By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

In the following months, reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces multiplied. The most serious was an allegation that the Syrian army had used sarin gas on Mar. 19, 2013 at Khan al Assal, north of Aleppo, and in a suburb of Damascus against its opponents. This was followed by two more allegations of small attacks in April.

Prem Shankar Jha

Seymour Hersh has reported that in May 2013, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan visited Obama, accompanied by his intelligence chief, and pressed him to live up to his “red line” commitment to punish Syria if it used chemical weapons.

But by then U.S. intelligence knew, and had conveyed to Barack Obama,  that it was Turkey’s secret service, MIT, that had been working with the Nusra front to set up facilities to  manufacture sarin, and had obtained two kilograms of the deadly gas for it from Eastern Europe, with funds provided by Qatar. Obama therefore remained unmoved.

Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed.

On May 13, 2013, Republican Senator John McCain paid a surprise visit to Idlib on the Syria-Turkey border to meet whom he believed were moderate leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Photos and videos posted on the web after the visit and resurrected after the rise of the Islamic States (IS) showed that two of the five leaders whom he actually met were Mohammed Nour, the spokesman of ‘Northern Storm’ an offshoot of the brutal Jabhat Al Nusra, and Ammar al Dadhiki, aka Abu Ibrahim, a key member of the organisation. The third was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, known as the ‘Caliph of the Islamic State’.“Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed”

The visit had been organised by Salim Idris, self-styled Brigadier General of the FSA, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a U.S. not-for-profit organisation that is a passionate advocate for arming the ‘moderate’ FSA.

McCain probably did not know whom he was meeting , but the same could not be said of Idris and SETF, because when McCain met them, Nusra was already on the banned list  and Baghdadi was on the U.S. State Department’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with a reward of 10 million dollars on his head. What is more, by then he had been the Emir of IS for the previous six weeks.

As for the SETF, investigations of its connections by journalists after the McCain videos went viral on the internet showed a deep connection to AIPAC.  Until these exposure made it ‘correct’ its web page, one of its email addresses was “syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org”.

The “torahacademybr.org” URL belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida, whose academic goals notably include “inspiring a love and commitment to Eretz Yisroel [Land of Israel] .” SETF’s director was also closely associated with AIPC’s think tank, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP).

When Obama ‘postponed’ the attack on Syria on the grounds that he had to obtain the approval of Congress first, Israel’s response was blind fury.

Obama had informed Netanyahu of his decision on Aug. 30, four hours before he referred it to Congress and bound him to secrecy. But Netanyahu’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, gave full vent to it the next morning in a radio interview, saying: “You don’t have to wait until tens of thousands more children die before intervening in Syria.”

Ariel went on to say; “When you throw gas at the population, it means you know you’re going to murder thousands of women, children indiscriminately. [Syrian President Bashar Assad] is a murderous coward. Take him out.”

Netanyahu reprimanded Ariel because he did not want Israel to be seen to be pushing the United States into war, but by then there was no room left for doubt that this is exactly what he and his government had been trying to do.

For, on Aug. 27, alongside U.S. foreign minister John Kerry’s denunciation of the Ghouta sarin gas attack, the right-wing daily, Tims of Israel, had published three stories quoting defence officials, titled ‘Israeli intelligence seen as central to US case against Syria’; ‘IDF intercepted Syrian regime chatter on chemical attack’; and, significantly, ‘For Israel US response on Syria may be a harbinger for Iran’.

The hard “information” that had tilted the balance was contained in the second story: a retired Mossad agent who refused to be named, told another German magazine, Focus, that a squad specialising in wire-tapping within the IDF’s elite ‘8200 intelliogence unit’ had intercepted a conversation between high-ranking officials discussing the sue of chemical agents at the time of the attack.

The similarity of method between this and the earlier leak to Der Spiegel makes it likely that it too was part of an Israeli disinformation campaign designed to trigger a fatal assault on Assad.

Obama gave his first hint that he intended to reverse the [George W.] Bush doctrine while talking to reporters on a tour of Asia in April 2014: “Why is it,” he observed, “that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve gone through a decade of war at enormous cost to our troops and our budget?”

He unveiled the change in a graduation day speech at West Point on May 28, 2014. “Here’s my bottom line”, he said. ”America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

“And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader – and especially your Commander-in-Chief – to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.”

Obama’s choice of venue was not accidental, because it was here that Bush had announced the United States’ first strike security doctrine 12 years earlier.

Obama’s repudiation of the Bush doctrine sent a ripple of shock running through the U.S. political establishment. Republicans denounced him for revealing America’s weakness and emboldening its enemies. But a far more virulent denunciation came from Hilary Clinton, the front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016.

“Great nations need strong organising principles”, she said in an interview with The Atlantic, “’Don’t do stupid stuff’ (Obama’s favourite phrase) is not an organising principle.”

Netanyahu got the message: he may have lost the U.S. president, but Israel’s, more specifically the Israeli right’s, constituency in the United States remained undented. No matter which party came to power in the next election, he could continue his tirade against Iran and be guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.

Since then he has barely bothered to hide his contempt for Obama and spared no effort to turn him, prematurely, into a lame duck President.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* The first part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2015. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2015 (IPS)

While it’s anyone’s guess whether a final deal will be reached over Iran’s nuclear programme this year, a number of key international actors have forcefully weighed in on calls from within the U.S. congress to impose more sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

President Barack Obama reiterated his threat to veto new Iran-related sanctions bills while talks are in progress during his State of the Union (SOTU) address this week.There’s no guarantee at this point whether the bills at the centre of the battle will garner the veto-proof majority necessary to become legislation.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said Jan. 20 in his second to last SOTU. “New sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails—alienating America from its allies; and ensuring that Iran starts up its nuclear programme again.”

The administration’s call to “give diplomacy with Iran a chance” was echoed a day later by key members of the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China plus Germany), which is negotiating with Iran over its nuclear programme, through an op-ed in the Washington Post.

“…[I]ntroducing new hurdles at this critical stage of the negotiations, including through additional nuclear-related sanctions legislation on Iran, would jeopardize our efforts at a critical juncture,” wrote Laurent Fabius (France), Philip Hammond (U.K.), Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany) and Federica Mogherini (EU) on Jan. 21.

“New sanctions at this moment might also fracture the international coalition that has made sanctions so effective so far,” they continued. “Rather than strengthening our negotiating position, new sanctions legislation at this point would set us back.”

Last week, during a joint press conference with Obama at the White House, the U.K.’s Prime Minister David Cameron admitted he had contacted members of the U.S. Senate to urge against more sanctions on Iran at this time.

“[Y]es, I have contacted a couple of senators this morning and I may speak to one or two more this afternoon,” he told reporters on Jan. 16.

“[I]t’s the opinion of the United Kingdom that further sanctions or further threat of sanctions at this point won’t actually help to bring the talks to a successful conclusion and they could fracture the international unity that there’s been, which has been so valuable in presenting a united front to Iran,” said Cameron.

In what has been widely perceived by analysts as a rebuff to Obama’s Iran policy, reports surfaced the day after Obama’s SOTU that the House of Representatives Speaker John A. Boehner had invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has made no secret of his opposition to Obama’s approach to Iran—to address a joint session of Congress on Feb. 11.

Netanyahu accepted the invitation, but changed the date to Mar. 3, when he would be visiting Washington for a conference hosted by the prominent Israel lobby group, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The invite, which was not coordinated with the White House, clearly surprised the Obama administration, which said it would not be receiving the Israeli prime minister while he is in town, citing a policy against receiving foreign leaders close to election dates (the Israeli election will be in March).

While Netanyahu has long recommended hard-line positions on what a final deal over nuclear program should entail—including “non-starters” such as zero-percent uranium enrichment on Iranian soil—he cannot be faulted for accepting the speaker’s invitation, according to the U.S.’s former ambassador to NATO, Robert E. Hunter, who told IPS: “If there is fault, it lies with the Speaker of the House.”

“If the Netanyahu visit, with its underscoring of the political potency of the Israeli lobby on Capitol Hill, is successful in ensuring veto-proof support in the Senate for overriding the threatened Obama veto of sanctions legislation, that would saddle Boehner and company with shared responsibility not only for the possible collapse of the nuclear talks…but also for the increased chances of war with Iran,” he said.

But there’s no guarantee at this point whether the bills at the centre of the battle—authored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Bob Menendez, and another by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker—will garner the veto-proof majority necessary to become legislation.

With the support of the Democratic leadership in Congress, the administration has so far successfully prevented the Kirk-Menendez bill from coming to the floor since it was introduced in 2013.

A growing number of current and former high-level officials have also voiced opposition to more sanctions at this time.

“Israeli intelligence has told the U.S. that rolling out new sanctions against Iran would amount to ‘throwing a grenade’ into the negotiations process,” Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News on Jan. 21.

“Why would we want to be the catalyst for the collapse of negotiations before we really know whether there is something we can get out of them?” asked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week after opposing new sanctions during a forum in Winnipeg, Canada.

“We believe that new sanctions are not needed at this time,” the Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen told the Wall Street Journal this week.

“To the contrary, new sanctions at this time, even with a delayed trigger, are more likely to undermine, rather than enhance, the chances of achieving a comprehensive agreement,” he said.

While the battle isn’t over yet, in the wake of Obama’s veto threat and Boehner’s invitation to Bibi, even some of the Democratic co-sponsors of the original Kirk-Menendez bill appear to be moving in the White House’s direction.

“I’m considering very seriously the very cogent points that [Obama’s] made in favour of delaying any congressional action,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told Politico.

“I’m talking to colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And I think they are thinking, and rethinking, their positions in light of the points that the president and his team are making to us,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The Barack Obama administration’s insistence that Iran discuss its ballistic missile programme in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement brings its position into line with that of Israel and senators who introduced legislation drafted by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC aimed at torpedoing the negotiations.

But the history of the issue suggests that the Obama administration knows that Iran will not accept the demand and that it is not necessary to a final agreement guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear programme is not used for a weapon.The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and through Senate Foreign Relations Committee members committed to AIPAC’s agenda.

White House spokesman Jay Carney highlighted the new U.S. demand in a statement Wednesday that the Iranians “have to deal with matters related to their ballistic missile program.”

Carney cited United Nations Security Council resolution 1929, approved in 2010, which prohibited any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including missile launches. “So that’s completely agreed by Iran in the Joint Plan of Action,” he added.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif not only explicitly contradicted Carney’s claim that Iran had agreed to discuss ballistic missiles but warned that a U.S. demand for discussion of its missile programme would violate a red line for Iran.

“Nothing except Iran’s nuclear activities will be discussed in the talks with the [six powers known as the P5+1], and we have agreed on it,” he said, according to Iran’s IRNA.

The pushback by Zarif implies that the U.S. position would seriously risk the breakdown of the negotiations if the Obama administration were to persist in making the demand.

Contrary to Carney’s statement, the topic of ballistic missiles is not part of the interim accord reached last November. The Joint Plan of Action refers only to “addressing the UN Security Council resolutions, with a view toward bringing to a satisfactory conclusion the UN Security Council’s consideration of this matter” and the formation of a “Joint Commission” which would “work with the IAEA to facilitate resolution of past and present issues of concern”.

It is not even clear that the U.S. side took the position in the talks last fall that Iran’s missile programme had to be on the table in order to complete a final agreement. But in any event it was not part of the Joint Plan of Action agreed on Nov. 24.

Past U.S. statements on the problem of the Security Council resolutions indicate that the administration had previously acknowledged that no agreement had been reached to negotiate on ballistic missiles and that it had not originally intended to press for discussions on the issue.

The “senior administration officials” who briefed journalists on the Joint Plan of Action last November made no reference to ballistic missiles at all. They referred only to “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear programme and to “Iranian activities at Parchin”.

The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and through Senate Foreign Relations Committee members committed to AIPAC’s agenda.

Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, Ha’aretz reported Thursday that Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz had met with Sherman and senior French and British foreign ministry officials before the start of the February talks and had emphasised that Iran’s missile programme “must be part of the agenda” for negotiation of a final agreement.

By early December, however, Israel was engaged in an even more direct effort to pressure the administration to make that demand, drafting a bill that explicitly included among its provisions one that would have required new sanctions unless the president certified that “Iran has not conducted any tests for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers.”

Since Iran had obviously tested missiles beyond that limit long ago, it would have made it impossible for Obama to make such a certification.

Although the bill was stopped, at least temporarily, in the Senate when enough Democratic members refused to support it, Republicans continued to attack the administration’s negotiating position, and began singling out the administration’s tolerance of Iranian missiles in particular.

At a Feb. 4 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, the ranking Republican on the Committee, Sen. Robert Corker, ranking Republican on the Committee, ripped into Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator in the nuclear talks with Iran.

After a highly distorted picture of Iran’s readiness to build a nuclear weapon, Corker asked, “Why did you all not in this agreement in any way address the delivery mechanisms, the militarizing of nuclear arms? Why was that left off since they breached a threshold everyone acknowledges?”

But instead of correcting Corker’s highly distorted characterisation of the situation, Sherman immediately reassured him that the administration would do just what he wanted them to do.

