Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture

 

Video and Edited Transcript
Dr. Stephen M. Walt
Transcript No. 367 (10 May 2012)

 

 

 

10 May 2012
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

 

Dr. Stephen M. Walt:

It is a pleasure to be here today, and a great honor to be asked to deliver the annual Hisham [B.] Sharabi [Memorial] Lecture.  Previous speakers in this series have set a rather high standard, and I will do my best to live up to the example they have set.  I want to thank Yousef Munayyer for the invitation, and the staff and supporters of the Palestine Center for making this event possible.  And of course, I want to thank all of you for coming.

Over the past few months we’ve seen an intense debate over the possibility of war with Iran.  The United States and Iran have been at odds for many years, and the United States has long been concerned about Iran’s nuclear research program.  There have been several moments in the past where the danger of war seemed real.  Remember that the [George W.] Bush administration once hoped that winning a quick and decisive victory in Iraq would allow it to turn on Iran and force regime change there as well.

Iraq didn’t work out the way [former U.S. President George W.] Bush and Company expected, but that debacle hasn’t stopped a number of people and groups from suggesting that Israel or the United States should launch a preventive war to retard Iran’s nuclear program.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described a nuclear-armed Iran as an “existential threat” and warned of a “second Holocaust.”  Some of Israel’s most vocal defenders in the United States have echoed these views, and sympathetic journalists have published articles suggesting that Israel was likely to attack if Iran did not stop its nuclear activities.  Most Republican presidential hopefuls described Iran as a looming danger, rejected policies designed to contain it and said they would use force if elected.

Needless to say, this all sounds eerily familiar.  In the 1990s, American neoconservatives portrayed [the late Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a major threat to U.S. interests and began a prolonged campaign to persuade Americans to use force to overthrow him.  Their efforts did not bear fruit immediately, but President George W. Bush and [former U.S.] Vice President Dick Cheney embraced their ideas after 9/11 and led the country into a war that cost more than one trillion dollars, the lives of 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis and weakened America’s strategic position in the Gulf.  Yet just a few years later, Americans are once again debating whether to launch another preventive war in the same region, for much the same reasons.

In my talk today, I will compare the earlier campaign for war with Iraq with the current campaign for military action against Iran.  I am going to make three main points.

I will first argue there are important similarities between these two situations.   Specifically, in both cases the main driving force behind the campaign for war are hardline individuals and groups in the Israel lobby.  By “Israel lobby,” I mean groups or individuals in the United States who work actively and openly to promote a “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, one where the U.S. gives Israel generous economic, military, and diplomatic support, and more-or-less unconditionally.  These groups are not the only reason why the U.S. went to war against Iraq—they didn’t cause the war by themselves.  But absent their activity, the United States would not have invaded Iraq in 2003 and we would not be debating war with Iran today.

I will then talk about the important differences between 2003 and 2012.  The “pro-Israel community” in the United States is not united on the issue of Iran, Israel’s own national security community is divided over the idea of preventive war, and the Obama administration is much less inclined to war than the Bush administration was.  All of which makes war less likely.

Third, these differences are a very good thing, because a military attack on Iran would be a major strategic blunder. And this point underscores a broader lesson: the most influential groups in the Israel lobby consistently promote policies that are harmful to nearly everyone, including Israel itself.

Finally, this counterproductive approach to Iran also distracts us from a variety of other problems, most notably the continued dispossession of the Palestinians and denial of their political rights.  That issue is not my main focus today, but it is also one we should not forget.

Let me start a little bit by talking about the war with Iraq. When John Mearsheimer and I first published our work on the Israel lobby in 2006, no claim was more controversial than our argument that the lobby had played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq.  It was clear by then that the war had been a huge blunder, and it is hardly surprising that the individuals and groups who had helped bring it sought to deny responsibility afterwards.  Our critics could not refute our arguments directly, however, so they chose to misrepresent them, or to portray us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.

What did we actually write?  In our original London Review of Books article and subsequent book, we said “the driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives.”  It was the neocons who dreamed up the idea of using U.S. power to topple Saddam, and it was the neocons who openly advocated this course from the mid-1990s onward.  Their efforts included a series of open letters addressed to [former U.S.] President [Bill] Clinton and numerous articles and op-eds in the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

It is important to emphasize that this idea did not come from the American military, the [U.S.] State Department, the intelligence community, or the oil industry.  As Tom Friedman of the New York Times told an interviewer in 2005:

“Iraq was the war the neoconservatives wanted, the war the neoconservatives marketed.  I could give you names of twenty-five people [here in Washington], who, if you had exiled them to a desert island in 2001, the Iraq war would not have happened.”


