The latest JINSA Report, the organization’s policy e-newsletter, calls Iran the “elephant” in the room that went unmentioned in U.S. President Barack Obama’s Iraq address, as well as the “elephant” in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The JINSA Report says that prospects for long-term success in Iraq will be “short-lived” unless the U.S. figures out what the elephant is and “how to tame it or remove it.” JINSA’s description of Iranian involvement in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories makes clear this prescription applies to those strategic challenges as well.

This theme is of course familiar to anyone who has followed JINSA since the run-up to the Iraq War. Just after September 11, 2001 — on September 14, to be exact — the top U.S. policy priority listed in the JINSA Report was the provision of  ”all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress, including direct American military support, to affect [sic] a regime change in Iraq.” (The Iraqi National Congress and its leader, the neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi, have since been revealed to have had extensive ties to Iran, with Chalabi even accused of spying for the Islamic Republic, making JINSA’s outrage at Iranian influence in Iraq somewhat ironic, to say the least.)

On March 19, 2002, just one year prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, JINSA made the exact same point about Iraq it is now making about Iran: in order to bring regional actors at odds with the U.S. to heel, the U.S. must remove their patron (in Iraq’s case, Saddam Hussein) from power. This 2002 JINSA Report warns:

…the Oslo process in the 1990s had shifted attention from the greater dangers posed by Iraq. We believed, then and now, that only after the regional situation was stabilized in America’s favor would the Palestinians be prepared to acquiesce to legitimate American and Israeli demands about security and legitimacy. It wouldn’t work the other way around.

This analysis should be of no surprise coming from JINSA, an organization funded by Irving Moskowitz, the bingo and gambling magnate who has had a close relationship with both the Likud party of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu and the most radical settler movements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Unsurprisingly, Moskowitz has also funded leading neoconservative institutions here, notably  (AEI, Center for Security Policy, Hudson), which connects him to figures instrumental in implementing the invasion of Iraq. Co-founded by Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Stephen Bryen, JINSA itself is advised by the likes of Anne Bayefsky (see Eli’s recent post), John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Jim Woolsey.

Dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives like the JINSA advisers have a known fondness for the policies of the Likud party. So it’s again no surprise to see that Netanyahu has long promoted the position that first solving the Iran problem will suddenly allow Israel some latitude in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. This notion, known as ‘reverse linkage’ rather than the militarily-accepted ‘linkage’ that says the opposite, was espoused by Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad, just they were coming into office. In March 2009, Arad told Reuters:

[T]he order of priority is: blunt Iran first, move vigorously on peace after, and based on that. Should you act in the wrong order…you will have a sterile, perhaps failed process with the Palestinians and at the same time you will end up with a nuclear Iran.

So now those same figures who brought us the Iraq war are using the same talking points — eerily echoing the Israeli right — to drum up support for escalating measures against Iran. We’ve seen this movie before.

• The Wall Street Journal: Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who made his first trip to the Middle East last month, applauds the talks between Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu but warns that “[t]here can never be peace in the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran.”  The first term Senator calls for additional “punishing” sanctions against Iran and reports that the possibility of a nuclear weapons possessing Iran is the biggest concern of both Israeli and Jordanian leadership.  Brown concludes that, “While we should encourage the Israelis and Palestinians as they return to the negotiating table, let’s not lose sight of the real threat to peace in the Middle East: Iran, the leading state sponsor of terror in the world, armed with a nuclear weapon.”

• Politico: Fredrik Stanton, author of “Great Negotiations: Agreements That Changed the Modern World,” argues that sanctions against Iran’s economy are failing to deter Tehran from its nuclear ambitions but that more aggressive steps—in line with Britain, Germany and Italy’s 2003 boarding of the BBC China, a ship carrying centrifuge parts for Libya’s nuclear weapons program—could deter Iran from its current path.  Stanton proposes that the U.S. should pursue policies of, “visible and tangible support for domestic opponents of the regime, greater focus on Iranian human rights violations, public seizures of nuclear proliferation material and an embargo of refined petroleum fuels.”

• International Herald Tribune: Earlier this week in the global edition of the New York Times, Iranian-American Reza Aslan and Israeli Bernard Avishai conclude that were the West to be “confronted by an Iran crossing the nuclear threshold, that would be a lesser evil than what we will confront in the wake of an attack to prevent this.” They sum up some of the recent war-drum-chatter around Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic piece on an Israeli attack on Iran, noting that the “logic” of what Goldberg writes points towards a U.S. strike. “This drumbeat must be silenced, and only President Obama can silence,” they write. “An Israeli attack on Iran would almost certainly precipitate a devastating regional war with unforeseeable global consequences.”