Sherman admitted that the November agreement covering the next months had not “shut down all the production of any ballistic missile that could have anything to do with delivery of a nuclear weapon.” Then she added, “But that is indeed something that has to be addressed as part of a comprehensive agreement.”

Sherman also suggested at one point that there would be no real need to prohibit any Iranian missile if the negotiations on the nuclear programme were successful. “Not having a nuclear weapon,” she said, “makes delivery systems almost — not wholly, but almost — irrelevant.”

That admission underlined the wholly political purpose of the administration’s apparent embrace of the Israeli demand that Iran negotiate limits on its ballistic missiles.

The Obama administration may be seeking to take political credit for a hard line on Iranian missiles in the knowledge that it will not be able to get a consensus for that negotiating position among the group of six powers negotiating with Iran.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov clearly implied that Moscow would not support such a demand in a statement Thursday that Russia “considers that a comprehensive agreement must concern only and exclusively the restoration of trust in a purely peaceful intention of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Although U.S., European and Israeli officials have asserted consistently over the years that Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles are designed to carry nuclear weapons, Israel’s foremost expert on the Iranian nuclear programme, Uzi Rubin, who managed Israel’s missile defence programme throughout the 1990s, has argued that the conventional analysis was wrong.

In an interview with the hardline anti-Iran Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in September 2009, Rubin said, “The Iranians believe in conventional missiles. Not just for saturation but also to take out specific targets…. Remember, they have practically no air force to do it. Their main striking power is based on missiles.”

Since 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency has accused Iran of working on integrating a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3 missile reentry vehicle in 2002-2003, based on a set of drawings in a set of purported Iranian documents. The documents were said by the George W. Bush administration to have come from the purloined laptop of a participant in an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research programme.

But that account turned to be a falsehood, as were other variants on the origins of the document. The documents actually came from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the anti-regime organisation then listed as a terrorist organisation by the U.S. State Department, according to two German sources.

Karsten Voigt, who was the German foreign office coordinator, publicly warned about the MEK provenance of the papers in a November 2004 interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Voigt, who retired from the foreign office in 2010, recounted the story of how an MEK member delivered the papers to German intelligence in 2004 in an interview last year for a newly-published book by this writer.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2014 (IPS)

Eight years ago, Stephen Rosen, then a top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and well-known around Washington for his aggressiveness, hawkish views, and political smarts, was asked by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker magazine whether some recent negative publicity had harmed the lobby group’s legendary clout in Washington.

“A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table,” wrote Goldberg about the interview. “’You see this napkin?’ [the official] said. In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”"The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience." -- Stephen Walt

Eight years later, the same official, Stephen Rosen, who was forced to resign from AIPAC after his indictment – later dismissed — for allegedly spying for Israel, told a Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that AIPAC needed to retreat from its confrontation with President Barack Obama after getting only 59 senators – all but 16 of them Republicans – to co-sponsor a new sanctions bill aimed at derailing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany).

“They don’t want to be seen as backing down… I don’t believe this is sustainable, the confrontational posture,” he said.

If AIPAC had succeeded in getting 70 signatures on the bill, which the administration argued would have violated a Nov. 24 interim agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that essentially freezes Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for easing some existing sanctions for a renewable six-month period, that would have been three more than needed to overcome a promised Obama veto.

But, after quickly gathering the 59 co-sponsors over the Christmas recess, AIPAC and the bill’s major sponsors, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, appeared to hit a solid wall of resistance led by 10 Democratic Committee chairs and backed by an uncharacteristically determined White House with an uncharacteristically stern message.

“If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “Otherwise, it’s not clear why any member of Congress would support a bill that possibly closes the door on diplomacy and makes it more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to proceed.”

Combined with a grassroots lobbying campaign carried out by nearly 70 grassroots religious, anti-war, and civic-action groups that flooded the offices of nervous Democratic senators with thousands of emails, petitions, and phone calls, as well as endorsements of the administration’s position by major national and regional newspapers and virtually all but the neo-conservative faction of the U.S. foreign policy elite, the White House won a clear victory over AIPAC and thus raised anew the question of just how powerful the group really is.

AIPAC’s inability to muster more support among Democrats, in particular, came on top of two other setbacks to its fearsome reputation over the past year.

Although they never took a public position on his nomination a year ago, the group’s leaders were known to have quietly lobbied against former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defence Secretary due his generally critical attitude toward Israel’s influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Several groups and individuals closely aligned with AIPAC, notably the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) – both of which have joined AIPAC in lobbying for the new Iran sanctions bill – questioned or opposed Hagel. Ultimately, however, he won confirmation by a 58-41 margin in which the great majority of Democrats voted for him.

Eight months later, AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups lobbied Congress in favour of a resolution to authorise the use of force against Syria – this time, however, at Obama’s request, although clearly also with the approval of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

But the popular groundswell against Washington’s military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern conflict – as well as the reflexive aversion by far-right Republicans to virtually any Obama initiative – doomed the effort.

Neither Hagel nor Syria, however, has approached the importance AIPAC has accorded to Iran and its nuclear programme which have dominated the group’s foreign-policy agenda for more than a decade. During that time, it has become used to marshalling overwhelming  majorities of lawmakers from both parties behind sanctions and other legislation designed to increase tensions – and preclude any rapprochement — between Tehran and Washington.

Last July, for example, the House of Representatives voted by a 400-20 margin in favour of sanctions legislation designed to halt all Iranian oil exports from Iran. The measure was approved just four days before Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration.

Throughout the fall, AIPAC worked hard – but ultimately unsuccessfully – to get the same bill through the Senate.

Now, two months later and unable to muster even a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, AIPAC appears to have shelved the Kirk-Menendez bill, which, among other provisions, would have imposed sanctions if Tehran violated the Nov. 24 agreement or failed to reach a comprehensive accord with the P5+1 on its nuclear programme within a year.

“Clearly, the ground has shifted, dealing a huge defeat to AIPAC and other groups who have been aggressively lobbying for [the new sanctions bill],” wrote Lara Friedman, a lobbyist for Americans for Peace Now in her widely-read weekly Legislative Round-up, while other commentators, including Rosen, warned that overwhelming Republican support for the bill put AIPAC’s carefully cultivated bipartisan image at risk with Democratic lawmakers and key Democratic donors.

“They definitely lost this round and that has cost them a huge amount of political capital with the administration and with a lot of Democrats,” said one veteran Capitol Hill observer who also noted AIPAC faced “an almost perfect storm” of an administration willing to fight for a policy that also enjoyed strong support from the foreign-policy elite and an engaged activist community that could exert grassroots pressure on their elected representatives. “Senate offices were getting a couple of calls in favour [of the bill] and hundreds against. That certainly has to make a difference.”

“AIPAC and other hard-line groups remain a potent force in guaranteeing generous U.S. aid to Israel and hamstringing U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but their clout declines when they advocate a course of action that could lead to another Middle East war,” Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told IPS in an email exchange.

“The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience,” according to the influential Harvard international relations scholar.

No one, however, believes that AIPAC and its allies have given up. If the P5+1 negotiations should falter, the Kirk-Menendez bill is likely to be quickly re-introduced; indeed, one influential Republican senator said it should be put on the calendar for July, six months from Jan. 20 the date that Nov. 24 interim accord formally went into effect.

“It seems likely that advocates [of the bill] are getting ready to shift to some form of ‘Plan B’ [which], …one can guess, will look a lot like Plan A, but, instead of focusing on derailing negotiations with new sanctions, [it] will likely focus on imposing conditions on any final agreement – conditions that are impossible to meet and will thus kill any possibility of a deal,” according to Friedman.

That could include conditioning the lifting of sanctions on an agreement that includes a ban on any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil – a condition favoured by Netanyahu that Tehran has repeatedly rejected and that most experts believe would be a deal-breaker.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

In what looks to be a clear victory – at least for now – for President Barack Obama, a major effort by the Israel lobby and its most powerful constituent, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to pass a new sanctions bill against Iran has stalled in the U.S. Senate.

While the legislation, the “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013,” had gathered 59 co-sponsors in the 100-member upper chambre by last week, opposition to it among Democrats appears to have mounted in recent days.

That opposition apparently prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who controls the floor calendar, to back away from a previous commitment to permit a vote on the measure some time over the next few weeks. As a result, AIPAC is now reportedly hoping to get the bill through the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

Democratic resistance to the bill, which its critics say is designed to scuttle the Nov. 24 Joint Plan of Action (JPA) between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) and any chances for a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, has grown stronger since Sunday’s successful conclusion of an implementation agreement between the two sides and by Obama’s explicit pledge to veto the bill if it comes to his desk.

Even one of the bill’s 16 Democratic co-sponsors, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, said this week that he saw no need for a vote “as long as there is progress” in implementing the Nov. 24 accord.

The accord, which formally takes effect Jan. 20, will ease some economic sanctions that have been imposed against Iran and ban any new ones in exchange for Tehran’s freezing and, in some cases, a rolling back key elements of its nuclear programme pending the negotiation within a year of a comprehensive agreement designed to prevent Tehran from achieving a nuclear “breakout capacity”, or the ability to build a bomb within a short period of time.

That goal is widely considered to be the single-most important – and potentially dangerous, both politically and strategically — foreign policy challenge facing Obama in his second term.

While Obama has pledged to use all means necessary, including taking military action, to prevent Tehran from obtaining a bomb, he has made little secret of his strong desire to avoid becoming engaged in yet another war in the Middle East, a desire that appears widely held both within the foreign policy and military elite, as well as the general public, according to recent opinion polls.

For its part, Iran has long said it has no intention of building a bomb. But it has also insisted that any final agreement must recognise its “right” under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to enrich uranium to levels consistent with the needs of a civil nuclear programme.

While the administration and the other P5+1 powers appear inclined to accept a deal that would, among other things, permit limited enrichment under an enhanced inspection regime, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that any final accord should effectively dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, including its enrichment capabilities.

Netanyahu’s demands are largely reflected in the pending Senate bill which is named for its co-sponsors, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, each of whom received more campaign money from AIPAC-related political-action committees than any other senatorial candidates during their runs for office – in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

The bill would impose sweeping new sanctions against Tehran if it fails either to comply with the terms of the Nov. 24 accord or reach a comprehensive accord within one year. Such sanctions would also take effect if Iran conducts a test for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500 kms or if it is found to have directly or by proxy supported a terrorist attack against U.S. individuals or property.

While the bill’s supporters insist that those provisions will strengthen the administration’s hand in negotiations over a comprehensive agreement, critics, including administration officials, argue that they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Nov. 24 agreement and would, if passed, open up Washington to charges by its P5+1 partners, as well as Iran, of bad faith.

The bill also requires that any final agreement include, among other things, “dismantlement of Iran’s enrichment  …capabilities” – a condition that Tehran has already declared a deal-breaker.

And it calls for Washington to provide military and other support to Israel if its government “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program” – a provision that was denounced on the Senate floor by Intelligence Committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, as “let(ting) Israel determine when and where the U.S. goes to war.” In a detailed speech Tuesday, she also described the bill as facilitating a “march to war.”

All of these provisions have lent credibility to the administration’s charge that the main purpose of the legislation is to sabotage the Nov. 24 deal and the negotiations, rather than support to them.

When first introduced nearly a month ago, the bill was co-sponsored by 26 senators, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, apparently in order to give it a bipartisan cast. But all but three of the additional 33 co-sponsors are Republicans, thus making it an increasingly partisan issue.

Eleven Democratic committee chairs, including Feinstein and Senate Armed Services Committee chief Carl Levin, have come out against a vote on the bill, as has Reid’s deputy, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who, like Reid, normally defers to AIPAC’s wishes.

In recent days, a number of other influential voices have come out in opposition to the bill. Bill Clinton’s second-term national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned that a vote on the legislation now raised the “risk of upending the negotiations before they start,” while former Sen. Dick Lugar, until last year the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told a Yale University audience Wednesday that Congress “ought to give diplomacy a chance.”

Similarly, former Pentagon chief Bob Gates, currently touting his memoir of his years under Obama and President George W. Bush, warned Tuesday that enacting new sanctions would be “a terrible mistake” and a “strategic error.”

Several prominent newspapers, including the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, USA Today, the Denver Post, and the strongly pro-Israel Washington Post, have also editorialised against the bill in recent days.

The bill, moreover, appears to have created dissension within the organised Jewish community, which ordinarily rallies behind AIPAC’s legislative agenda.

While progressive Jewish groups, notably J Street and Americans for Peace Now, joined 60 other grassroots religious, humanitarian, anti-war, and civic-action organisations in actively opposing the bill by flooding Democratic senators with emails, petitions and phone calls over the past few days, more conservative Jewish groups and influential opinion-shapers, such as New York Times columnists Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg, also defended the administration’s opposition.

Rabbi Jack Moline, the director of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), publicly accused AIPAC of using “strong-arm tactics, essentially threatening people that if they didn’t vote a particular way, that somehow that makes them anti-Israel or means the abandonment of the Jewish community.”