He was right. As you know, neoconservatives are an especially hawkish faction within the broader Israel lobby.  As one prominent neoconservative, Max Boot, wrote in Foreign Policy, steadfast support for Israel “is a key tenet of neoconservatism,” and virtually all the most prominent neoconservatives—like Boot himself, William Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, etc. are ardent defenders of the “special relationship.”  Many neoconservatives held important positions in the Bush administration, where they played key roles in pushing for war against Iraq.  For example, at the first meeting at Camp David after 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz argued for invading Iraq before Afghanistan, even though [Osama] Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.  Neoconservatives outside the government expressed similar views, with Robert Kagan and William Kristol calling for regime change in Iraq right after 9/11—well before the Taliban had been toppled from power.  A few months later, in April 2002, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century released yet another open letter, this time urging President Bush “to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein.”

Thus, the crucial role the neoconservatives played in lobbying for war is beyond dispute.  But what about groups like AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], or the other major organizations in the lobby?  They didn’t initiate the idea of invading Iraq, and they do not appear to have done much to convince President Bush to decide on war.  Instead, these groups played an important role in convincing Congress and the American people to support Bush’s plan.

For example, in the months preceding the war, AIPAC’s biweekly Near East Report published numerous articles highlighting the danger from Iraq, including an interview with Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center at Brookings [Institution].  Pollack was the author of The Threatening Storm, a book that argued regime change in Iraq was necessary because Saddam was undeterrable.  Pollack’s boss at the Saban Center was Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute on Near East Policy, and both men wrote articles and op-eds calling for war in late 2002 and 2003.

But there’s more.  In 2003, AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun that one of AIPAC’s “success stories” in 2002 was “quietly lobbying Congress” to approve the resolution authorizing the use of force. This wasn’t just idle bragging: John Judis of the New Republic later recounted that Senate staffers had told him personally about AIPAC’s pre-war lobbying activities, and AIPAC spokesperson Rebecca Needler told the Jewish Telegraph Agency that “if the president asks Congress to support action in Iraq, AIPAC would lobby members of Congress to support him.”  And they did.  I might add that Nathan Guttman of the Jewish newspaper the Forward and Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker, also wrote articles saying AIPAC had lobbied in favor of war.

In addition to AIPAC, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations passed resolutions endorsing the use of force, and the chairman of the Presidents’ Conference, publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, was especially outspoken about the need to topple Saddam.  Not to be outdone, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee [AJC] pointedly asked “Do we have to wait until a target is hit, and the world says ‘Ah, yes, he did have weapons of mass destruction?’”

Or as the Forward recalled in a 2004 editorial:

“As President Bush attempted to sell the war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense.  In statement after statement, community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.”


Finally, prominent Christian Zionists also backed the war, with Reverend John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, telling followers “if Saddam Hussein is allowed to dictate the terms . . .of this war, the front lines of the war will explode in American cities with a death toll too staggering to comprehend.  Saddam must go!”

In short, the role of the neoconservatives and other key organizations in the lobby cannot be denied.

But it is important to be clear about what I am not saying, because so many critics get our story wrong.

First, we did not claim that the neocons or the other groups in the lobby were all-powerful, or that they started the war by themselves.  Their initial effort to convince Clinton to go to war failed, and they were unable to persuade either Bush or Cheney until after 9/11.  If 9/11 had never happened, the U.S. would probably never have invaded Iraq.  The lobby’s activities were a necessary condition for the war, but not a sufficient condition by themselves.

Second, the war was not the result of some sort of secret cabal or conspiracy.  On the contrary, the neoconservatives made their case openly and went to great lengths to publicize their views, as did leaders of major pro-Israel organizations.  And they were happy to take credit for it afterwards; that is, until the war started to go south.

And as we emphasized repeatedly, there was nothing illegitimate about their lobbying for war, even if it was in fact a very bad idea.