Tom Ricks, Center for a New American Security (CNAS) senior fellow, adds his take to the list of disastrous scenarios which could follow an Israeli attack on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

On his Foreign Policy blog, The Best Defense, Ricks reflects on a note received from (ret.) Col. Peter Mansoor–Gen. David Petraeus’ executive officer from February 2007 to May 2008–in which Mansoor outlines the potential fallout from an Israeli strike and, rather ominously, describes such an attack as “a likely scenario”. Ricks had been coming to the conclusion that, “…the more Israeli officials chat with journalists about [bombing Iran], the less likely I think it is to happen,” but Mansoor’s note appears to be giving him second thoughts.

The note, reposted on Ricks’ blog, reads:

“Whether it is Israel or the United States that attacks Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranians will respond by trying to close the Straits of Hormuz and unleashing terror attacks in the ME and around the world. In the event of an attack, the United States will have to destroy Iran’s capacity to close the straits, which means destroying their anti-ship missile batteries, submarines, aircraft, and the assortment of small boats and mine layers that can wreak havoc on  Gulf shipping. Israel will no doubt have to invade southern Lebanon again to suppress the inevitable barrage of missiles from Hezbollah. The West will have to go on high alert against terror attacks. The oil shock alone will no doubt spiral the West into a double dip recession/depression.

Not a pretty picture to contemplate, but a likely scenario. Despite the crowd of academics in the United States that says we can live with an Iranian bomb, Israel will not allow the Iranians to go nuclear — at least, not while a Holocaust denier who has made pointed threats against the Jewish state remains in power.”

Henninger’s basic point (which Frum also makes) is that although we now know that Saddam had no nuclear weapons program, he surely would have gone back to pursuing nukes by now if we hadn’t taken him out. After all, both North Korea and Iran have intensified their nuclear programs since 2003, and Saddam therefore would have felt the need to keep pace.

There are two things to note here. First: traditional just war doctrines argue that a first strike is only justifiable if it is preemptive — that is, aimed at heading off an imminent threat. The Bush Doctrine famously sought to justify preventive as well as preemptive warfare; according to the Bush administration, it did not matter that Saddam posed no imminent threat in 2003, because he was seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction (in particular, nuclear weapons) that he might use in the future. He may not have been a threat, in other words, but he was threatening to be a threat. Even putting aside the intense controversy about the legitimacy of preventive war itself, we now know that this line of argument was false: Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, nor was he actively seeking a nuclear weapon.

So Henninger, in his attempt to salvage a justification for war after the collapse of the WMD argument, simply takes the Bush logic one step farther. Sure, Saddam had no nuclear weapons, and sure, there is no evidence that he was seeking them. But how can we know that he wouldn’t do so in the future? He may not have been a threat, and he may not even have been threatening to be a threat — but he was threatening to threaten to be a threat. The tortured language reflects the flimsiness of the underlying argument. The case for war was not terribly strong even on the assumption that Saddam was seeking nukes; it is even weaker when the supposed emergency is that Saddam might decide to seek nukes at some unspecified moment in the future.

The second flaw with Henninger’s logic is in his argument that Saddam would have been compelled to seek nukes to keep up with Iran and North Korea. The problem here is that Henninger simply assumes that the increasingly confrontational stance that Iran and North Korea took in the wake of the Iraq war (and Bush’s January 2002 “axis of evil” speech) reflect what they would have done regardless of American actions.

This is a highly dubious assumption. By lumping Iran and North Korea in with Iraq in the “axis of evil” and by demonstrating that the U.S. was willing to use military force to overthrow such regimes, the Bush administration gave these countries both a motive for adopting a confrontational stance and an incentive for developing nuclear deterrents of their own to head off a potential invasion. While both countries’ nuclear programs predate the Bush Doctrine, it should surprise no one that the invasion of Iraq would cause both to redouble, rather than curtail, these programs.

Similarly, Henninger suggests that rivalry with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have inspired Saddam to greater mischief, but it is far from clear that Ahmadinejad would currently be president at all if it weren’t for the events of Bush’s first term. If the U.S. had not been perceived as so hostile to Iran and to Muslims generally, both Khamenei and the Iranian populace may well have been far less receptive to the appeal of an anti-American demagogue such as Ahmadinejad. In any case, we can see from this how nonsensical it is to treat Iranian and North Korean behavior post-2003 as if it existed in a vacuum that was utterly unaffected by the Iraq war, and to seek to justify the invasion ex post facto by referencing events that may not even have occurred if it hadn’t been for the invasion itself.