“The bill before the U.S. Senate …will not achieve the denuclearization of Iran,” Goldberg, a self-described “Iran hawk,” wrote in his Bloomberg column this week. “What it could do is move the U.S. closer to war with Iran and, crucially, make Iran appear – even to many of the U.S.’s allies – to be the victim of American intransigence, even aggression.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

This week’s introduction by a bipartisan group of 26 senators of a new sanctions bill against Iran could result in the biggest test of the political clout of the Israel lobby here in decades.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani has warned repeatedly that the demand that Iran dismantle its nuclear programme entirely is a deal-breaker. Credit: Mojtaba Salimi/cc by 2.0.

The White House, which says the bill could well derail ongoing negotiations between Iran and the U.S. and five other powers over Tehran’s nuclear programme and destroy the international coalition behind the existing sanctions regime, has already warned that it will veto the bill if it passes Congress in its present form.

The new bill, co-sponsored by two of Congress’s biggest beneficiaries of campaign contributions by political action committees closely linked to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), would impose sweeping new sanctions against Tehran if it fails either to comply with the interim deal it struck last month in Geneva with the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) or reach a comprehensive accord with the great powers within one year.

To be acceptable, however, such an accord, according to the bill, would require Iran to effectively dismantle virtually its entire nuclear programme, including any enrichment of uranium on its own soil, as demanded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani has warned repeatedly that such a demand is a deal-breaker, and even Secretary of State John Kerry has said that a zero-enrichment position is a non-starter.

The bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, also calls for Washington to provide military and other support to Israel if its government “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.”

The introduction of the bill Thursday by Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez followed unsuccessful efforts by both men to get some sanctions legislation passed since the Geneva accord was signed Nov. 24.

Kirk at first tried to move legislation that would have imposed new sanctions immediately in direct contradiction to a pledge by the P5+1 in the Geneva accord to forgo any new sanctions for the six-month life of the agreement in exchange for, among other things, enhanced international inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities and a freeze on most of its nuclear programme.

Unable to make headway, Kirk then worked with Menendez to draw up the new bill which, because of its prospective application, would not, according to them, violate the agreement. They had initially planned to attach it to a defence bill before the holiday recess. But the Democratic leadership, which controls the calendar, refused to go along.

Their hope now is to pass it – either as a free-standing measure or as an amendment to another must-pass bill after Congress reconvenes Jan. 6.

To highlight its bipartisan support, the two sponsors gathered a dozen other senators from each party to co-sponsor it.

Republicans, many of whom reflexively oppose President Barack Obama’s positions on any issue and whose core constituencies include Christian Zionists, are almost certain to support the bill by an overwhelming margin. If the bill gets to the floor, the main battle will thus take place within the Democratic majority.

The latter find themselves torn between, on the one hand, their loyalty to Obama and their fear that new sanctions will indeed derail negotiations and thus make war more likely, and, on the other, their general antipathy for Iran and the influence exerted by AIPAC and associated groups as a result of the questionable perception that Israel’s security is uppermost in the minds of Jewish voters and campaign contributors (who, by some estimates, provide as much as 40 percent of political donations to Democrats in national campaigns).

The administration clearly hopes the Democratic leadership will prevent the bill from coming to a vote, but, if it does, persuading most of the Democrats who have already endorsed the bill to change their minds will be an uphill fight. If the bill passes, the administration will have to muster 34 senators of the 100 senators to sustain a veto – a difficult but not impossible task, according to Congressional sources.

That battle has already been joined. Against the 13 Democratic senators who signed onto the Kirk-Menendez bill, 10 Democratic Senate committee chairs urged Majority Leader Harry Reid, who controls the upper chamber’s calendar, to forestall any new sanctions legislation.

“As negotiations are ongoing, we believe that new sanctions would play into the hands of those in Iran who are most eager to see negotiations fail,” wrote the 10, who included the chairs of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, respectively. They also noted that a new intelligence community assessment had concluded that “new sanctions would undermine the prospects for a successful comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.”

Their letter was followed by the veto threat by White House spokesman Jay Carney and a strong denunciation of the bill by State Department spokesperson Marie Harf. She accused the sponsors of “directly contradict[ing] the administration work. …If Congress passes this bill, …it would be proactively taking an action that would undermine American diplomacy and make peaceful resolution to this issue less possible.”

But none of that has deterred key Israel lobby institutions. “Far from being a step which will make war more likely, as some claim, enhanced sanctions together with negotiations will sustain the utmost pressure on a regime that poses a threat to America and our closest allies in the Middle East,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) argued Thursday.

And, in a slap at both the administration and the Senate chairs,  the Conference of Major American Jewish Organisations complained about criticisms of the bill’s proponents. “Some of the terminology and characterizations used in the latest days, including accusations of warmongering and sabotage, are inappropriate and counterproductive,” it said.

Since it lost a major battle with former President Ronald Reagan over a huge arms sale to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, the Israel lobby has generally avoided directly confronting a sitting president, but, at this point, it appears determined to take on Obama over Iran.

For some observers, its opposition is difficult to understand, particularly because key members of the Israeli national security establishment have conspicuously declined to join Netanyahu in denouncing the Geneva deal.

“I’m amazed that they’ve taken it this far,” said Keith Weissman, a former AIPAC specialist on Iran. “Bottom line is that if the Iranians comply with the terms of the deal – which it seems like they are doing so far, despite some internal resistance – they are further from breakout capacity [to produce a nuclear weapon] than they were before the deal.”

But Douglas Bloomfield, a former senior AIPAC executive, suggested the motivation may be of a more practical nature. “It’s good for business,” he told IPS. “AIPAC has spent the last 20 years very, very effectively making a strong case against Iran, and Iran has been a great asset to them.”

“They want to show they’re not going to give up on this; they’ve built a huge financial and political base on it. …Most of the Jewish groups and all of Congress have been on auto-pilot on Iran; nobody ever thought you might actually get a deal… In AIPAC’s case, they’re terrified they’re going to lose their major fund-raising appeal.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Secretary of State John Kerry announces that Ambassador Martin Indyk will serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations on Jul. 29, 2013. Credit: U.S. State Department

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators returned to the negotiating table on Thursday, ready to put claims by the United States that it will engage more forcefully in the negotiating process to the test.

The talks, which paused for the meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, have been struggling amidst Palestinian complaints of Israeli foot-dragging and the lack of U.S. participation."The publics on both sides have hardened their positions in the last 20 years. So the selling of a deal is harder than it was." -- J Street's Jeremy Ben Ami

Yet for all the enthusiasm around the revived peace talks, there remains considerable doubt about the prospects for ultimate success.

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, a non-profit organisation working to raise funds to aid the Palestinian people, believes it unlikely that a permanent agreement will be possible.

“Ideally, all parties would like a comprehensive agreement, except Israel wants one on their terms, the Palestinians want on their terms, and the U.S. wants something that can stick,” he told IPS.

“None of these goals are really in line now. Israeli and Palestinian positions are so far apart that the U.S. may want to save face with an interim agreement. It would be in Israel’s interest at very little cost to them but at a high cost to the Palestinians. And this would be a disaster.”

Yet some see hope as dovish lobbying groups are gaining more prominence in Washington. The moderate group J Street appears to have overcome attempts by more hawkish pro-Israel groups, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to marginalise it.

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama dispatched his vice president, Joe Biden, to speak at J Street’s annual conference and rally its supporters behind the peace-making efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Biden’s appearance, along with those of Obama’s special envoy Martin Indyk, Israel’s lead negotiator Tzipi Livni and Israeli opposition leader Shelly Yachimovitch, as well as House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, offered strong evidence that J Street has established itself as a significant force here.

“It’s become an accepted notion that there is not only one mass movement lobbying org in DC, which is AIPAC,” Ori Nir, spokesperson for Americans for Peace Now (APN) told IPS.

“What J Street can do now, having been around for five years, it can authentically and credibly claim that its positions [supporting robust negotiations for peace] represent the pro-Israel community much more authentically than the traditional leadership. That puts wind in the sails of the Obama administration.”

Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and a top Middle East policymaker under former President Bill Clinton, believes there is a real chance for success in the current talks.

“We’ve agreed to intensify the talks, and the U.S. will increase its involvement,” Indyk said at the conference. “All the core issues are on the table and our common objective is a final status agreement, not an interim one.

“The parties have agreed to resolve all the issues in nine months,” he continued. “Both sides have negotiated for years. The outline of an agreement is clear. What is needed is leadership and political decisions.”

However, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Affairs, and former senior policy adviser to Oslo Accords architect Yossi Beilin, expressed strong scepticism about the current talks.

“I don’t see [Netanyahu] as having walked toward a realistic two-state solution,” Levy said. “From what I understand there is a refusal to present a map, not even of the borders of the settlement blocs. He wants to not remove any settlements and maintain an ongoing military presence…

“I fear that we may repeat some of the old mistakes: an over-emphasis on bilateral negotiations, lack of a frame of reference, and a fetishisation of process [over results].”

J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben Ami, laid out his vision for a two-state solution, emphasising that both sides would have to make sacrifices. On the Israeli side, this includes sharing Jerusalem and evacuating some settlements.

On the Palestinian side, it means accepting a de-militarised state, which many Palestinians see as a denial of their full sovereignty, and acknowledging that virtually no Palestinian refugees would return to Israel, a key Palestinian national aspiration.

“The two-state solution is the only solution for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people and the only way we can secure the future of the region for all their children,” Ben-Ami told his supporters.

Asked by IPS if he was concerned that the proposed solution might not prevail in referendums, which both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have conditionally set as requirements for any final agreement, Ben-Ami said, “The publics on both sides have hardened their positions in the last 20 years. So the selling of a deal is harder than it was.

“I think the ultimate deal will involve sacrifices and compromises. I don’t know what they will be but they will be hard to sell and all of us will have a tough selling job to do and we have to be ready to do that.”

But Husam Zomlot, the executive deputy commissioner for international affairs of the Palestinian Authority, spoke passionately at the conference about the rights of Palestinian refugees.

“Some of [the refugees] want to stay where they are. Some of them might want to resettle somewhere else in a third country. Some of them might want to come back to the State of Palestine. And some of them might want to return to their original homes. But all of them want one thing: full recognition of the Nakba (catastrophe, referring to the dispersion of Palestinians during Israel’s war of independence from 1947-49) that has befallen our people.”

Zomlot cushioned his point by indicating that his own father would not choose to physically return, suggesting that many Palestinian refugees would feel similarly. Still, this issue seems far from easily resolved.

As far as Palestinians are concerned the right of return is a human right,” Munayyer said. “In my view, human rights are not negotiable.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 1, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

Like the proverbial skunk at the garden party, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his turn at the podium at the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday to pour scorn on Iran’s new president, 96 hours after a smiling Hassan Rouhani departed New York after a momentous four-day stay that raised unprecedented hopes for détente with the United States and the West.

Echoing his early assessment of the Iranian leader, Netanyahu described Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the eyes – the wool over the eyes of the international community”. He demanded that Iran completely abandon its nuclear programme as the price for lifting existing sanctions against Tehran.“Clearly, Rouhani had scored some points in his latest visit. This was Netanyahu's way of trying to even the score." -- Gary Sick

“The international community has Iran on the ropes,” Netanyahu said in reference to U.S.-led economic sanctions. “If you want to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons programme peacefully, don’t let up the pressure. Keep it up.

“If Iran advances its nuclear weapons program during negotiations, strengthen the sanctions,” he added.

In a speech that dwelt almost exclusively on Iran, the Israeli leader also suggested, as he has oftentimes in the past, that he was prepared to order unilateral military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he declared. “And in standing alone, Israel will know that we are defending many, many others.”

Netanyahu’s speech, which came just four days after a telephone conversation between Rouhani and Barack Obama – the first between the leaders of the U.S. and Iran since 1979, followed a more restrained performance by the Israeli leader here Monday during his White House meeting with the U.S. president.

At that meeting, he contented himself with advising that Iran’s “conciliatory words must be met with real actions” – a point which Obama himself has stressed since last week’s momentous events – although Netanyahu also emphasised that “the ultimate test of a future agreement with Iran is whether or not Iran dismantles its military nuclear programme.”

Netanyahu’s appearance here and at the U.N. this week in some ways could not come at a worse time for the Israeli leader for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the extremely positive impression left behind by Rouhani and his foreign minister and former U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif.

Zarif remains in New York both to continue consultations with key U.S. opinion-shapers and prepare for the Oct. 15-16 negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The message conveyed repeatedly by both Iranians in an intense, seemingly non-stop stream of meetings with influential media figures, Iranian Americans, think-tank scholars, and former senior U.S. diplomats and other officials – not to mention Thursday’s 30-minute one-on-one exchange between Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of a ministerial meeting of the P5+1 attended by Zarif – was that Tehran was prepared to negotiate verifiable limits to its nuclear programme so long as its right to enrich uranium under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was recognised and sanctions were lifted.

After those meetings were capped by Obama’s 15-minute phone call to Rouhani as the latter was being driven to JFK airport for his return flight to Iran, the atmosphere surrounding the visit turned almost euphoric, comparable in some ways to Washington’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s.

Media commentators on weekend talk shows and columnists in U.S. newspapers called the visit “historic” and a potential “turning point” in U.S. relations with a country which it has treated as an enemy for some 34 years.