Third, the war party did not push this policy because they thought it would be good for Israel but bad for the United States.  Rather, they thought it would be good for both countries.  They were tragically mistaken, of course, but not disloyal.

Fourth, the idea of invading Iraq did not originate with Israel.  Indeed, Israeli officials were skeptical at first, because they wanted the U.S. to go after Tehran first.  That is another reason why AIPAC was initially quiet; it didn’t get fully on board until Israel decided to go along.  Israel backed the war after the Bush administration explained that Iraq was just the first step, and that Iran would be dealt with afterwards.  At that point, key Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu then helped sell the war here in America through interviews with the press, op-eds in prominent American newspapers and appearances on Capitol Hill.

Fifth, it is worth asking what might have happened had the major organizations in the lobby pursued a different course of action.  Suppose the AIPAC, the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and the Conference of Presidents had encouraged a lively debate in their publications and helped Congress sift the pros and cons of war in a fair-minded way.  What if the Israeli government had recognized the dangers of the war and encouraged AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents to oppose it?  Or what if the major organizations had chosen to do so on their own?  It is possible that Bush, Cheney and the neoconservatives would have still managed to take us over the brink, but it would have been much more difficult.  Opposition or neutrality from the major pro-Israel organizations would have encouraged Congress to think twice about the issues and given them good reasons to slow the rush for war.  We might have had a real debate about the military requirements and the risks of a costly quagmire.  Of course, the problem wasn’t that key organizations in the lobby failed to speak out against the war; the problem was that many of them actively endorsed it.

Finally, we emphasized that it would be wrong to blame American Jews for the war.  In fact, surveys of U.S. public opinion show that the American Jewish population was less supportive of the war than the American people as a whole.  Rather, the blame lies with President Bush and his advisors, who made the ultimate decision, with the neocons, who dreamed up the war and sold it to Bush and Cheney, and with the major groups in the lobby, who did much to sell it inside and outside the Beltway.

Let me now turn to the issue of Iran, which is in some ways similar and in other ways quite different.

If Israel did not exist and there was no “Israel lobby,” the United States might still have a contentious relationship with Iran.  Iranians resent the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that restored the Shah [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi] to power, as well as our support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.  Similarly, Americans remember the hostage crisis that followed the fall of the Shah and worry about Iran’s potential to dominate the oil-rich Persian Gulf.  The United States would axiomatically oppose any Iranian effort to obtain nuclear weapons, because the U.S. has long sought to slow nuclear proliferation.  So the Israel lobby is hardly the only reason the United States and Iran are wary of each other.

Nonetheless, both Israel and the lobby have long encouraged the United States to take a hardline stance toward Iran and sought to block any efforts at rapprochement between Tehran and Washington.

In the 1990s, the United States adopted the strategy of “dual containment,” which committed the United States to deter Iran and Iraq simultaneously.  This strategy was the brainchild of Martin Indyk again, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs.  According to Indyk’s associate Ken Pollack as well as author Trita Parsi, “dual containment” was adopted largely to reassure Israel.  In 1994, AIPAC responded to growing Israeli concerns by preparing a lengthy paper portraying Iran as a threat to Israel and the United States alike.  Throughout the rest of the decade, AIPAC pushed hard for increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, culminating in the 1998 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act.  It also opposed several Iranian attempts to improve relations, and successfully lobbied President Clinton to block an oil deal between Iran and CONOCO in 1996.

The neoconservatives in the Bush administration were as hostile to Iran as they were to Iraq, and they believed “regime change” would include Tehran as well as Baghdad.  In May 2003, when it looked like the U.S. had won a stunning victory in Iraq, William Kristol wrote in The Weekly Standard that the job wasn’t finished and that “the next great battle. . . will be for Tehran.”  Other neoconservatives echoed this hope.

The neocons’ fantasies of regional transformation evaporated when Iraq turned into a costly quagmire, and it soon became clear that Saddam’s overthrow had backfired by enhancing Iran’s regional influence.  Nonetheless, the Bush administration continued to insist that Iran had to suspend all nuclear enrichment before any negotiations could begin. In the process rejecting Iranian offers to limit enrichment to little more than a small research and development initiative.