This sloppiness is typical of the new Iraq revisionism. The case for war remains as weak as it has been ever since the original justification based on WMD and al-Qaeda ties collapsed, so it is not surprising that advocates of the invasion are forced to resort to such flimsy arguments to defend it.

That system, notes Majd, has “never quite been the absolute and monolithic totalitarian dictatorship we often imagine it to be (and it’s certainly not one with a dictator president).” Rather than the embattled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the focus of much Iranian discontent), the real power center of Iranian politics, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remains very much in control. Though some infighting has persisted despite his orders to stop, Khamenei accepts a level of political dissent — especially if it comes from Ahmadinejad’s right and doesn’t challenge the Supreme Leader himself.

So why did Khamenei insist that the political wrangling be toned down, at least in public? And what does it mean for what Obama’s claims about his gains versus his actual prospects for progress on the nuclear issue? Majd writes:

Khamenei is no doubt aware that Iran’s enemies are keenly watching for signs of the regime’s weakness, the better to justify military attacks. By emphasizing unity — something former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, no fan of Ahmadinejad, has also done in recent weeks — Khamenei likely means to project an image of strength, internationally and domestically, at a crucial period in Iran’s history. The rallying together isn’t a flailing reaction to sanctions; it’s a concerted show of strength in the face of adversity.

The fact is, there is broad consensus on major foreign-policy issues across the political spectrum in Iran — particularly with respect to the nuclear issue. While U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration claims that the latest and toughest sanctions seem to be working, forcing the Iranians to consider negotiations on the nuclear issue, the Iranian leadership was already in agreement on actual compromises before the sanctions were imposed. [...]

The suggestion that tensions within the leadership have been aggravated by the sanctions, or that sanctions are responsible for Iran’s apparent willingness to talk, is a misreading of the political scene in Tehran.

• The Washington Post: Scott Wilson writes that shared regional fears of a nuclear weapons possessing Iran might be a catalyst for a breakthrough in this week’s Arab-Israeli peace talks. “Iran’s ambitions, which have cast a long shadow over the greater Middle East, may serve as a common bond keeping a frail peace process intact despite threats that have arisen even before the negotiations open Thursday at the State Department,” he says. Wilson suggests that, if Israel is seriously considering a unilateral strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons facilities, Netanyahu will need to stick with peace talks and win goodwill with the White House.

• The Wall Street Journal: Daniel Henninger defends the U.S. invasion of Iraq as preemptively cutting off Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Henninger theorizes that had the U.S. not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have been driven to pursue nuclear weapons in order to match Iran’s alleged pursuit of the bomb. “In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have ‘contained’ him?” he asks. Henninger continues his exercise in hypothetical history by suggesting that Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan would enter the “nuclear marketplace” if Iran and Iraq acquired nuclear weapons. He concludes: “The sacrifice made by the United States in Iraq took one of these nuclear-obsessed madmen off the table and gave the world more margin to deal with the threat that remains, if the world’s leadership is up to it. A big if.”

• Foreign Policy: Author Hooman Majd contests a recent U.S. talking point that sanctions are working. Citing political infighting between various conservative factions, the Obama administration argues that sanctions are having an effect. But Majd asserts that this is politics as usual — not a sign that there might be political space for a resurgent Green Movement. In fact, he says, no matter what happens, the real power center in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remains firmly in the driver’s seat and the nuclear calculus is still a point of mutual agreement between the many political factions.

• JINSA Report: The ultra-hawkish advocacy organization, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), issued it’s latest e-mail blast calling Iran the “elephant” in the room in nearly every U.S. and Israeli strategic challenge in the region (this mirrors the ‘road to peace leads through Tehran’ meme discussed in yesterday’s TP’s). The U.S. needs “to tame it or remove” that elephant from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and the “the Israel-Palestinian ‘peace’ talks,” JINSA argues.

The Guardian, a left-leaning daily in the U.K., says that Blair called a potential Iranian weapons program “wholly unacceptable” and said such a program leaves the West “no alternative” other than a military strike.

Blair is the Middle East envoy for the ‘Quartet’ (UN, EU, Russia and the U.S.), which is involved in multilateral negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Promoting his new book, Blair told the BBC’s Andrew Marr:

I am saying that I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapons capability and I think we have got to be prepared to confront them, if necessary militarily. I think there is no alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons. They need to get that message loud and clear.

