official said.

{NY Times/Matzav.com Newscenter}


2 COMMENTS

  1. Urgent please spread message to all
    A 4 year old boy in elad israel fell of a 5 foot high porch on to his head and he is in critical condition . Please say tehillem for him
    yedidya eliyahu ben sima simcha

  2. The next sixty days offer a window of opportunity for trust building that must be exploited. Spring is coming to the Northern Hemisphere and international goodwill should build until late July when the London Olympics commences. Either this dynamic will be harnessed or a dangerous vacuum will develop. You never know, we just might witness Hadi Saie and Janguli Karchvava competing against each other in good spirit in the men’s 80 kg Taekwondo competition in London in early August without the Iranians spitting the dummy and walking out of the arena.

    Every day is critical in the region right now. One rash mistake by certain players could see things spiral downward into a satanic vortex very quickly. What is required is vision, courage and trust building. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to drive on a road from Jerusalem to Tehran by 2019 ? Perhaps we will see at the 2022 Qatar World Cup the USA, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel competing in Group D. The future is what we make of it after all. The universe really is stable, ordered, benevolent and expansive. The potential GDP of the region can boom over the coming years and decades if a certain paradigm develops.

    Prayers for the Middle East.

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