In essence, Washington was demanding that Iran give us what we most wanted up front, at which point we might be willing to talk about any concerns that Tehran might have.  Not surprisingly, this approach was a complete failure: Iran had exactly zero centrifuges spinning when Bush took office and roughly 4000 operating when Bush’s second term ended. Nonetheless, a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 concluded that Iran had suspended its research on nuclear weapons back in 2003 and had no active weapons program underway.  This finding was consistent, by the way, with Iran’s repeated insistence that it did not seek nuclear weapons, and with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s declaration that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam.

Accordingly, when Israeli leaders sought a green light to launch a preventive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities during Bush’s last year in office, his response was a firm no.  The last thing the United States needed in 2008 was war with another Muslim country.   Even so, AIPAC managed to kill a provision to a defense bill that would have required President Bush to get Congressional authorization to use force against Iran, because doing so would, in AIPAC’s view, “take the use of force off the table.”

As the Bush administration came to a close, individuals and groups in the lobby continued to push for a hardline U.S. approach.  In September 2008, two well-known neocons, Michael Makovsky and Michael Rubin, produced a task force report for the Bipartisan Policy Center that portrayed Iran as a looming threat to American interests and recommended that the United States demand that Iran abandon all nuclear enrichment, backed up by the use of force if necessary.

Which brings us to the Obama administration.  At first, Obama tried to engage Tehran through several symbolic gestures and agreed to participate in direct talks on Iran’s nuclear program.  The two countries nearly reached a deal in 2009 on a fuel swap that would have reduced Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium in exchange for fuel for a small research reactor.  These efforts were derailed in part by the contested Iranian election of 2009, which made a compromise more difficult for both sides, and by miscommunication and vacillation over the terms of the fuel swap deal.

Yet even as Obama supposedly extended an open hand, the United States was also tightening sanctions and ramping up covert action against Iran, culminating in the Stuxnet computer virus attack in 2010.  And there is good evidence that key officials in the administration expected diplomacy to fail, and were just going through the motions in order to justify the use of force later.  Washington continued to demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment, and top officials repeatedly declared an Iranian bomb “unacceptable,” and that all options were “on the table.” Pushed by Congress, Washington orchestrated a successful international campaign to tighten economic sanctions, including the blacklisting of Iran’s central bank, and then openly bragged about our diplomatic success.  Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated during this period, although U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explicitly denied that the United States was involved in any way.

Taken together, these developments highlight a fundamental contradiction in the entire American approach.  Washington is supposedly trying to convince Tehran that the United States has no hostile intentions and that Iran therefore has no need for a nuclear deterrent.  But by ratcheting up pressure and continuing to talk about military action and regime change, it is giving Iran a clear incentive to acquire the ultimate deterrent, or at least get close to that capability.  Not surprisingly, Iran has responded not by capitulating to our demands, but building additional enrichment facilities, including an underground site near Qom that is vulnerable only to high-tech “bunker-busting” bombs.

Fears that war might be imminent rose significantly in the fall of 2010.  The Netanyahu government continued to hype the danger, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story in the September issue of the Atlantic concluded that Israel was likely to strike by June 2011.   Goldberg’s forecast was as accurate as his earlier writings about Iraq—that is to say, it was dead wrong—but the New York Times Magazine published an updated version of the same argument by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman last January.  Bergman also suggested that time was running out and that Israel’s leaders were getting close to launching a preventive strike.  The possibility of war with Iran soon permeated the Republican primary contest, with Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum all trying to outdo each other in their expressed willingness to use force on Israel’s behalf.

The war fever peaked at AIPAC’s annual policy conference earlier this year.  Prime Minister Netanyahu told his audience “Iran must never be allowed to get nuclear weapons,” declared that “containment was not an option,” said “diplomacy had failed,” and that “none of us can afford to wait much longer.”  Senator Mitch McConnell pledged to introduce legislation authorizing the use of force, and Senator Joseph Lieberman told the audience “the question is not whether we can stop them—but whether we will choose to stop them. . . . when it comes to Iran, all options must be on the table, except for one option, and that is containment.”