This hawkish rhetoric against Iran is apparently a theme for Blair of late. The Guardian piece goes on to cite its own exclusive interview with Blair (also promoting his book), where the former PM said:

Now other people may say: ‘Come on, the consequences of taking them on are too great, you’ve got to be so very careful, you’ll simply upset everybody, you’ll destabilise it.’ I understand all of those arguments. But I wouldn’t take the risk of Iran with a nuclear weapon.

In the postscript of the book itself, Blair writes: “Iran with a nuclear bomb would mean others in the region acquiring the same capability; it would dramatically alter the balance of power in the region, but also within Islam.”

(h/t reader Anthony)

• The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ editorial board uses two 30-year-old letters from the Imam of the Park 51 community center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, to show Rauf’s alleged anti-Israel and pro-Iranian revolution leanings. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s 1977 outreach to Israel led Rauf to write, “In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.” In a letter written after the 1979 Iranian revolution, he observed the American and Iranian revolution shared “the very principles of individual rights and freedom”. In Rauf’s response to the WSJ’s publication of his letters, he wrote, “As I re-read those letters now, I see that they express the same concerns—a desire for peaceful solutions in Israel, and for a humane understanding of Iran.”

• National Review Online: At NRO’s The Corner blog, Benjamin Weinthal lays out a ‘reverse linkage’ — turning around the usual military/realist thinking that Israeli-Arab peace will help the U.S. deal with other regional issues. He writes, “To bring about peace with longevity between the Palestinians and Israel, the Obama administration has to confront Iran, which means promoting democracy in Iran and terminating its nuclear-weapons program.” Weinthal asserts, “if the sanctions prove impotent, Obama will then have to turn to serious saber-rattling and lay out a blueprint for military intervention.” The statement rehashes the catchphrase from the early 2000s that ‘the road to Mid East peace runs through Baghdad’ – only now it’s rerouted through Tehran.

• The New York Times: David Sanger writes about the linkages between Israeli-Palestinian peace, Iraq and Iran. He argues while other presidents have dealt with these linkages, Obama faces a new variation with U.S. forces pulling out of Iraq, tough sanctions on Iran and and the slow emergence of a working Palestinian government in the West Bank. With the withdrawal from Iraq, Obama can claim victory over that source of instability and, according to Sanger’s sources, progress on Iran. Sanger interviews WINEP cofounders Martin Indyk, the Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Senior Mideast diplomat Dennis Ross, special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross currently works out of the National Security Council, where he focuses on Iran, and  has served in the past two administrations. Indyk and Ross agree sanctions have made progress in isolating and containing Iran.  “We finally have leverage,” said Ross, pointing to talk from Iranian officials about the possibility of negotiations with the West.

Then he emphatically says it again: “There is no option but to actively discourage an Israeli attack.”

Riedel’s piece, published last week, is a sober look at how to avoid the regional catastrophe that could be engendered by an Israeli strike on Iran — a position that falls in line with the National Interest, the Nixon Center’s flagship realist publication. The piece, however, is surprising coming from a senior fellow at Brookings’s Saban Center, which is known for hawkish (albeit liberal hawkish) positions in the Middle East. Riedel’s colleagues Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, after all, were instrumental in giving liberal interventionist cover to the neoconservative drive for war with Iraq.

After running through the history of Israel’s nuclear development and its policies of opacity and regional monopoly, Riedel, a former CIA analyst, describes the many hints that Israel has developed plans for an attack. After running through logistical problems with a strike — Iran’s distance from Israel, the challenge of crossing unfriendly airspace and the dispersal of Iranian nuclear sites, to name a few — Riedel asses  potential blowback, focusing on the potential harm to the U.S.:

AN ISRAELI attack on Iran is a disaster in the making. And it will directly impact key strategic American interests. Iran will see an attack as American supported if not American orchestrated. The aircraft in any strike will be American-produced, -supplied and -funded F-15s and F-16s, and most of the ordnance will be from American stocks. Washington’s $3 billion in assistance annually makes possible the IDF’s conventional superiority in the region.

Iran will almost certainly retaliate against both U.S. and Israeli targets. [...]

America’s greatest vulnerability would be in Afghanistan. Iran could easily increase its assistance to the Taliban and make the already-difficult Afghan mission much more complicated.

In addition, Riedel notes that “even a successful Israeli raid would only delay Iran’s nuclear program, not eliminate it entirely.” The delay to the program could be as little as a year, according to even Israeli analysts. The U.S. would still need to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, but in a “much more complicated diplomatic context since Tehran would be able to argue it was the victim of aggression and probably would renounce its NPT commitments.”

