Could Isreal Drag the US Into War with Iran?

Back when Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu was elected Israel's prime minister for the first time, in 1996, a Jordanian political scientist with a grim sense of humor said the only way to describe him was like a villain out of an old Western: "He's a lyin', cheatin', deceitin' son of a bitch!"

The Obama administration, without using quite such colorful language, might be inclined to agree. As Aluf Benn, the respected diplomatic correspondent for Israel's Haaretz newspaper wrote in these columns recently, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel last week, he "had come to offer not just friendship, but support (and protection) against Iran—Israel's greatest bogeyman—in exchange for a few concessions from Netanyahu. Instead, he got a finger in the eye."

The announcement of government-approved plans to build 1,600 new Israeli homes in largely Arab East Jerusalem was a direct challenge to Biden's efforts to move peace talks forward. The Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem as the capital of their state, accuse the Israelis of using such projects to create "facts on the ground" that vastly complicate future negotiations—and, indeed, that is precisely the intent of many Israelis who support the building program.

But the problem as Benn presented it was more complex than that: a combination of brinkmanship and blackmail in which Netanyahu's government makes veiled threats to attack Iran, or not, depending on how much pressure it feels on the Palestinian issue.

U.S. military planners have little doubt that an Israeli air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities would provoke Iranian retaliation against Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers allied with the United States. American efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which border Iran, would come under threat. And there would be no way that any U.S. administration, after so many decades pledging undying support for Israel, could make a convincing claim in Muslim eyes that it was not complicit in the attack.

One of the cardinal rules of realism in international politics—and Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both pride themselves on their realism—is "never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you." Political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote in his classic Politics Among Nationsthat great powers "lose their freedom of action by identifying their own national interests completely with those of a weak ally." And for all its bluster, Israel is, at the end of the day, a tiny country with a population smaller than that of New York City. "Secure in the support of its powerful friend, the weak ally can choose the objectives and methods of its foreign policy to suit itself," Morgenthau warned. "The powerful nation then finds it must support interests not its own and that it is unable to compromise on issues that are vital not to itself, but only to its ally."

Netanyahu wants to make sure that his priorities are America's priorities on many issues. So he and his supporters argue that if they're forced to make concessions that would create an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state, Israel would feel so insecure that it would have to attack Iran to protect itself—no matter what the implications for Americans and their men and women in the field.

"On both sides they are talking in terms of life and death," Benn wrote in Haaretz a couple of days ago. "Netanyahu's backers charge [President Barack] Obama with sentencing Israel to death via the Iranian nuclear program and 'Auschwitz borders' from which rockets would be fired [by Palestinians] onto Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion International Airport. For their part, the Americans warn that Israel's desire for settlements is endangering their soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Actually, the American warning is a little more pointed even than that, and it's not just from the politicians in the Obama administration, it's from the military. As reported by Mark Perry at Foreign Policy, back in January a briefing prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff by senior officers at the U.S. Central Command under Gen. David Petraeus reported "a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel," that the leaders of the many Arab governments in CentCom's area of responsibility were "losing faith in American promises," and that "Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region."