Let’s be clear: Lieberman was saying that war will be necessary if Iran does not give in to all our demands.  President Obama sought to deflect pressure for immediate action in his own remarks to AIPAC, both by denouncing “loose talk” about war and reiterating that he “had Israel’s back.”  Yet he also told the Atlantic’s Goldberg “I do not have a policy of containment. . . I have a policy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

“Loose talk” about war has receded in recent weeks, and negotiations between Iran and the so-called “P5+1” resumed in Istanbul last month.  There have been hints in the press that a deal might be in the offing, which would permit Iran to continue low-level enrichment if it reduced its stockpile of more highly enriched uranium, a step that would in effect lengthen the amount of time it would take Iran to “break out” and build a bomb.  But it remains to be seen if such a deal can be struck, especially in a presidential election year.

What I want to do now is compare how these developments can be contrasted with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.   There are important similarities, but the good news is that there are also some key differences.

The most obvious similarity, of course, is that the main advocates of a hardline approach—including the use of military force—have been the same people and groups who pushed for an attack on Iraq in 2003.  Thus, William Kristol, who led the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has since launched two new organizations—the “Emergency Committee for Israel” and the “Foreign Policy Initiative.”  Both groups have hyped the threat from Iran and favor military action to keep it from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold.  Kristol has said “we have an engraved invitation” to “speak to the Iranian regime in the language it understands—force,” adding “we can stop talking.  And we can hit the regimes nuclear weapons program, and set it back.”   Fellow neoconservative Reuel Marc Gerecht, another prominent Iraq war advocate, began calling for an attack on Iran in 2010, and wrote after reports surfaced of an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador here in Washington that “the White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage.  If we don’t we are asking for it.”  Michael Makovsky has continued to release alarmist reports of Iran’s nuclear progress, writing in 2012 that “the United States needs to make clear that Iran faces a choice: it can either abandon its nuclear program or have it program destroyed militarily, by the United States or Israel.”

As you would expect, advocates of a this approach have recycled the same arguments they previously made about Saddam Hussein.  Iran is routinely portrayed as actively seeking to get nuclear weapons, even though U.S. intelligence services believe that Iran has no active weapons program and is probably seeking only a latent or “breakout” capability.  Hawks describe Iran’s leaders as unstable or irrational, which is precisely how they used to talk about Saddam Hussein.  They warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be able to blackmail its neighbors, dominate the Persian Gulf or give nuclear weapons to terrorists. They claim that failure to stop Iran would damage U.S. credibility, trigger an arms race in the region and lead our other Middle East allies to abandon us.  And just as the neocons argued that an attack on Iraq would be easy and pay for itself, advocates of war downplay the costs and risks and argue that it will hasten the end of the clerical regime.

What about the mainstream groups in the lobby?  Organizations like AIPAC have generally refrained from making overt calls for war, but they have worked overtime to reinforce a hawkish line.  AIPAC played a key role in drafting the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Divestment and Accountability Act of 2010, which broadens U.S. sanctions against Iran and authorizes punishing foreign companies that aid Iran’s petroleum sector.  The bill was also endorsed by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and by the progressive lobby group J Street, but opposed by leading business groups and by Americans for Peace Now.  That legislation passed the House by a vote of 408 to eight and the Senate 99 to zero.   AIPAC also helped to draft a Congressional Resolution declaring it a “vital national interest of the United States to prevent the [Government of the] Islamic Republic [of Iran] from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability”—meaning just the capacity to build one—and affirming that Congress “oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”  A 2012 AIPAC policy brief warned “the United States must dramatically quicken the pace and scope of sanctions while bolstering the credibility of its option to use force.  The United States cannot rely on a policy that seeks to contain a nuclear Iran.” And not to be outdone, AJC head David Harris wrote in the New York Times in March that “the United States and many other like-minded nations have no choice but to get tough. Otherwise, we face the game-changing prospect of an Iran capable of building a nuclear bomb.”  And notice, he’s not talking about Iran with an actual weapon, he’s saying we cannot tolerate an Iran who could in theory build one.

As in 2002, therefore, key individuals and organizations in the lobby are in the forefront of those pushing for a hardline approach to Iran, and in some cases openly favoring the use of force.  Equally important, it was hard to find any other powerful constituency favoring a similar course.  Indeed there is considerable opposition to using force throughout the U.S. government.  For example, the U.S. military is decidedly skeptical, with former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warning that “if you think war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would in my opinion be a catastrophe” and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told CNN host Fareed Zakaria in February 2012 that “an attack on Iran would not be prudent.”   Neither the Department of State nor the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] favored military action, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying that war is not in anyone’s interest and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reaffirming the CIA’s earlier judgment that it has a “high level of confidence” that Iran “has not made a decision as of this point to restart its nuclear weapons program.”

