RE: What Is Israel to Do?

Emanuele Ottolenghi
Contentions/Commentary
30 June '10

As Jennifer points out, Admiral Mullen’s remarks about Iran are disconcerting.

I am no military expert and, like most of us in the blogosphere and the policy community, lack the actionable intelligence to make the kind of judgment that Admiral Mullen makes on whether a military strike against Iran would yield the kind of benefits desired without the kind of consequences one may reasonably fear.

Maybe Admiral Mullen is in a position to know better and his public assessment is correct. But why announce it? To make the Mullahs sleep better?

What is remarkable, and remarkably shocking, about this procession of military and intelligence personnel coming to say what politicians have now said for a while, is that they do not seem to appreciate how these comments have damaging consequences.

Perhaps a military strike is not in the cards anymore — who knows? Perhaps the risks involved are considerable. Maybe the hour is late. Understandably, there is little appetite for war. And, frankly, one should underestimate neither the operational difficulties nor the political fallout.

But there is a world of difference between entertaining skepticism about the military option in private and ruling it out in public. Whether it is politicians or uniformed personnel, their public dismissal of the military option — perhaps the only thing Iran’s regime truly fears — undermines the effectiveness of all non-military alternatives.

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What Is Israel to Do?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
29 June '10

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is at it again. In the past he’s spoken about his aversion to military action against Iran. At a swank Aspen gathering, he made clear just how averse he is — and the dearth of other options for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran:

A military strike against Iran would be “incredibly destabilizing” to the region said the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. He believes Iran will continue to pursue nuclear weapons, even if sanctions against the country are increased.

Speaking Monday at the Aspen Security Forum, Mullen said it would be “incredibly dangerous” for Iran to achieve nuclear weapons, and that there’s “no reason to trust” Iran’s assurances that it is only pursuing a peaceful nuclear program, especially after the discovery of a secret nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom. …

Mullen said there was no reason to expect Iran to conform to international norms, given its past behavior, but he declined to describe what measures the US was considering. He has often said that all options remain on the table.

He explained that the hardest part about trying to decide what to do about Iran is how much the US does not know about the country’s nuclear progress.

When asked whether he thought Israel would give the United States time to see whether tougher sanctions or talks would produce more cooperation from Iran, he would only say that he believes the US and Israel are “in sync” with their current policies.

Following on Leon Panetta’s troubling interview, this should certainly unnerve you — on multiple counts. First, we again see that the Obami consider the prospect of a strike on Iran to be ”destabilizing” — apparently more so than a nuclear-armed Iran. Second, Mullen confesses he really doesn’t know how far Iran’s nuclear program has progressed. Is this strategic ambiguity to keep Israel at bay? Or is it evidence that our intelligence is deficient and Israel will need to gauge for itself when time has run out on the feckless attempts to engage and sanction Iran? Third, like Panetta, he thinks economic sanctions will be ineffective. Finally, and worst of all, even if Mullen believes these things, why in the world would he say them? Giving comfort and encouragement to our adversaries isn’t part of his job description.

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Mullen's Myth of Geostrategic Equivalence

On Iran's nuclear program.


William Kristol
The Weekly Standard
19 April '10

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told a forum at Columbia University yesterday, "Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome...In an area that's so unstable right now, we just don't need more of that."

But Mullen's formulation of geostrategic equivalance ignores a massive difference between the two outcomes: Even assuming the degree and kind of "destabilization" would be the same in both the cases of attack and appeasement (which I don't think would be so), one scenario--attack--leaves Iran without nuclear weapons, at least for now; the other--appeasement--means Iran would have nuclear weapons going forward. Which unstable outcome is less damaging to U.S. interests? I think the answer is pretty clear: An attacked Iran that does not have nukes.

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Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel?

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
16 March '10

What’s behind the administration’s new get-tough policy with Israel? If you believe Mark Perry, a former Arafat adviser and author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies, it’s the doing of General David Petraeus. In a rather imaginative post at Foreign Policy’s web site, he claims that on Jan. 16,

a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

According to Perry, the briefing “hit the White House like a bombshell,” because in effect the U.S. military was placing itself in opposition to the “powerful … Israeli lobby” by announcing that “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers.”