Riedel says that forcing Israel away from its calculus to bomb Iran is the same thing as asking them to give up their nuclear monopoly, but lays out a convincing case that this hurdle can be overcome. In a solid rejection of the neoconservative and right-wing Israeli theme that Iran is a “suicide” state, Riedel uses historical examples to demonstrate that Iran “has been careful to avoid taking actions that would lead to catastrophic consequences.”

Based on this, he proposes that Israel bring its nuclear program out of closet and that the U.S. extend its nuclear umbrella to the Jewish State. (The latter was proposed by then-Israeli PM Barak at Camp David, with Riedel in the room, but fell by the wayside when those negotiations collapsed.) Riedel also advocates bolstering Israel’s second-strike capability and giving it entrance into NATO, which he admits is a “very hard sell” given negative European views of Israel’s intransigence in the peace process.

While the focus on bolstering Israel’s nuclear capacity is sure to upset some of those in the non-proliferation camp (perhaps seen as an undue reward for Israel’s long policy of nuclear ambiguity), Riedel’s analysis of the situation clearly explains the potential “disaster” of an Israeli or American strike against Iran and offers constructive diplomatic suggestions.

Riedel’s conclusion nicely sums up his arguments and serves to remind readers just how big the potential issues are:

THE ERA of Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East is probably coming to an end. Israel will still have a larger arsenal than any of its neighbors, including Iran, for years if not decades. It will face threats of terror and conventional attack, but it already faces those. With American help it can enhance its deterrence capabilities considerably. It has no reason to lose its self-confidence. But to avoid the potential for all-out war not only between Israel and Iran but also between the United States and the Islamic Republic, Washington needs to act now. Only by enhancing Israel’s nuclear capability will America be able to strongly and credibly deter an Israeli attack on Tehran’s facilities.

The clock is ticking on the IDF’s plans. And the lives of hundreds, if not millions, are at stake.

John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel (CUFI) has just sent out a petition demanding that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the crime of incitement to genocide.

“The next time that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears before an international tribunal, it must not be as an honored guest at the United Nations General Assembly. It must be as a defendant in the dock of the International Criminal Court,” Hagee and his lieutenant David Brog wrote in a letter promoting the petition, for which they claim to have already gathered 75,000 signatures.

The fact that CUFI is endorsing the authority of the ICC and international law is a striking policy shift away from the views held by most right-wing supporters of Israel. Usually, these supporters spurn international laws and the institutions that enforce them because Israel often ends up on the receiving end of international legal criticism.

For instance, settlements in the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits military occupiers from transferring their own populations into occupied lands. 

It’s unclear how Hagee will bring together the contradictory positions taken by his endorsement of international law while, at the same time, funding illegal West Bank settlements.

Hagee, who is no stranger to controversy and believes that the founding of the state of Israel set a countdown clock for the apocalypse, has advocated for a territorially maximalist Israeli state and the destruction of Islamic shrines and mosques which are currently on the site of the Temple of Solomon.

CUFI’s brand of Christian Zionism has long focused on Iran, though perhaps for questionable reasons. Ali reported on the Iranian focus at the 2008 CUFI summit, where neocons like Patrick Clawson, Cliff May and Frank Gaffney pushed their own hawkish prescriptions for Iran on Hagee’s flock.

The full e-mail petition to charge Ahmadinejad in the ICC is pasted below the fold.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to address the United Nations General Assembly the week of September 13.  Once again, this Holocaust denying tyrant will be welcomed as an honored leader by most of the international community.

We have a different welcome in mind.  We want to greet him with a petition signed by over 100,000 Americans demanding that he be tried by the International Criminal Court for the crime of  incitement to genocide.  Over 75,000 people have already signed this petition to date. Please click here to help us reach 100,000 by September 13, 2010.

International law criminalizes not only the act of genocide, but also the direct and public incitement to commit genocide. This is an extremely important legal provision. The only way that the international community can stop genocide is if it prevents the acts that make it possible: namely the provocation of and preparation for such atrocities by people in positions of authority.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats to destroy Israel present a clear case of incitement to genocide. He has made these threats explicitly, publicly, and repeatedly. His pursuit of nuclear weapons and long range missiles, as well as his ongoing support for Hezbollah and Hamas, demonstrate that these threats are by no means idle.

The next time that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears before an international tribunal, it must not be as an honored guest at the United Nations General Assembly. It must be as a defendant in the dock of the International Criminal Court.  For the sake of those who died in the Holocaust he denies, and for the sake of those who would die in the Holocaust he threatens, please sign the petition today and pass it on to as many of your friends as you can.

Blessings to you and those you love,

Pastor John Hagee National Chairman Christians United for Israel

David Brog Executive Director Christians United for Israel