“The Israeli government has clearly been rattled by the Iranian charm offensive,” noted the New York Times in what has to be considered an understatement given what it called the “dizzying diplomatic developments” set off by Rouhani’s visit.

But aside from being thrown off-balance by Rouhani’s success, Netanyahu also faced an unusual public-relations problem this week: Tuesday’s partial shutdown of the U.S. government resulting from the budgetary impasse between the White House and the Republican-led House of Representatives dominated the news agenda, effectively diminishing Netanyahu’s customary command of the media spotlight and hence, his message.

But even his message – particularly, his demands that Iran completely dismantle its nuclear programme and abandon its right to enrich under the NPT – has come to be viewed by a large consensus of Iran and foreign-policy specialists here as a non-starter for negotiations and clearly identifies Israel as a spoiler.

“We all know that the chance of a [negotiated] settlement is reduced to near zero when we start with pre-conditions that Iran must totally dismantle its entire scientific infrastructure,” said Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

“Limits yes, but the days of zero or near-zero centrifuges are long past,” he told IPS.

Indeed, key figures in the Israel lobby, including Dennis Ross, counselor of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spin-off of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has argued for more than a year that Washington should test Iran on whether it will accept strict limits on its enrichment programme and, if so, accept it in exchange for eliminating sanctions.

Indeed, as early as 2011, when Ross was still serving as Obama’s chief Iran aide, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly hinted that Washington could eventually accept a peaceful nuclear programme that included some enrichment capabilities.

Even as Rouhani’s U.N. sojourn was unfolding last week, David Harris, the head of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), another major Israel lobby group, warned Netanyahu that his dismissive attitude – as evidenced then by Israel’s boycott of Rouhani’s speech to the General Assembly — toward the Iranian leader risked isolating Israel.

“Did [the boycott] help or hurt Israel to make its case?” he asked in Israel’s ‘Haaretz’ newspaper. “Some would argue it helped by stressing the danger and willingness to act, even if alone. Others, however, would say that Israel only demonstrated its unwillingness to hear the message, even if Rouhani turns out to be, say, the next Mikhail Gorbachev.”

Indeed, Sick said Netanyahu sounded “defensive and shrill” in his U.N. speech Tuesday. “Clearly, Rouhani had scored some points in his latest visit. This was Netanyahu’s way of trying to even the score.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Just three weeks ago, Washington’s hawks, particularly of the pro-Israel neo-conservative variety, were flying high, suddenly filled with hope.

President Barack Obama, having trapped himself with his own “red-line” rhetoric, appeared on the verge of ordering air strikes designed not only to deter Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad from re-using his chemical weapons, but also, at their urging, to degrade his military machine in a way that could shift the tide of battle toward the rebels in the two-year-old civil war that Obama had desperately tried to stay out of.

It was win-win all the way. In addition to landing a heavy body blow against Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world, they whispered to themselves that such an attack might also sabotage prospects for serious negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme with its moderate and dangerously appealing new president, Hassan Rouhani.

In any event, a strike would serve as a valuable precedent for similar – if even more ambitious – action against Iran’s nuclear facilities some time in the next year, as well restore U.S. military credibility in a region from which U.S. power was seen to be dangerously in retreat.

Today, with those promising attacks suspended indefinitely, the same hawks are down in the dumps, not to say downright desperate. Some are even comparing the chain of events over the past two weeks to the West’s “appeasement” policies that contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

“…[S]yria is merely Act One. Next week Act Two opens at the United Nations,” wrote Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, co-founder of The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Friday.

“There, we’ll see a charm offensive worthy of Richard III by the new Iranian president and veteran deceiver of the West, Hassan Rouhani. In response the Obama administration will move on from punting in Syria to appeasing Iran.

“Smaller retreats lead to larger ones. The West’s failure to resist Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 – and his troops’ use of poison gas – was merely a foretaste of the failure to resist Hitler when he took the Rhineland in March 1936,” he warned, evoking Winston’s Churchill’s denunciation in the British Parliament of London’s appeasement policies in the run-up to the World War Two.

Ironically, it was the British Parliament that appears to have set off the extraordinary chain of events that brought the hawks to their current depths of despond. Its vote against participating in any military action against Syria persuaded Obama to yield to a rising bipartisan tide in Congress demanding that he seek its formal authorisation before launching strikes.

The administration mounted an intense lobbying effort, enlisting key Republican hawks, notably Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham (who demanded stronger military action and enhanced military aid for the rebels as the price for their backing), as well as the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel groups in the cause, but popular support for an attack was not forthcoming.

Worse, because of the August recess, most lawmakers were in their home districts among their constituents, rather than in the “Beltway Bubble” where elite opinion and the “talking heads” who dominate the airwaves tilted generally in favour of military action. And while the Congressional leadership of both parties supported the authorisation, they said members were free to vote their conscience.

As Congress reconvened, it became clear that the White House would be lucky to win in the Senate but had no chance of prevailing in the House. Despite the efforts of McCain and Graham, who had long been treated by the mainstream media as the party’s chief spokesmen on foreign policy issues, Republican support for the authorisation virtually collapsed. Both Obama and the hawks faced certain defeat.

It was at that moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s most influential foreign backer, threw Obama a lifeline.

By offering a deal whereby Damascus agreed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and place its chemical arms under international control, he permitted Obama to suspend both Congressional and military action pending implementation of the plan, the operational details of which are now being worked out.

If the White House was relieved, the hawks were furious.

“What could be worse for America’s standing in the world than a Congress refusing to support a President’s proposal for military action against a rogue regime that used WMD [weapons of mass destruction]?” asked the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial page. “Here’s one idea: A U.S. President letting that rogue be rescued from military punishment by the country that has protected the rogue all along.”

“The Iranians will take it as a signal that they can similarly trap Mr. Obama in a diplomatic morass that claims to have stopped their nuclear program,” it went on, a point ceaselessly echoed since by other hawks, including McCain and Graham.

But several polls have shown overwhelming public support for the deal – as high as 80 percent, even as majorities also voice scepticism that the agreement will be effective. The findings are widely seen as an expression of the country’s deep war-weariness and opposition to any new Middle East military adventures in the absence of any clear and imminent threat.

Indeed, the events of the past few weeks suggest that the public has lost confidence in the war hawks and their military solutions. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, a prominent foreign-affairs commentator, noted this week that McCain is becoming “a kind of Republican version of Jesse Jackson” whose proposals “have no political support at home”.

While the Syria crisis unfolded, of course, a bigger threat to neo-conservatives has been developing in Tehran, where Rouhani appears to have consolidated his authority over foreign policy and carried out a highly sophisticated public-relations campaign.

This has ranged from the release of political prisoners to tweets wishing Jews a happy Rosh Hashanah, to an interview with a U.S. television network and an op-ed in Friday’s Post, all aimed at conveying the impression that he is someone the West “can do business” with (as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of Mikhail Gorbachev after their first meeting in 1984) in the run-up to his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.

That both Tehran and Obama disclosed this week that they have exchanged letters and speculation that the two leaders may actually meet – even if it’s only momentarily in a U.N. corridor — Tuesday when each addresses the General Assembly have only increased the hawks’ anxiety that a 21^st version of “Munich” (shorthand for the 1938 accord that permitted Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia) is at hand.

Taking their cue from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned Thursday that “the Iranians are spinning in the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning,” several pro-Israel groups here, including AIPAC and FPI, demanded Friday that Washington increase pressure against Tehran on all fronts and ignore growing calls to take a more conciliatory approach.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

With Congress still deliberating over Barack Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action against Syria, the powerful Israel lobby here has taken the lead in pressing the president’s case.

But in addition to echoing the administration’s view that Damascus’ alleged violations of international norms against the use of chemical weapons must be punished, pro-Israel groups are  focusing their appeals at least as much, if not more, on stopping what they say is Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme.

“The Syria issue needs to be largely understood through the context of Iran,” said Michael Makovsky, the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), as he unveiled his organisation’s latest report, “Strategy to Prevent a Nuclear Iran,” here Wednesday.

“Stopping a nuclear-capable Iran is the gravest, most pressing national security threat facing the United States today,” he added, quoting from the introduction of the report, the product of a task force that included several former George W. Bush administration officials, several retired flag officers, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top adviser on Iran for most of his first term.

“(I)f there isn’t a [Congressional] response to the crossing of the red line [against the use of chemical weapons], the Iranians will draw the lesson that when we create red lines, we don’t mean it,” Ross said.

“So when the administration makes it clear that prevention [of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon] is the objective, [the failure to act on Syria] will make it look more rhetorical than real,” according to Ross, who currently serves as counsellor to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank.

“So, I think there’s a direct relationship between what’s going on on Syria and how the Iranians would perceive it.”

Those warnings came as the administration appeared to make progress on Capitol Hill Wednesday in rallying Congress behind military action.

In a 10-7 vote, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution authorising Obama to conduct military strikes against Syria. Two Democrats and five Republicans, including presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, opposed the resolution. Another Democrat abstained.

To rally a majority, the resolution’s authors limited the authorisation to 60 days – with a possible 30-day extension – and banned the use of ground forces in Syria “for the purpose of combat operations”.

But they also appeased hawkish forces, led by Republican Sen. John McCain, by adding a statement that any action should aim to “change the momentum on the battlefield” in favour of the rebels in order to enhance the chances of a negotiated settlement to the two-year-old civil war. The resolution, which will go to the floor next week, also urged an increase in U.S. military aid to the rebels.

The draft resolution submitted by the White House had called for a “limited” action to prevent the use or proliferation of chemical weapons in Syria.

While some administration officials initially predicted a campaign of only two or three days of cruise-missile strikes that would not necessarily affect the current balance of power in the war, stronger action now appears more likely unless the Republican-led House of Representatives votes no or places more limits on its version of the authorisation when it meets next week.

The administration’s efforts to gain authorisation have been significantly bolstered by the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had maintained a public silence on the issue. However, some of its more important institutions had been quietly pressing both the administration and lawmakers for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus for weeks, even before the alleged Aug. 21 chemical attack that killed more than 1,400 people, according to the White House.

On Tuesday, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the lobby’s most powerful group, came out strongly in support of the authorisation, as did the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organisations and the Anti-Defamation League.

They were followed by, among others, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group dominated by strongly anti-Obama wealthy donors who have provided millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and are closely associated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

While most of the group echoed the administration’s position that the use of chemical weapons must be punished, they also stressed that Washington’s credibility regarding its enforcement of “red lines” was at stake, particularly with respect to Iran.

“This critical decision comes at a time when Iran is racing toward obtaining nuclear capability,” AIPAC stressed in its endorsement.

“Failure to approve this resolution would weaken our country’s credibility to prevent the use and proliferation of unconventional weapons and thereby greatly endanger our country’s security and interests and those of our regional allies.”

That was very much the message conveyed by the new JINSA report and its two co-chairs, Ross and Bush’s former undersecretary of defence for policy, Eric Edelman, among other task force members present for the report’s release.

“I do think it’s important …for the credibility of the president’s statements [to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon] with regard to Iran that the Congress authorise the use of force,” Edelman said.

“Unless Iran believes there is a credible military option underpinning the willingness to negotiate, there will not be a successful negotiation,” he added in reference to the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) talks with Iran that are considered likely to resume later this month.

JINSA’s task force consists largely of members of a previous task force that issued a series of very hawkish reports on Iran for the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) over the past five years.

It said Washington’s explicit policy objective should be “to render Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapons capability” which it defined as the point at which Iran could “manufacture fissile material for a nuclear device in less time than would be required to detect and respond to such activity.” According to some experts, that threshold is likely to be reached by mid-2014.

With the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, it said, Washington should “try to make diplomacy work,” although the task force failed to reach agreement on what terms would be acceptable.

While some members of the task force, including Ross, said the U.S. should offer a deal that would permit Iran to enrich uranium up to five percent and limit its stockpile of enriched uranium subject to a strict inspections regime, others said Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capability.

In the meantime, the task force argued against recent calls by think tanks and Iran experts for Washington to make goodwill gestures, such as recognising Iran’s right to enrich or “preemptively signal a willingness to lift sanctions during talks”.

On the contrary, the report urges increasing the pressure on Iran by imposing new sanctions and preparing and developing “a very real military strike capability against Iran’s nuclear and strategic facilities, and an array of opportunities for pursuing political warfare against the Iranian regime.”

With respect to the former, Ross suggested “we should have a demonstration [of a 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster bomb’], put it on YouTube, let it go viral, let the Iranians see it; this is a capability that was developed basically to deal with them…”

“I still think at this point, given where we are in Syria, the most important thing right now is to act on the resolution and do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious,” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama meets with his National Security Staff to discuss the situation in Syria, in the Situation Room of the White House, Aug. 30, 2013. From left at the table: National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice; Attorney General Eric Holder; Secretary of State John Kerry; and Vice President Joe Biden. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

In an important boost for President Barack Obama, two key Republicans and the Israel’s lobby’s two most influential groups Tuesday announced their support for a proposed Congressional resolution authorising limited military strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

“I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action,” said Rep. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, after emerging from a White House meeting with Obama. The Republican majority leader, Eric Cantor, who also took part in the meeting, echoed his endorsement.

