Netanyahu’s Speech and the
Politics of Iran Policy
By Gareth Porter
February 03, 2015 "ICH"
- Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu’s acceptance of an invitation to
speak to the US Congress on 3 March, two
weeks before the Israeli election and
without any consultation with the White
House, is aimed at advancing both
Netanyahu’s re-election and the proposed new
set of sanctions against Iran in the US
Congress. For many months, pro-Israeli
legislators and lobbyists have been
threatening to re-impose existing sanctions
on Iran and add new ones while negotiations
are still going on.
Regardless of the argument
that the sanctions legislation is meant to
strengthen the US negotiating hand, the real
purpose of the proponents of sanctions has
always been to ensure that no nuclear
agreement can be reached. Those proponents
take their cues from Netanyahu, and that has
been Netanyahu’s openly proclaimed aim ever
since the negotiations with the Rouhani
government began. Netanyahu has often
insisted that Israel will not accept an
agreement that allows Iran to retain any
enrichment capability.
The Obama administration
has made it clear that it would veto such
new sanctions legislation, arguing that it
would leave the United States with no
options except the threat of war. That
argument prevailed in the Senate earlier,
and the administration may well be able to
use it again to defeat the Israeli effort to
sabotage the negotiations through sanctions
legislation. But there are more battles to
come.
Influence and threats
The current tensions over
the Netanyahu speech is just the latest
chapter in a long-running drama involving an
Israeli strategy to use its political power
in the US Congress to tilt US Iran policy in
the direction Israel desires. But in the
past, that Israeli advantage has been
combined with a strategy of trying to get
the United States to take care of Iran’s
nuclear problem by suggesting that,
otherwise Israel might have to use force
itself.
Netanyahu’s predecessor,
Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, initiated that
strategy in May-June 2008, when the Israeli
Air Force carried out a
two-week air war exercise over the
eastern Mediterranean and Greece. During
that exercise, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul
Mofaz threatened that if Iran continued what
he called “its program for developing
nuclear weapons”, Israel “would attack”.
In fact, the purported
rehearsal for attack and explicit war
threats were a ruse. The Israeli Air Force
did not have the ability to carry out such
an attack, because it had only a fraction of
the refueling capacity it would have needed.
The whole exercise was really aimed at
influencing the next US administration.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who
conceived the strategy, sought to
take advantage of the waning months of
the George W Bush administration, which
cooperated with the Israelis in pointing to
the exercise as a signal to Iran that
Israel’s most enthusiastic US ally would
leave office in a few months. After
Netanyahu was elected prime minister for a
second time in early 2009, he kept Barak as
his defense minister in order to refine the
strategy of bluff to have maximum effect on
the Obama administration.
Netanyahu introduced a new
element into the ruse, playing the part of
the zealot who viewed himself as the savior
of the Jewish people who would use force to
prevent Iran from continuing its nuclear
program. He used
two
articles by Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic
magazine featuring interviews with Netanyahu
or his aides and allies to sway the American
political elite to believe his bluff.
In contrast to his
calculated self-created image as a messiah
ready to recklessly go to war, Netanyahu’s
reputation in Israeli political circles was
one of a risk-averse politician. The editor
of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, told me in a March
2012 interview that Netanyahu was generally
known as a “hesitant politician who would
not dare to attack without American
permission.”
Netanyahu’s phony war
The climax of Netanyahu’s
phony war threat was his carefully
calculated showdown with Obama during the
2012 presidential campaign. It began with
AIPAC maneuvering a 401-11 vote in the House
of Representatives demanding that Iran be
prevented from having “nuclear weapons
capability.” Then, in August – two weeks
before the Republican convention – after
leaking to the press that he had all but
made the decision to attack Iran in the
fall, Netanyahu offered Obama what was
termed
a “compromise”: if he publicly accepted
Netanyahu’s “red line” that Iran would not
be allowed to have the enrichment capability
for a bomb, Netanyahu would consider it a
“virtual commitment” by Obama to “act
militarily if needed” and “reconsider” his
decision to attack Iran.
Netanyahu believed Obama
would be forced to go along with the offer
by the threat from a militantly pro-Israel
Romney campaign, fueled by
tens of millions of dollars from Sheldon
Adelson, Netanyahu’s main financial
backer for many years. But instead, Obama
got tough with Netanyahu. The Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin
Dempsey
declared that he – meaning the US
military – would not be “complicit” in any
Israeli attack. Several days later, in a
long phone conversation with Netanyahu,
Obama
flatly rejected his demand for a time
limit on how long the US would wait for Iran
to comply with its negotiating demands. And
he refused to meet with the prime minister
during a trip to the United States later
that month.
Israel’s Congress
allies constrain Obama
After that defeat, the air
went out of Netanyahu’s war threat strategy.
But he still has his minions in Congress,
and they have had a palpable impact on
Obama’s negotiating position in the nuclear
talks. The demand for a much smaller number
of Iranian centrifuges than required to
guarantee against an Iranian dash for a bomb
was adopted primarily in order to stave off
a concerted attack from the Congressional
followers of Israel. And the
administration’s posture on lifting
sanctions is hamstrung by existing laws that
were passed on the demand of Israel and by
the fear of the ferocious attack from the
same Congressional camp followers to any
effort to get around those restrictions.
The power of the Israeli
lobby is certainly part of the
administration’s calculation in insisting
that Iran must comply with US demands on the
enrichment capacity and give up its
aspiration for the removal of all US
unilateral sanctions as well as UN Security
Council sanctions.
Netanyahu’s approaching
speech to Congress is a reflection of the
increasingly open interference in US
politics by Israel and its political forces
in the United States. In the most recent
manifestation of the subservient character
of a large proportion of the US Congress in
relation to Israel,
Senator Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.) told
Netanyahu, “The Congress will follow
your lead” on Iran and would demand a role
in the final settlement. The phenomenon is a
direct result of the large campaign
contributions that go into the coffers of
those in Congress who “follow the lead” of
Israel and to the opponents of those who
fail to do so. Such is the power wielded by
AIPAC that very few dare to stand up to its
threats.
There are limits to what
an otherwise obsequious Congress will do for
Netanyahu and Israel. Many members will not
vote for a measure that can be credibly
presented as an incitement to US war.
Nevertheless, we are still likely to see a
revealing contrast next week as Netanyahu is
lionized (again) by the US Congress even as
he is
under fire in his own election campaign
for his clumsy and possibly costly insult to
the Obama administration.
Gareth Porter is
an independent investigative journalist and
historian writing on US national security
policy. His latest book, “Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare,” was published in February 2014.