That didn’t ring true to me, so I asked a military officer who is familiar with the briefing in question and with Petraeus’s thinking on the issue to clarify matters. He told me that Perry’s item was “incorrect.” In the first place, Petraeus never recommended shifting the Palestinian territories to Centcom’s purview from European Command, as claimed by Perry. Nor did Petraeus belittle George Mitchell, whom he holds in high regard. All that happened, this officer told me, is that there was a “staff-officer briefing … on the situation in the West Bank, because that situation is a concern that Centcom hears in the Arab world all the time. Nothing more than that.”

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Arab States Lose Faith in the United States Over Lack of Action on Iran, Administration Blames Israel

JINSA Report #: 973
16 March '10

Viral on the web yesterday was a blog post at ForeignPolicy.com about a briefing supposedly given to Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by CENTCOM senior officers following a trip through the Arab world. It contained the paragraphs:

The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that [U.S. envoy and former Senator George] Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

The briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders. "Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling," a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. "America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding." But Petraeus wasn't finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza... be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region's most troublesome conflict.

This, according to the blog, was the background to Vice President Biden's tongue-lashing of Israel's prime minister and the outrageous slander that Israel is to blame for the difficulties the Obama Administration is having getting our Arab leaders to help us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Damage done.

In our experience, there are three half-truths and an enormous, vicious lie in the post.

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Biden's lost cause

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
05 March '10

US Vice President Joseph Biden's job is about to stop being easy. Indeed, it is about to become impossible.

On Monday Biden will arrive in Israel for a three-day visit. Biden, who will meet with Israel's leaders, will be the most senior official in the cavalcade of senior US officials that have descended on Israel in recent weeks. Biden will replace Senator John Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who was here this week. Kerry himself replaced Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was here two weeks ago.

In his press conference in Jerusalem on Monday, Kerry explained the purpose of these visits. As he put it, "...I am here and other people were here and Vice President Biden is coming shortly... to make sure we are all on the same page and that we are all clear about [Iran]."

Although Biden is just the latest senior US official to visit Israel to try to coerce the government not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, his visit is novel in one respect. In addition to his meetings with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of Israel's senior officials, Biden intends to make a case for the Obama administration's policies towards Iran, the Palestinians and Israel directly to the Israeli public. During his trip he will give what is being billed as a major policy speech at Tel Aviv University.

In light of the gaping disparity between the Obama administration's policies and those of the Israeli government, the apparent goal of Biden's address is to shore up the position of the Israeli Left as an alternative to Netanyahu. Apparently, the picture emerging from all of the senior US officials' meetings with Netanyahu is that Israel's leader still feels comfortable defying them. Presumably, they now believe that the only way to force him to toe their line is by making him believe that the price of defiance will be his premiership.

(Read full article)
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Sanctions, shmanctions

Fresnozionism.org
14 February '10

News item:

Visiting U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen declared Sunday that Washington was committed to Israel’s security, voicing concern over the “unintended consequences” a war in the Middle East over Iran’s contentious nuclear program would bring.

“I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences of a strike,” he told reporters during a visit to Tel Aviv, referring to Iran’s threats to retaliate against Israel and U.S. sites in the Gulf. “I think the Iranians are very difficult to predict.”

Translation: he’s worried about Israel’s security so much that he really doesn’t want Israel to attack Iran. This makes little sense. Nobody is more aware than Israel of Iran’s ability to retaliate in many unpleasant ways, and so it’s very likely that it would not take that step unless there was absolutely no alternative. It would only attack if the consequences of not attacking were judged to be worse.

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The U.S. Military Looks at the Middle East: Bows to the White House But Knows Its Mission, Too

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
14 February '10

The Department of Defense has just released its new Quadrennial Defense Review Report for 2010. What does it say about the Middle East? Far less than you’d expect in terms of space but still some extremely important points about what might involve the United States in future wars there.

Aside from some scattered references on the need for more civilian nation-building experts, funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and energy conservation efforts (that's an area, no doubt, where money could be saved), that region takes up less than two pages, about two percent, of the 97-page report.

In comparison, about one-quarter of the four-page note from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, attached to the report, spends 25 percent on the region and sounds far more sensible.

I read this gap as suggesting that the uniformed military (which prepared the admiral's note) is concerned about Iran and terrorist groups but that the text’s main body, by the secretary of defense and designed to please the White House, puts more emphasis on climate change, green energy, and the use of the military as a community-organizing type force to make civilians in places like Afghanistan more friendly to the United States.

But there are significant points of interests in both sections. Let’s start with the report itself which basically makes three points.

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