Several hours later, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which advertises itself as “the most influential foreign policy lobbying organisation on Capitol Hill”, came out with its own endorsement, implicitly linking military action to past pledges by Obama to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons, by military means if necessary.

“This is a critical moment when America must …send a message of resolve to Iran and Hezbollah – both of whom have provided direct and extensive military support to [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad. The Syrian regime and its Iranian ally have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not respect civilized norms,” the group said.

“That is why America must act, and why we must prevent further proliferation of unconventional weapons in this region,” it added.

A key Jewish group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, also came out in favour of military action based on much the same argument.

Referring to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against an opposition stronghold outside Damascus that the administration has said killed more than 1,400 people, the group declared, “Those who perpetuate such acts of wanton murder must know that they can not do with impunity.

“Those who possess or seek weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, must see that there is accountability,” according to the Conference. “Failing to take action would damage the credibility of the U.S. and negative impact the effort to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capacity.”

The endorsements came on the second day of what some administration officials called a “full-court press” to persuade lawmakers to back the resolution when Congress officially returns from its August recess next week. They do not guarantee its passage, but are seen as key milestones along the way.

They marked the latest developments following Obama’s surprise decision this past weekend to seek authorisation to carry out limited strikes against Syria – an action which most observers had expected would have taken place by now – from Congress.

That decision was bitterly denounced by neo-conservatives and other hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, as an abdication of leadership and the latest in what they regard as a disastrous series of moves by Obama to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East.

It followed the unexpected defeat in the British House of Commons last Thursday of a preliminary motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorise military action against Syria.

The vote, which effectively deprived Washington of its most loyal military ally, stunned the administration. With many lawmakers from both sides of the aisle here also pressing for a vote, Obama, who had seemed increasingly determined in the preceding days to carry out cruise-missile strikes from warships in the eastern Mediterranean as early as last weekend, apparently decided to yield to their demands.

Still, the White House has said Obama retains the authority as commander-in-chief to go ahead without Congress’ approval.

Obama announced his decision in a televised address Saturday and subsequently submitted a draft Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF) which will serve as the basis for the Congressional debate.

If approved in its present form, it would give Obama the authority to use the military “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria” in order to “prevent or deter” their “use or proliferation” and “protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.”

Hawks, the most visible of whom have been McCain and Graham, initially said they could not support the resolution because it was too limited in purpose and did not appear to be “part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict.”

After meeting with Obama at the White House Monday, however, the two men came out in support of the resolution both because, in McCain’s words, a no vote would be “catastrophic” for Washington’s international credibility and because of their understanding that the president was committed to “very serious’ strikes against Syria beyond the “shot across the bow” that he had spoken of earlier in the week.

In addition, they suggested that Obama had assured them that Washington will step up military aid to Syrian rebels, something which he has long been reluctant to do.

But appeasing the hawks may make it more difficult to overcome the concerns of the anti-war faction in his own party, as well as the embryonic coalition of libertarians, neo-isolationists, and fiscal conservatives among Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives whose members are traditionally more sceptical of foreign entanglements than the Senate where Obama should have an easier ride.

While the top two House Democrats have endorsed the proposed resolution, others have said they will support it only if it is drawn more narrowly, such as explicitly excluding the use of ground troops and setting limits on its duration in time and its geographical scope to within Syria’s borders. Of course, if Obama agrees to such limits, he risks losing support from the hawks.

As for the Republicans, Boehner and Cantor are considered relatively weak leaders who have repeatedly failed to keep their caucus in line on many issues. Newer members, many of whom associate themselves with the “Tea Party” movement and are reflexively anti-Obama, been particularly unruly.

Moreover, with public opinion among both Democrats and Republicans – although Republicans are somewhat more evenly split – running against military action, Obama could face a difficult climb in getting the House behind him. A Pew Research Centre poll conducted over the weekend found 48 percent of respondents opposed to airstrikes on Syria, while 29 percent approved.

While only 33 percent of respondents said they thought such strikes would be effective in deterring the use of chemical weapons, 74 percent said they thought a regional backlash against the U.S. was likely to occur if the attacks took place, and 61 percent said strikes would likely lead to a long-term military commitment.

Still, active lobbying by AIPAC and the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had publicly maintained a discreet silence about how Washington should react to the alleged chemical attacks, could prove decisive to the outcome in Congress.

The New York Times this weekend called AIPAC “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” whose unquestioned influence was needed by the administration to prevail. (Significantly, the Times omitted the quote in updated online versions of the story.)

While the group argued in a reference to the alleged chemical-weapons attack that “barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass,” it suggested that Iran and its nuclear programme – which successive Israeli governments have denounced as the number one threat – loomed as large or larger in considering how to respond.

Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, in the West Bank. Credit: Libertinus/ CC by 2.0

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Aug 28 2013 (IPS)

Israel and its domestic U.S. lobby are already in the early stages of the next 10-year aid package, which would not go into effect until 2017 and will be the first since Congress passed the Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, which requires in part that U.S. military aid to Israel ensure that Israel maintains its “Qualitative Military Edge” (QME) over any combination of states and non-state actors.

QME has long been an understood negotiating principle between the United States and Israel, but now that it has been made law, the president is required to report to Congress every four years on Israel’s QME.

That requirement could be an important tool in the lobbying effort around renewing U.S. military aid to Israel, for while that aid is as certain as anything can be in Washington, increasing it currently faces some new obstacles.

“We’re looking at a holistic Mideastern picture, which includes growth of missile arsenals in Lebanon and Gaza,” Michael Oren, the outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the United States, told Defense News. He also pointed to the situations in the Sinai and Syria.

Israel does not oppose U.S. arms sales to “moderate” Arab states but insists that these sales be offset by higher quality sales to Israel. “If America doesn’t sell these weapons, others will,” Oren said. “We also understand the fact that each of these sales contributes to hundreds or thousands of American jobs. And we have an interest in a strong and vital American economy.”

Yet the fact that the U.S. economy remains depressed and its recovery slow has already affected aid to Israel. The sequester, or mandatory budget cuts effective earlier this year, sparked debate within pro-Israel lobbying groups about whether to push for Israel’s aid package to be exempted from the cuts.

The debate highlighted the concern American pro-Israel groups feel about balancing their mission to advocate for a foreign country while not wishing to appear more concerned for that country than their own.

Contradictory finances

Historically, aid to Israel has continued apace during difficult economic times in the United States. But this time, other factors could raise some eyebrows.

The 2008 law, for instance, makes no mention of Israel’s own responsibility to ensure its QME. Rather, it places the onus on the United States to balance arms sales to meet Israel’s needs and uphold Israel’s QME."Israel wants the extra aid but doesn't really need it."
-- Stephen Walt

Israel cut its defence budget in 2013, and the reduction of over 820 million dollars, which is more than 25 percent of the annual aid it currently receives, might raise the question of how Israel can request increased aid while reducing its own budget.

That question is bolstered by the fact that an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report issued in May projected 3.9 percent growth in Israeli gross domestic product (GDP) for 2013 and 3.4 percent for 2014. The average for OECD countries for those two years is 1.2 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively.

As Oren indicated, as the United States moves from one financial crisis to another, these conditions could present political problems for lobbyists pushing for more aid. The fact that Israel’s QME is now mandated by law, however, bolsters those lobbyists’ efforts. They no longer have to argue whether the United States should commit additional resources to assure the QME, because the law now demands it.

Settlements

The cuts in defence while Israel’s GDP rises are not the only contradiction Israel needs to overcome in making its case for increased aid. There is also the spectre of settlements in the West Bank.

For years the United States has largely turned a blind eye to ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank, merely criticising them as “obstacles to peace” but taking little action to press Israel to stop their spread.

Secretary of State John Kerry is currently trying to manage ongoing construction, which had been the sticking point preventing the Palestinian Authority from engaging in renewed peace talks, against Palestinian concerns that the spread of settlements moots the peace process.

But the settlements raise another question in the context of the aid request. If the United States objects to settlements and sees them as hurting peace prospects, should it not expect Israel to prioritise its own defence spending, which, given the circumstances Oren described, would seem to be more imperative, over spending on settlements?

The cost of settlements is unclear. In 2005, the Israeli government commissioned an investigation into government funding of so-called “illegal outposts”, settlements established without government authorisation.

The report produced from that investigation concluded that from 2000-2004, the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing officially spent around 20 million dollars on these unauthorised outposts.

The report’s author, Talia Sasson, bemoaned the impossibility of obtaining complete information and suggested that “the actual sum considerably exceeds the one mentioned,” given that “the sum also does not include money the Ministry of Construction and Housing paid for infrastructure, public buildings and planning in unauthorised” outposts.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2011, official spending on Israeli-authorised settlements increased by 38 percent over the previous year, reaching well over 400 million dollars.

That sort of increase in the face of a request for additional aid gives advocates for peace a potentially useful tool, according to Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“Israel’s demand for a 10-year guarantee gives Obama and Kerry a useful bit of leverage, if they have the political will to use it,” Walt told IPS. “They should make it clear that Israel will get this guarantee if and only if it ends settlement expansion and agrees to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.”

“This is useful leverage because Israel wants the extra aid but doesn’t really need it,” Walt added. “It would retain its military edge for many years even if the U.S. stopped sending any aid at all.  So Obama and Kerry could use this pressure without actually endangering Israel’s security; indeed, by pushing Israel to end the occupation, they would in fact be enhancing it.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was originally established to promote U.S. aid to Israel, a purpose that remains at the heart of its advocacy.

Congress, where AIPAC’s influence is by far the strongest, must ultimately decide whether the president is fulfilling the commitment in the 2008 law to ensure Israel’s QME. That law is likely to play a crucial role in overcoming what appear to be more barriers to increased aid than AIPAC is accustomed to.

For the first time in many months, supporters of intensified diplomatic engagement with Iran appear to be gaining strength here.

Following last month’s surprise election of Hassan Rouhani – widely considered the most moderate of a field of six candidates – as the Islamic Republic’s next president, the possibility of a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme has become more widely accepted.“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations.” -- Joel Rubin of the Ploughshares Fund

That was reflected most dramatically this week by the fact that 131 members of the hawkish, Republican-led House of Representatives – including a majority of House Democrats – signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to “reinvigorat(e) U.S. efforts to secure a negotiated nuclear agreement”.

The letter, whose signatories included 17 Republicans, suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax bilateral and multilateral sanctions against Iran in exchange for “significant and verifiable concessions” at the negotiating table. It also implicitly warned against adding new sanctions at such a sensitive moment.

“We must also be careful not to pre-empt this potential opportunity by engaging in actions that delegitimize the newly elected president and weaken his standing relative to hardliners within the regime who oppose his professed ‘policy of reconciliation and peace’,” the letter stated.

Remarkably, most of the signatories – who together made up nearly a third of the House’s 435 members – signed on to the letter after a particularly bellicose appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a widely-viewed public-affairs television programme last Sunday in which he urged Washington to increase pressure, including threats of military action, against Tehran and called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful vanguard of the Israel lobby in Washington, took no public position on the letter. However, the group, which generally promotes the policies of the Israeli government, made clear that they would prefer that lawmakers not sign it, according to knowledgeable sources.

“This is critical because it shows that there is a strong and bipartisan constituency even in the U.S. Congress, which has been one of the most inflexible elements in the U.S. government, that understands there is a historic opportunity before us and wishes to ensure that we do our utmost to explore it,” Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told IPS.

“Letters of this kind almost never get more than 30 signatures, and this one got well over that number, including some senior members and important Republicans, as well. It tells us that things are changing,” he added.

Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network (NSN), echoed that assessment. “The willingness of 131 members to sign this letter reflects a bipartisan expert consensus that’s been emerging over the last eight months or so that negotiations need space and focus to succeed,” she said. “That consensus has been strengthened by the election results in Iran.”

The latest developments came as senior U.S. officials met their counterparts in the so-called P5+1 (U.S., France, Britain, Russia, China plus Germany) in Brussels in anticipation of a new round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme that is likely to take place in September, at least one month after Rouhani takes office Aug. 4.

Created in 2006, the P5+1’s last meeting with Tehran took place in April in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The group reportedly tabled an offer to ease sanctions on Iran’s trade in gold and other precious metals and its petrochemical exports as a confidence-building measure (CBM) in exchange for Tehran’s suspending its 20-percent enrichment of uranium and transferring its existing stockpile out of the country.

U.S. officials have told reporters that Iran has not yet formally responded to the offer and that therefore Washington is not yet prepared to modify the package. At the same time, the officials said Tehran should not see it as a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposal and that if it wanted a more comprehensive deal, the P5+1 would be prepared to discuss it.

Earlier this week, 29 former senior U.S. experts and foreign diplomats, including some with experience in negotiating with Iran, sent their own letter to Obama.

It urged him to show greater flexibility, a point on which three of the signatories, former U.S. Ambs. Thomas Pickering and William Luers, as well as a top nuclear-arms expert, Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, elaborated in an essay in this week’s New York Review of Books.