Thus, AIPAC president David Victor was largely correct when he told members in 2009 that “we are the only constituency in America making this [anti-Iranian] case.”  Or as the New York Times reported earlier this year, “Among those advocating a more aggressive approach toward Iran are groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel, and AIPAC, the so-called “neocons from the George W. Bush administration who were strong proponents of war in Iraq, [and] pro-Israel evangelicals like Gary Bauer.”  One should also add every prominent GOP presidential candidate except Ron Paul.  And let us not overlook Christian Zionists like John Hagee, who declared way back in 2006 that “the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”

In short, it is not hard to find worrisome parallels between the current debate on Iran and the earlier campaign for war with Iraq.  Fortunately, there are also some critical differences.

One obvious difference is that no one is seriously proposing invading or occupying Iran.  Instead, the debate has been over whether to conduct air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The obvious weakness of that option is that it can only delay the program, not eliminate it once and for all.

A second difference is that groups in the lobby are more divided on this issue than they were over the invasion of Iraq.  Unlike 2002, prominent voices in the pro-Israel community reject the use of force today and call for diplomacy instead.  For example, both J Street and Americans for Peace Now oppose the AIPAC-sponsored resolution rejecting any policy of containment. Former U.S. official Dennis Ross, who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute and was an open supporter of war with Iraq in 2002, has been stressing the need for diplomacy in recent weeks. Other prominent pro-Israel commentators such as Leonard Fein or Leslie Gelb have been openly critical of the renewed emphasis on military threats as well.

Third, Israel’s national security establishment is far from unified about the need to strike Iran.  Netanyahu has continued to hype the threat from Iran, but prominent members of Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment have openly questioned whether Iran is an existential threat and warned that an Israeli strike would be foolish.  The former head of the Mossad, Meir Dogan, called an Israeli air strike the “stupidest thing he had ever heard of,” and the current Chief of Staff of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], General Benny Gantz, told Ha’aretz that “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people,” adding that he did not think Supreme Leader Khamenei even wanted to go the extra mile to get nuclear weapons.  The former head of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, warned that Israeli airstrikes could result “in a dramatic acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program.”  Then former [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told an audience in the United States that Netanyahu’s bellicose posture was jeopardizing international support and emphasized the need for diplomacy.

Last but by no means least, the Obama administration seems to recognize that war with Iran is neither necessary nor wise.  Its position stands in sharp contrast to Bush and Cheney, which drank the neocons’ Kool-Aid after 9/11 and led a sophisticated campaign to convince the American people to support an unprovoked and illegal war.  Pressure from the lobby and election-year politics have forced President Obama to walk a fine line—reaffirming support for Israel but downplaying the need to use force—though he clearly believes war would be foolish.

Both Obama and Netanyahu’s critics in Israel are right, and we should be thankful that the constellation of political forces has lined up differently today than it did before the war in Iraq.   Let me briefly explain why war with Iran would be a blunder of enormous proportions.

For starters, Iran is not an existential threat to anyone.  Its defense spending is about ten billion dollars per year—less than two percent of what the U.S. spends—and it has no significant power projection capabilities.  It also has no powerful allies.

Second, although it would be better if Iran did not develop nuclear weapons, achieving the capacity to make a few bombs won’t transform the region or turn Iran into a regional superpower.  Several ofIran’s neighbors already have sizeable arsenals of their own, and Iran could not use its weapons without facing devastating retaliation.  Iran could not blackmail or coerce anyone, for the same reasons that the Soviet Union couldn’t blackmail other countries when it had thousands of nuclear warheads and sophisticated long-range missiles.  Nor are Iranians going to give any weapons they have struggled for decades to acquire to give to terrorists, because they would be giving up all control over them.  And contrary to what alarmists in the lobby might tell you, there is no evidence that Iran’s leaders don’t fully understand these basic realities.

Third, Tehran has not yet decided to build a weapon, and there are good reasons why it might prefer not to.  But if Israel or the United States attacks, that is bound to convince Iran’s leaders that they have no choice but to acquire a real deterrent, in the form of their own nuclear arsenal. Ironically, attacking Iran—or even continually threatening it with regime change—may be the best way to push Iran across the nuclear threshold.