“The United States is the dominant world power and, ‘negotiating from strength,’ should take the initiative and communicate directly with the new (Iranian) leadership,” said the essay, which included a detailed, step-by-step plan for reciprocal concessions leading to a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Among other recommendations, it called for Obama to send a brief, private message of congratulations to Rouhani on the latter’s inauguration; suggest, via friendly states, that the two meet personally, “perhaps as early as during the September UN General Assembly,” and, parallel to those steps, establish “regular, even routine, bilateral discussions” on regional issues, “perhaps beginning with Iraq and Afghanistan (and even Syria).”

The latest developments appear to substantially reduce the chances that Congress will enact new unilateral sanctions against Iran before the end of the summer, and possibly the end of the year, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

Until this week, it was considered a foregone conclusion that the House would pass a tough new package designed to tighten existing sanctions and impose a de facto oil embargo against Iran before its August recess. The leadership in the Democratic-led Senate has indicated it has no plans to act before September, if then.

The widely respected Capitol Hill CQ Roll Call newspaper reported Friday that new economic penalties against Tehran are unlikely until the end of the year “at the earliest” and that “the slowdown …is starting to worry hawks on Capitol Hill and in Israel.”

“There’s clearly an understanding forming in Congress about the stakes involved in these negotiations,” said Joel Rubin, director of policy and government affairs at the Ploughshares Fund, a California-based global-security foundation.

“What this means is that for bills to go forward, there will need to be clarity about whether the negotiation track has serious potential, and those discussions will intensify in the fall, so there will be hesitation by many in Congress to get too far ahead of the administration,” he added.

Moreover, the fact that 131 House members signed the just-released letter could persuade the House Republican leadership to put off a vote on the pending package, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

They said the leadership, which works closely with AIPAC on Iran-related legislation, prefers to win by overwhelming margins – often approaching unanimity — on such bills, and that the possibility of substantial division suggested by the letter may act as a deterrent.

“Public support in Congress for engaging Iran at the negotiating table has grown markedly since Rouhani’s election,” according to Dylan Williams, director of government affairs for J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.

“This letter sends a clear signal – both here and overseas – that there exists a politically viable path to resolving concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme through diplomacy,” he added, noting that among the signers were 22 members of the foreign affairs and armed services committees.

Earlier this month, all but one of the 46 members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed a letter to Obama urging him to increase pressure on Iran through enhanced sanctions despite Rouhani’s election.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

With President Barack Obama reportedly primed to nominate former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon early next week, the powerful Israel lobby, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), faces a major dilemma.

Former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel speaks at a forum for the Law of the Sea Convention in Washington, D.C., May 9, 2012. Credit: public domain

If it mounts a vigorous campaign to fight Hagel’s confirmation by the Senate, it could put at serious risk its relations with the president, who is about to be inaugurated for another four-year term.

Worse, if it loses such a campaign, the aura of near-invincibility that it has assiduously cultivated over the past 30 years – and which has translated into virtually unanimous votes on resolutions in both houses of Congress in support of Israeli policies from the Occupied West Bank to Iran – will suffer a serious blow.

Yet, if it acquiesces in Hagel’s confirmation, it will result in the placement in a critical foreign policy post of a man who prides himself on his independence.

Hagel has expressed strong scepticism about – if not opposition to – war with Iran, and, despite a record of strong support for Israel’s defence needs, has not hesitated to publicly criticise both the Israeli government and its supporters here for pursuing actions that have, in his view, harmed Washington’s strategic interests in the Middle East.

“Hagel’s nomination presents AIPAC and other like-minded groups with a tough choice,” said Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor and co-author of the 2007 “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” “They may not like his reasonable approach toward Iran and his willingness to speak the truth about certain Israeli policies, but he’s a decorated war hero who is hardly hostile to Israel.”

That Hagel will indeed be nominated has not been officially confirmed, and two possible alternatives – Deputy Defence Secretary Ashton Carter and former Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy – have reportedly been fully vetted for the post. Both have served under the Obama and Clinton administrations and are considered accomplished technocrats who, however, lack Hagel’s political experience and stature.

But a number of highly placed sources and well-connected journalists have reported over the past 24 hours that the former Nebraska senator, who has co-chaired Obama’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board since 2009, remains the president’s preferred candidate despite a furious three-week campaign led by neo-conservatives, such as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), to pre-empt his nomination.

Among other charges, Kristol, who also heads the far-right Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), Rubin, and other foes have accused Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran, with anti-Semitism and hostility toward the Jewish state.

They have also tried to enlist – with some initial success that has subsequently dissipated – the gay community in their campaign by citing, among other things, his scepticism over easing the prohibition of gay enlistment in the military and his opposition to the nomination of an openly gay ambassador in the 1990s.

Hagel subsequently apologised, and both the ambassador and most LGBT organisations have accepted his apology.

While the neo-conservatives, whose political views are close to those of the ruling Likud Party and, in some cases, the settler movement, have led the anti-Hagel drive, the involvement of the more-cautious Israel lobby – which includes AIPAC and other major national Jewish organisations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) – not to mention numerous Christian Zionist groups, such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) – has been more discreet.

Early on, the long-time head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, for example, called Hagel’s views on Israel “disturbing” but said his group would not necessarily oppose the nomination.

AIPAC itself has not commented on Hagel, although its former spokesman, Josh Block, who now heads The Israel Project (TIP) but remains close to AIPAC, has been among the most active participants in the campaign.

Despite also enlisting the support of the Washington Post’s editorial page, which also expressed concern over Hagel’s generally non-interventionist positions and support for cutting the defence budget, the no-holds-barred nature of the neo-conservative campaign has spurred a backlash.

It is particularly visible among Republicans who hail from the more-moderate, internationalist wing of the party most closely identified with Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush.

There is also resistance from retired senior military, intelligence, and foreign service officers who share a “realist” foreign policy perspective and oppose the kind of adventurism favoured by neo-conservatives, including Kristol, who led the charge into Iraq 10 years ago and are now beating the drums for war with Iran.

For example, four former national security advisers, including Brent Scowcroft (Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan), Zbigniew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter), Gen. James Jones (Obama), and a former Reagan defence secretary, Frank Carlucci, as well as several former chiefs of the U.S. Central Command (CentCom) have signed letters in support of Hagel.

Many observers close to the Pentagon believe that Hagel’s views, particularly regarding the folly of attacking Iran and the damage inflicted by Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands on Washington’s strategic position in the Middle East, reflect those of much of the serving military brass.

Four former U.S. ambassadors to Israel have also backed his nomination, as has most recently Ryan Crocker, who was widely praised by neo-conservatives during his tenure as ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan and who has also served as Washington’s top envoy to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and Pakistan.

The sharpness of the neo-conservative campaign – particularly its allegations that Hagel is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel – has evoked charges of McCarthyism from his defenders, adding to the discomfort of the Israel lobby’s main organisations. Even CUFI, sometimes described as more Zionist than the Jewish organisations, disassociated itself from some of the charges.

Thus far, only three Republican senators have said they will oppose Hagel if he is nominated, while several others who have traditionally been close to the lobby, including Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have voiced strong reservations but refrained from committing themselves. Some Democrats have also quietly expressed concern.

But most observers believe that, if nominated, Hagel, who also heads the influential Atlantic Council think tank, will be confirmed by a solid – if not overwhelming – majority of senators. That makes the lobby’s position even more delicate.

During his two terms as senator, Hagel, a consistent conservative on social and domestic issues, was personally popular with his colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

“Americans are sick and tired of the smear tactics that Hagel’s main opponents have used, and going all-out against him would reveal that AIPAC cares more about Israel than it does about U.S. interests,” Walt told IPS. “Plus, why spend political capital on a former senator whose colleagues on the Hill are going to confirm him anyway?”

AIPAC and like-minded groups will no doubt be influenced by the views of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition is favoured to win elections later this month.

The major U.S. Jewish organisations and AIPAC have historically given great weight to the policy preferences of Israel’s elected leadership, even as they have privately urged them to take a different course.

But for Netanyahu, who has been sharply criticised by retired senior officials of Israel’s national-security establishment for allegedly endangering the Jewish state’s strategic ties with the U.S. by repeatedly defying Obama, the stakes are also high.

If he is seen as backing any effort to defeat Hagel’s anticipated nomination, his ties with the White House – already tenuous given his scarcely veiled support for Mitt Romney in the November presidential campaign – will likely only worsen.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called “commercial speech” even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Johan Galtung

There were real disagreements, some kind of rhetorical left-right. However, the real problem lies somewhere else, not in what was said but in what was not. The list is long. The Washington Post on election day (Manuel Roig-Fanza): “A tough day for causes without a candidate”. The article mentions climate change, gun control and immigration as issues that werent picked up by either one of the party conventions, nor in the debates. But there are many more pressing problems confronting the country.

Two major lobbies advocating the use of force were left untouched: the National Rifle Association, NRA, for violence in the U.S., and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, AIPAC, for violence abroad, mainly anti-Muslim wars.

They both exercise power through their impact on the media, denying critical politicians access to political power, thereby removing obstacles to violence. Dennis Kucinich, a voice for peace in Congress, and other critics, had the boundaries of their districts changed so that they were not reelected, fatally reducing the political spectrum in Congress and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates knew that to take them on would be suicidal.

Foreign policy was twisted in the debates to economic relations with China, trying to sound tough. But the U.S. majority cannot live without affordable Chinese goods with adequate quality/price ratios. Unless a big unless the U.S. restructures its economy from below, with cooperatives and self-employment, activating the countryside and local communities with numerous small enterprises focused on basic needs, food above all, housing and clothing, health and education, direct from producers to consumers.

No country in the world has a population so creative and cooperative. But the blossoming Occupy Movement has so far limited itself to occupation and critique, not to constructive action. They left untouched the basic change in the world: the U.S. grip on elites in other countries is loosening, in Latin America, even Africa, in the Arab awakening.

Instead they recited the “largest economy in the world” (the European Union is bigger, and China will overtake the U.S. soon) and the “strongest military power in the world” (losing Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan is a strange concept of “strongest”).

Climate change: the U.S. is dragging its feet, delaying action in any international fora. Not the candidates, but Nature, in the shape of Sandy, talked, a brutal reminder of climate reality. How much is man-made is uncertain but the change is certain enough. And the self-proclaimed world leader does not lead.

Then, incredible: the fact that 16 percent are in misery and hunger, while one percent live in opulence, feeding on speculation, was drowned in glib talk about the “middle class”. Yes, it is large, and stagnant. But far from 100 percent.

Neither candidate had answers, possibly agreeing to be silent. The U.S. desperately needs more parties that are less afraid of truth (as they will not win anyhow), for democratic transparency, and open dialogue.

Does the election make a difference? What change will the second Barack Obama term bring? Obama said in his victory speech that he will focus on deficit, the taxation system, and immigration. None of the above mentioned issues. In foreign policy Mitt Romney, like George W. Bush, might have been more reckless, accelerating the fall of the empire. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is better informed, more sophisticated, holding up the fall a little longer. And democrats are more inclined to do what Israel wants.

Obamacare will continue, whatever that is worth given the rise in costs for any medical care possibly because the “state will pay”.

On Jan. 1, 2013, the debt ceiling strikes, according to the Congress consensus, with major “austerity” for those who can least afford it, touching the military gently. Misery will accelerate and so could military deployment and wars waged the Obama way, with drones and SEALs, extrajudicial executions.

Imagine a Politburo committee in China studying photos to decide whom to kill abroad for anti-Chinese activity or threats to China’s security. Or China arming Cuba and Haiti countries as close to the U.S. as Taiwan is to China to the teeth; with a fleet cruising in the Caribbean. The U.S. would find this unacceptable.

But Obama will play, “I am above the parties uniting the nation. In his first term he was leaning over backward to the Republicans and was badly punished mid-term; this time that makes Romney a de facto co-president. The Dodd-Frank finance economy reforms will be very bland, Wall Street will by and large continue its lethal games. The rich may be taxed and may find more loopholes including settling abroad. Like the French super-rich in London?

Is U.S. democracy a two-party system becoming a one-party state? If so, other countries beware. Do not imitate. Democracy is more than elections. It is also transparency and dialogue, for real change. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” ( www.transcend.org/tup)

The Democratic National Convention erupted in controversy this week over the removal of a clause in the party platform stating that Jerusalem should remain Israel’s undivided capital and only grew worse when the wording was hastily re-inserted.

Though party platforms are routinely ignored by presidents and members of Congress, the politically sensitive issue of Israel, which has been particularly prominent in a U.S. presidential election where foreign policy has been downplayed by both sides, has caused ripples far beyond Washington.

The Democratic Party platform had initially intended to remove the wording from 2008 which had affirmed the party’s stance on Jerusalem in order to bring it in line with long-standing United States policy, upheld by presidents of both parties, which holds that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be decided in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Both Republicans and Democrats, however, have routinely voiced support for Jerusalem being Israel’s “undivided capital” in their party platforms in order to gather support from wealthy pro-Israel donors and secure votes in swing states where Jewish voters are believed to be decisive.

Barack Obama, in a 2008 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobbying group, said that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but quickly backtracked and has since held to a policy of keeping Jerusalem as a final status issue.

Although the George W. Bush administration repeatedly stated its intent to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, it never acted to do so, the embassy remains in Tel Aviv, and the United States still has not formally recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Numerous media outlets reported that the Democratic platform had been vetted by AIPAC, which had voiced its approval. But after the controversy erupted, and Republican nominee Mitt Romney referred to the omission of the Jerusalem statement as “shameful”, President Obama was reported to have personally intervened to have the language re-inserted.

The amendment needed approval by a two-thirds majority in a voice vote on the conference floor. The controversy deepened when three calls for a vote came back without a clear majority in favour, much less the required two-thirds. But conference chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, declared that he had heard the required majority. Video recordings of the vote cast strong doubts on that assertion.

“The handling of the Jerusalem amendment in the Democratic party platform was ham-fisted to say the least,” Saqib Ali, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and a Democratic Party activist, told IPS.

“By ramming through the amendment on a dubious procedural move, Mayor Villagarosa and party leaders insulted those who believe Palestinians deserve equal human rights to everyone else in the world.

“The Democratic Party platform on this issue contradicts the position of the Obama administration. The divergence between the Democratic platform and the Obama administration policy just doesn’t make any sense,” Ali added.

Palestinians noted the controversy as well. Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said that while the entire episode might just be “election propaganda”, a failure to recognise the Palestinian claim to east Jerusalem will “destroy the peace process” and lead to “endless war”.

The Democrats’ official stance also seems to lack support from the party’s rank and file. In a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, while nearly 60 percent of Democrats said they were not sure what they thought the ultimate disposition of Jerusalem should be, those who voiced an opinion favoured dividing the city over it being controlled by Israel alone by a nearly two-to-one margin.

“Pushing through the amendment was in part a reaction to Republican criticisms that the Obama administration – despite providing record amounts of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel’s rightist government and blocking the United Nations from challenging Israeli violations of international humanitarian law – was somehow not supportive enough of Israel,” Professor Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, wrote in an article for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“It was also a demonstration of just how determined the Democratic Party leadership is to undermine the Middle East peace process and weaken international law, even if it means running roughshod over their members and thereby hurting their chances in November,” Zunes said.

Other observers were much more explicit about the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the incident.

John Mearsheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, says that this episode reflected how out of touch U.S. leaders are with public opinion on Israel and the Palestinians.

“I don’t think the flap over Jerusalem will have any effect on the election, since there is no evidence that Obama was responsible for the problem and he fixed it right away,” Mearsheimer told IPS.

“Nevertheless, what happened yesterday was very important because we saw right before our own eyes that the president and his lieutenants were caving into pressure from Israel and the lobby, but at the same time, there was significant opposition to what Obama was doing among the rank and file in the Democratic Party.

“Actually, this is not surprising if you look at public opinion polls on how the American people think about our special relationship with Israel. The evidence is clear that the public is generally pro-Israel, but not so much as to justify the present relationship, where we give Israel more aid than any other country and give it unconditionally.”

Notably, while Obama visibly intervened to change the party platform, he made no mention of Jerusalem in his convention speech, and barely touched upon Israel at all, confining his remarks to a pro forma statement that “Our commitment to Israel’s security must not waver, and neither must our pursuit of peace.”

Obama also was sparing in his remarks on Iran, which has been dominating U.S. foreign policy for the past year. While this may all reflect a general preference of both candidates to speak to ongoing domestic economic issues in this election, some observers thought there might be some small indication of the beginnings of a shift in pro-Israel influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Like everyone who saw this appalling misprision of democracy by the Democratic National Convention, I was struck by the blatancy of the political manipulation on view,” former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman told IPS.

“Whatever the merits of the issue itself in terms of campaign politics, the Israel Lobby can have done itself no good by exposing its contempt for the opinion of the delegates now gathered in Charlotte in this way.”

Mearsheimer agreed. “What makes the special relationship (between the U.S. and Israel) work is the fact that the lobby is deadly effective at putting pressure on American politicians and policymakers to support Israel no matter what. If the public had a real say in our policy toward Israel, we would have a very different policy than we now have. Wednesday, that point was driven home clearly on our TV screens for all to see. Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

Congress’s rush to pass new sanctions against Iran ahead of the August recess comes amidst an intensified drive to pin the Iranian government to deadly acts of international terrorism and amplified moves by U.S. politicians to demonstrate their support for Mideast ally Israel ahead of the November presidential election.

The push to implement more punitive measures against an increasingly demonised Iran could undermine efforts to resolve the longstanding impasse over Iran’s nuclear programme peacefully.

Jamal Abdi, policy director for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told IPS that even the mere “threat” of the new sanctions, which will be a combination of two bills passed in December and May by the House of Representatives and the Senate that target Iran’s energy sector and its ability to conduct financial transactions electronically, “have had a negative effect on the Iran nuclear talks and limited the president’s ability to use sanctions as a tool for leverage”.

“When this bill passes, it will further aggravate the chain of escalation between Iran and the U.S., and if it includes ‘economic warfare’ measures on top of those already in place, the Iranians will be inclined to respond with equal escalation,” he said.

A Jul. 25 hearing on Iran’s alleged support for international terrorism saw testimony from expert witnesses recommending that U.S. policy should be focused on gathering international support for holding Iran responsible and weakening its influence in the region.

According to the written testimony of Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or the Washington Institute), “…Iran cannot win a conventional war against the West, but it can exact a high price through asymmetric warfare.”

“Exposing Iran’s involvement in international terrorism is now more important than ever, both to deny the group its coveted ‘reasonable deniability’ and to build an international consensus for action against Iran’s support for terrorism,” he wrote.

Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign policy programming at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), wrote in her testimony that “the fall of the house of Assad would be devastating to Iran. So we clearly have an interest in Syria’s future.”

Pletka also claimed that U.S. policy is geared towards “tolerance for Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism” and during her oral statements asked why U.S. officials had not publicly declared that Iran was responsible for a bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists. To date, no evidence has been presented to support that allegation.

Amidst ongoing efforts to tie Iran to international terrorism, the U.S.-led sanctions regime charges ahead. But while the full traditional legislative process has now been bypassed so the pending Iran sanctions can be passed before Friday, the details of the bill in question have been waiting to be finalised for more than half a year.

Republican-spearheaded efforts to include harsher measures have clashed with Democrat-led moves to pass the bill as is, resulting in gridlock until a compromise is reached.

According to a NIAC press document, one such provision, the “Kirk Amendment”, would result in “unintended consequences” that would harm ordinary Iranians such as prohibiting Iranian-American citizens from sending money to family members in Iran and stopping pharmaceutical companies from selling medicines to Iranian hospitals “regardless of whether the Treasury Department granted them a license to do so”.

M. J. Rosenberg, a veteran Israel analyst who worked for years at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), told IPS that Congress is rushing to pass the sanctions because they “promised AIPAC that they would and want to deliver before the election season goes into full swing in September”.

“Sanctions bills seem to originate from Congress, but they actually originate from inside AIPAC,” he said.

Rosenberg, who has been consistently critical of AIPAC and other U.S. Israel lobby groups in his writings and commentary, also said that Iran is at the top of AIPAC’s agenda.

“Look at AIPAC’s conference in the spring. The Iran sanctions issue was AIPAC’s main issue. If you want to show your donors that you are 100 percent for the cause – the cause being first sanctions and then war with Iran – you have to cosponsor bills and get them passed,” he said.

On Jul. 27, President Barack Obama’s signing into law of the “United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012”, which gives Israel an additional 70 million dollars in military aid and expands military and civil cooperation, coincided with the presumptive Republican White House Nominee Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel for the foreign-policy focused portion of his campaign.

While in Jerusalem, Romney had a friendly meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attended a fundraiser that reportedly resulted in more than one million dollars in donations from 45 Jewish donors.

According to the AP, billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has pledged to spend 100 million dollars to defeat President Obama, was seated next Romney at the event and joined in a standing ovation when Romney declared Jerusalem to be the Israeli capital.

Ongoing efforts by the presidential contenders to demonstrate their support for Israel have been described by analysts as an effort to capture a traditionally Democrat-aligned “Jewish vote”.

On Jul. 27, Gallup issued new polling data showing that from Jun. 1-Jul. 26 Jewish registered voters still favoured Obama over Romney by 68 percent to 25 percent.

Earlier in the year, a survey of more than 1,000 self-identified Jews conducted between late February and early March by the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI) showed that Jewish voters, who make up only about two percent of the national population but comprise more than that in several key “swing states”, such as Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois, remain largely liberal and Democratic in their political orientation and that U.S. Jews are more concerned about issues such as social justice than foreign policy.

Asked what issue was most important to them in the upcoming election, 51 percent cited the economy and 15 percent the growing gap between rich and poor. Only two percent of respondents cited Iran.

The relative lesser importance accorded by respondents to both Israel and Iran is remarkable in light of strenuous efforts over most of the past year by all but one of the Republican presidential candidates, as well as Republican lawmakers in Congress, to drive a wedge between Obama and his Jewish supporters over precisely those two issues.

According to Rosenberg, campaigning to the Pro-Israel community is “not about the votes, it’s about money”.

“Adelson is big in the Romney camp and has lots of friends in the Israel community and is trying to pull them away from supporting Democrats by saying he will be tougher on Iran,” he said.

“It’s not about votes, it’s about getting these millionaires and billionaires into your corner,” said Rosenberg. “I would say that about politics in general. Ultimately money turns into votes. But really, when it comes to the pro-Israel community, it’s strictly about the money.”

*Jasmin Ramsey edits IPS News’s foreign policy blog, www.lobelog.com

U.S. President Barack Obama Sunday made a clear statement against a rush to war – either by the U.S. or Israel – with Iran, while also emphasising that he would pursue that option if alternatives were unsuccessful in ensuring that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon.

Speaking at the annual policy convention of the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama decried the “loose talk of war”, and contended that sanctions and international pressure are working.

“Now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built,” he said, noting that the recent drumbeat for war “has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil…”

He was no doubt referring to recent reports that Israel was preparing to strike Iranian nuclear targets this year, as well as exhortations by its supporters here, including three of the four major Republican presidential candidates, to take a more aggressive and threatening stance against Iran or to support Israel if it undertakes an attack against Tehran’s nuclear facilities on its own.

Obama began pushing back on that pressure last week in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine in which he stated that “…our assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”

Obama went on to urge a diplomatic resolution, which, he contends, there is still time to achieve. He reiterated that point at the AIPAC conference Sunday.

“Given their history, there are of course no guarantees that the Iranian regime will make the right choice. But both Israel and the United States have an interest in seeing this challenge resolved diplomatically. After all, the only way to truly solve this problem is for the Iranian government to make a decision to forsake nuclear weapons. That’s what history tells us.”

AIPAC has been backing a resolution in the U.S. Senate which would draw a “red line” at Iran’s acquisition of the “capability” of building a nuclear weapon, a lower, if substantially more vague threshold than actually possessing one.

The group, whose positions generally reflect those of the Israeli government, will be sending thousands of its members gathered here for the conference to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to lobby lawmakers to support that resolution. The conference will hear directly from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday night after what many regard as a critical meeting between the two leaders earlier in the day.

Many analysts, including the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, believe that Iran is already technically capable of producing a nuclear weapon but has not yet made the decision to actually build one. So the Senate’s approval of the resolution, especially if it carries an overwhelming majority of the upper chamber, not only risks escalating tensions with Tehran, but  would also challenge the administration’s policy, as enunciated Sunday by Obama himself.

Obama drew this distinction in his speech Sunday at the AIPAC conference by repeatedly warning about Iran “obtaining” a nuclear weapon, while not mentioning “capability”.

“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table,” the president stated.  “And I mean what I say.

“Iran’s leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told the 13,000 AIPAC delegates. “And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

In the last several weeks, it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. and Israel disagree not only on their definition of “red lines” that would provoke military action, but also on what an acceptable negotiated outcome with Iran might be.

Israel has long held to the same position as former President George W. Bush: that Iran should not be permitted to enrich uranium on its own territory, a result that is also favoured by the sponsors of the pending resolution. The Obama administration, on the other hand, has indicated it is willing to accept a settlement permitting enrichment in Iran, provided it is subject to enhanced international oversight.

On the eve of his visit here, Netanyahu said he saw no use in further negotiations, but most analysts believe a new round of talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) will take place as early as the end of this month.

Obama’s presentation at AIPAC came in the context of a larger controversy over his role in U.S.-Israel relations.

Speaking Immediately before Obama, Israeli President Shimon Peres, who is believed to oppose a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, praised him for his support of Israel and his efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“He has made it clear that the United States of America will never permit Iran to become nuclear. He made it clear that containment is not a viable policy,” Peres said. “And as the president stated, all options are on the table…Mr. President, I know your commitment to Israel is deep and profound. Under your leadership, security cooperation between the United States and Israel has reached its highest level. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a friend in the White House.”

Yet the applause for Peres when he was introduced was noticeably much greater than that for Obama.

And just before the two presidents spoke, Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and an ascendant neo-conservative in her own right, drew considerable applause herself when she charged during a discussion with several other prominent analysts that Obama had undermined Israel more than any president before him.