Fourth, our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan ought to teach us that war is unpredictable and messy, and the costs can be enormous and victory elusive.  A war would drive up oil prices and threaten a global economic recovery that is still on life support.  Iran will surely seek to retaliate in various ways and groups like Hizballah may join in by firing rockets at Israel itself.  And even a successful strike could not stop Iran from digging out and redoubling its efforts just as Saddam Hussein did when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Fifth, an Israeli or U.S. attack would rally Persian nationalism and give the clerical regime a new lease on life.  Iran’s current government is not widely popular, and many younger Iranians would like closer and more open ties with the West.  If Israel or the United States attacks, however, Iranian-American detente will be set back for years.

Lastly, the whole debate about Iran has been a giant distraction from other key regional issues, which may be precisely what Netanyahu and AIPAC want.  Obama’s initial efforts to encourage a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians have been stymied ever since 2009, and many responsible observers in Israel, the Arab world and the United States now worry that a two-state solution is becoming impossible, or will be very soon.

This situation is a looming threat for Israel, a continual headache for the United States, and of course a disaster for Palestinians as well.  For if two states are not achieved, the only alternatives are one-state democracy, ethnic cleansing to remove all Palestinians from greater Israel, or some form of a permanent apartheid.  These last two alternatives are obviously contrary to key American values, and in my view all three options would consign these two peoples to another generation of bitter strife.

This is not simply an abstract matter of national strategy or realpolitik.  It is also a matter of genuine human suffering, as Palestinians face the denial of basic rights, the steady encroachment of Israeli settlers, repeated home demolitions and expulsions, the imprisonment of thousands of family members, the daily degradation of checkpoints that stifle commerce and keep families apart, inadequate access to water, attacks by settler gangs that have increased by over 200 percent in the past two years and countless other humiliations large and small.  Not to mention actual killings, including nearly 5,000 in the second intifada, nearly 1400 in Operation Cast Lead, and 258 since then.  Israelis have died tragic deaths during this period, but in far smaller numbers.

None of this is in America’s strategic interest, especially given the winds of change that are blowing through the Arab world.  No matter how the “Arab Spring” ultimately turns out, future Arab governments will be far more responsive to public sentiment than autocrats like [former Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak were.  And because the Palestinian issue continues to resonate strongly among Arab populations, the continued denial of Palestinian rights will force the U.S. to pay an increasingly high price for its special relationship, and especially if the hopeful vision of “two states for two peoples” is replaced by permanent apartheid.

This is not to say that Iran can be ignored either.  But it should be obvious what the proper course of action is.  Having gotten Iran back to the bargaining table, the United States should take the threat of regime change off the table so that Iran has less incentive to weaponize. We should acknowledge that Iran is entitled to enrich uranium in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, provided that it agrees to full inspections under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and implements the so-called Additional Protocol.  Washington and the other members of the P-5 should explain to Tehran why it is better off without a nuclear arsenal, both because some of its other neighbors might follow suit and because possessing an actual nuclear arsenal would make it more likely to be a suspect if some terrorism group ever acquired and used a bomb.  And Washington should be willing to begin more wide-ranging discussions on broader regional security issues such as Afghanistan, where American and Iranian interests might actually overlap.

Given the legacy of suspicion on both sides, as well as deep internal divisions, none of this will be easy.  But this course makes far more sense than another war or another thirty years of confrontation.  And given that the United States and its allies are far stronger and far more secure than Iran, we can pursue this course without worrying that our security will be at risk.  Lastly, if this approach fails and Iran does test a weapon someday, we can rely on a policy of containment, which worked well against the far more powerful Soviet Union. Let’s not forget after all who won the Cold War.

Most groups in the lobby won’t like this advice and we should expect them to continue to beat the drums of war on occasion.  Remember: the neocons began lobbying for war with Iraq in the mid-1990s, and their efforts finally succeeded in 2003.  The lobby’s efforts to drum up a war scare have failed this time around, but it would be naive to assume that they won’t try again.  When dealing with AIPAC and the neoconservatives, it seems, the price of peace is eternal vigilance.

Thank you very much.

 

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as Academic Dean from 2002 to 2006. He wrote his latest book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer in 2007. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he was Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, and co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security. His daily weblog can be found at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com.

 

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.