Although that applause was exceeded when fellow panelist and former Congresswoman Jane Harman, now head of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, chastised those who would break the bipartisan consensus on support for Israel and turn the issue into a “political football”, it remained a strong indication of the sizeable contingent in the cavernous Washington Convention Centre hall used by AIPAC for its annual convention that was very hostile to Obama.

Aware of this, Obama preceded his statements on Iran by defending his record of support for Israel and echoing Harman’s criticism of those who would politicise the issue.

“If during this political season you hear some question my administration’s support for Israel, remember that it’s not backed up by the facts,” Obama said.

He pointed to the widely acknowledged fact that U.S.-Israel security cooperation is greater than ever, as well as his repeated – and often lonely – defences of Israel at the U.N. and other international forums, many of which have drawn criticism from some of Washington’s closest allies.

Obama thereby set the stage for his defence of his Iran policy, and where the role of military force fits into it.

“As president and commander-in-chief, I have a deeply-held preference for peace over war,” Obama said. “I have sent men and women into harm’s way. I have seen the consequences of those decisions in the eyes of those I meet who have come back gravely wounded, and the absence of those who don’t make it home. …I only use force when the time and circumstances demand it.”

Although most of his speech was devoted to Iran, Obama also spent several minutes warning against “cynicism” and “despair” regarding the Palestinian issue, which has virtually disappeared from the headlines over the past year, displaced by the so-called “Arab Spring” and the escalation in tensions over Iran. But he announced no new initiatives in that regard.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this story.

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While Israeli leaders historically have enjoyed not insignificant influence with their U.S. counterparts, Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu will likely arrive at the White House next week with a little extra boost in his efforts to get President Barack Obama to toughen his already hard line against Iran.

President Barack Obama greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009. Credit:White House photo by Pete Souza

Not only is that because the vaunted Israel lobby – whose premier organisation, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), will be holding its star-studded annual convention here beginning Sunday – has been working overtime to hype the “existential” threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear programme to the Jewish state’s survival.

Nor is it related only to the fact that three of the four Republican presidential candidates are repeatedly accusing Obama of being “soft” on Iran and insufficiently committed to Israel’s security, thus seeking to drive a wedge between the president and Jewish voters and donors.

The extra boost on this visit is provided by growing concerns over the convergence of steadily rising oil prices – and jitters in the oil market over mounting tensions between Israel and Iran – with the November elections here.

“The biggest hurdle to President Obama’s re-election is almost surely going to be the inevitable rise in gas prices over the summer,” wrote Daniel Dicker, an oil trader who writes a column for financial website, The Street, this week.

“And no matter how hard he – or anybody else – argues that higher pump prices are largely beyond his control, you and I know that the American public won’t much care for explanations.”

Although Israel itself is neither a major producer nor consumer of oil, Netanyahu – whether by design or not – now finds himself in a position to influence the price that U.S. motorists pay at the pump and thus affect Obama’s political fortunes this fall, as noted Thursday by Gal Luft, the Israeli-born director of the Washington- based Institute for Global Security, in an essay published this week by foreignpolicy.com.

“There is no gainsaying the corrosive political impact that high gasoline prices have on an incumbent president’s chances of getting re-elected,” he wrote. “With prices projected to hit a national average of 4.25 dollars a gallon (3.8 litres) by (the end of May), and with a new poll finding that seven in 10 Americans find the gas price issue ‘deeply important,’ the president should be concerned.”

After all, back in the summer of 2008, oil and petrol prices reached all-time highs, helping to propel Obama to victory over Republican Senator John McCain in the presidential election that fall.

“Today, it’s the (Republicans’) turn to smell blood,” according to Luft. “Obama knows this. The problem is that Netanyahu, one of the savviest foreign leaders when it comes to American politics, know this too.”

Indeed, oil experts cited by the New York Times estimate that recent Israeli-Iranian threats and counter-threats, combined with U.S. pressure on third countries to reduce Iranian oil imports, have increased world oil prices by as much as 20 percent.

The same experts estimate that an actual Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would by itself provoke a further spike in oil prices on the order of 15 to 25 percent, adding at least 50 cents to petrol costs at the pump, which are now averaging close to four dollars a gallon.

“If the price of oil goes up to five dollars a gallon or more, it would not be good for Obama’s re-election,” according to Charles Ebinger, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution.

But such an increase could be prolonged or multiplied if Tehran retaliated by following through on threats to close the Strait of Hormuz – even if only for a few days – or by striking, either directly or through proxies, critical oil- and gas-production or refining facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, or Iraq, where Iranian-backed militias are well-placed to cause havoc in the southern oil fields.

“The most dangerous scenario would be if the Iranians were to retaliate against some of the Gulf states either because one or more let (the Israelis) over-fly their territory or another reason,” Ebinger told IPS.

“If they were attacked – especially the major refineries in Saudi Arabia or the main LNG (liquefied natural gas) facilities in Qatar – oil and gas prices would go through the roof,” he said.

An Israeli attack “could be a stunning success, or it could just as easily unleash a chain of events that would bring the world to the brink of the Greater Depression,” agreed Luft.

He argued that success would be better assured if the U.S. carried out the attack because, unlike Israel, it has the military resources to destroy Tehran’s conventional retaliatory capabilities, as well as its nuclear facilities.

But even without an attack, the persistence of Israeli-Iranian tensions through the summer ensures that petrol prices will remain 10-20 percent higher than they otherwise would be. Moreover, those prices will likely increase as demand grows with the ongoing – albeit slow – economic recovery and as supplies, whether due to sanctions against Iran or declines in exports from other sources, such as Sudan or Nigeria, tighten.

Netanyahu is expected to demand that Obama toughen his rhetoric against Tehran, deploy more firepower in the region to increase the credibility of a U.S. military strike, and offer concrete assurances that Washington will indeed take military action if Iran’s nuclear programme crosses certain “red lines”.

If Obama acquiesces, Luft noted, the current 10-20 percent Iran- related premium on oil prices could go higher yet. But rejection of those demands could also send prices higher because Israel may be considered more likely to take unilateral action with or without U.S. approval.

There are ways for Obama to overcome his predicament, according to Luft, who is closely associated with a number of prominent neo- conservative hawks.

Netanyahu may be willing to hold off on striking Iran until after the November elections in exchange for such prizes as the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a major new U.S. weapons deal, and an increase in missile-defence spending for Israel in the administration’s 2013 budget, according to Luft. Such an agreement would presumably be accompanied by a U.S. commitment to strike Iran if its nuclear programme crossed certain red lines.

But Luft’s preferred option is something else altogether. Obama, he wrote, could “take ownership of, and lead, the military option against Iran, and reinvent himself as a war president in the hope that American motorists will view their pain at the pump forgivingly as part of their patriotic duty.

“Such an option would also defuse Republican criticism about Obama being weak on Iran and transform national priorities in the months leading up to the elections.”

Luft’s essay, however, leaves out a number of other possible factors that could both reduce the Iran-related premium and enhance Obama’s chances of being re-elected.

It ignores, for example, Iran’s own potential influence – for good or ill – on the oil market, according to Michael Klare, an energy specialist at Hampshire College.

“Netanyahu can have a lot to say about the price of gasoline, only so long as the Iranians play along,” he said. “But if tomorrow the Iranians say, ‘We’re going to negotiate seriously to resolve this,’ then he won’t have any cards to play any more,” as tension – and the Iran-related premium – ratchets down.

Indeed, any progress in negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 – the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China – which most analysts believe will resume after a year’s hiatus at the end of this month or in April – could have that effect.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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On the eve of a critical set of meetings here between top U.S. and Israeli officials, a new survey finds little backing among the Israeli public for a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington’s approval.

According to the poll, released at a briefing at the Brookings Institution here Wednesday, only about one in five Israelis (19 percent) favour a unilateral strike without U.S. support.

If, on the other hand, Washington gave a green light for an attack, another 42 percent of Israelis would favour it, according to the survey, which was conducted late last week by Israel’s Dahaf Institute and has a margin or error of four percent.

The poll, which was organised by Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at Brookings who teaches Middle East politics at the University of Maryland, found that 34 percent of the 500 Israeli respondents questioned by the pollsters oppose a strike and that a similar percentage believes such a strike would either have no effect on Iran’s nuclear programme (19 percent) or actually accelerate it (11 percent).

The poll, which also found that more than two-thirds of respondents (68 percent) believe that such an attack will provoke retaliation by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, is likely to bolster those in the administration of President Barack Obama who hope to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two men meet here next week to shelve any plans his security cabinet may have for carrying out such an attack this year.

Netanyahu will be here to speak before the annual convention of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been the main domestic lobbying force pushing for a hawkish policy and Congressional passage of a series of ever-tougher sanctions against economic and financial sanctions against Iran.

Obama, as well as Israeli President Shimon Peres and a host of other political heavyweights from both countries and major U.S. parties, is also scheduled to speak to the convention before his meeting with Netanyahu.

The Obama-Netanyahu meeting will cap a flurry of bilateral meetings of senior officials in both countries’ capitals over the last month in what appears to be an effort to gauge each others’ intentions.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, widely considered the most hawkish member of Netanyahu’s eight-man security cabinet, is here this week, while Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was in Israel last week. The head of Israel’s Mossad, its foreign intelligence agency, was here to meet with his counterparts here, shortly after the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, completed a two-day visit to Israel.

While officials on both sides publicly insist that that they are coordinating their policies, the frequency of these high-level meetings, as well as off-the-record comments by anonymous officials, suggest that key differences on tactics and strategy in dealing with Iran may in fact be widening.

Top administration officials, backed by a growing number of retired military and intelligence officials here, have made increasingly clear that they oppose an Israeli military strike.

Echoing both his predecessor, Adm. Michael Mullen, and his boss, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, Dempsey warned in an interview 10 days ago in the clearest expression of the administration’s position to date that such an attack would be, among other things, “destabilising”, “premature”, “not prudent”, and unlikely to achieve Israel’s “long-term objectives”.

U.S. military and intelligence officials have also stated repeatedly that they do not believe the Iranian leadership has yet decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Such remarks have infuriated Netanyahu who, according to Israeli reports, accused Dempsey of “serving Iranian interests” by reducing the credibility of the threat that Israel or the U.S. would resort to military action if Tehran did not abandon its nuclear programme. He also reportedly refused to promise Donilon that he would give Washington advance notice if he decided to mount an attack.

Netanyahu himself reportedly hopes to persuade Obama to take a tougher line against Iran, beyond the administration’s mantra that “all options are on the table,” a reference to possible military action.

In particular, he wants Washington to publicly establish a clear “red line” – specifically, the achievement by Iran of an ill-defined nuclear-weapons “capability” – which, if crossed by Tehran, would trigger a U.S. attack.

The administration, however, has so far declined to do so, insisting privately instead that its red line would be Iran’s actual “weaponisation”, a benchmark that most analysts believe would take at least three years for Iran to achieve if it indeed decided to produce a deliverable bomb.

And while its officials, including Dempsey, continue to emphatically insist that the military option remains on the table, many analysts here – and in Israel – believe that the administration prefers putting in place a “containment and deterrence” strategy toward a nuclear Iran over a war whose consequences cannot be predicted.

Thus, AIPAC, presumably with Netanyahu’s encouragement and support, is lobbying for a pending Senate resolution that would take the “containment” option from the table and declare that it is a “vital national interest” of the U.S. to prevent Iran from acquiring a “nuclear weapons capability”.

“We …want to say clearly and resolutely to Iran: You have only two choices – peacefully negotiate to end your nuclear weapons programme or expect a military strike to end that programme,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, one of the co-sponsors.

Two other co-sponsors, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, met with Netanyahu in Israel last week, while three of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates are expected to endorse it when they address AIPAC next week.

The resolution so far has 37 co-sponsors, roughly equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, in the 100-seat Senate, but AIPAC is expected to make an all-out push for passage when its 10,000 activists arrive in Washington this weekend.

In this context, the latest poll should strengthen Obama’s hand. In addition to the lack of support for a unilateral strike that isn’t approved by Washington, it also found that a large majority of Israelis – and especially Israeli Jews – believe that Hezbollah, which is believed to have tens of thousands of rockets targeted on Israel, would join Iran in retaliating against any attack on Tehran.

On the other hand, a 44-percent plurality of Israeli respondents said they believed that an Israeli attack could set back Iran’s nuclear programme by at least three years.

Asked what they expected the U.S. to do if Israel carried out an attack, 27 percent said they thought Washington would join the war on Israel’s behalf, while 39 percent said it would provide diplomatic support but not military assistance. Only 15 percent said Washington would punish Israel by reducing its assistance.

Respondents were equally split on whether an Israeli attack would weaken or strengthen the Iranian regime, and a slight majority said a military strike against Iran would trigger a military conflict lasting months or years, as opposed to days or weeks.

Israeli respondents were split on whether they preferred Obama to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in November’s presidential elections, but preferred Obama by large margins over the other Republican candidates, including former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and House Speaker Newt Gingrich who have been the strongest advocates of military action against Iran.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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