[Marxism] Iran war drums are rolling again -

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think Robert Dreyfuss is wrong to think that differences are
widening between the US and Israel. I suspect he is right that Obama and the
real core of his team, probably including Hilary Clinton (she is definitely
an America Firster, not an Israeli Firster), favor more pressure on Israel.
But can they shift position sufficiently and soon enough to prevent Israel
from feeling able to attack Iran with a guarantee of US support if anything
goes wrong.

That is the issue. It seems to me that to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran,
Washington needs to be able to say two things. If Iran proves capable of
responding to Israeli attacks with successful rocket attacks on Israel
(given the historic weakness of Middle Eastern states, no one can know that
this will happen -- plus when Washington intervened against Iran to save
Saddam in the war with Iraq in 1988, the Iranian air force did not make an
impressive showing. But Israel is clearly worried about this and wants US
guarantees of backup if anything goes wrong. Can Washington say no?

Secondly, if Israel takes substantial losses in the war, will Washington
guarantee to make them up with more added on to make a new war possible. If
Washington can say a firm no in advance, Israel  will not be able to launch
the war.

Of course there is another question: Is Israel bluffing about launching a
war against Iran without the prior direct approval and support of
Washington. 

By bluffing fiercely, they may hope to gain the guarantees that will make it
possible to wage a war that would otherwise actually be impossible for them.
(A serious war against Iraq -- especially with the destruction of their
industrial -- including nuclear -- requires substantial support (albeit
perhaps passive in the first days).

I see no sign that the US government is anywhere near being able to give a
firm no the the challenges Israel is raising.

So I proceed on my usual assumption, that an attack on Iran which, as a
relatively independent state produced by a national revolution and PARTIAL
counterrevolution that was not rooted in imperialist domination in the way
that the resoration of the shah was, must be treated as a live possibility
and must be campaigned against energetically by the left. Perhaps this will
turn out to be a false alarm. This is possible. 

As Abrahamian pointed out in my post on why the Islamic Republic has
survived, here are things about Iran that make it quite possible that an
attack on Iran, by Israel alone or even with open US support, will prove
impossible, or far from decision in practice.

Abrahamian in "Why the Islamic Republic has Survived" is mclearly no
enthusiast of the regime, despite Louis' efforts to paint him and me
(because we notice things that are apparently not supposed to be noticed by
REAL opponents of the mullahs), as abject apologists. In my case, he
attempts to pass off my contribution as an expression of support for the
Iranian model against the Cuban, and for capitalism against socialism. Well,
any stick is good enough to beat a dirty dog with.

In the service of this jihad, he tries to sell the substantial (for
semicolonial capitalist countries) social wage in Iran as simply charity
from priests for powerless working class and peasant beggars.

At any rate, I have hopes that the prospect of this war threatened directly
by Israel, but still based on the assumption that Washington can be pulled
along, can be avoided.  But I think we should fight on the line that this
will not be resolved with diplomacy but in battle.
Fred Feldman


Obama Rebuffs Israeli Hawk 
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 03/17/2009 @ 09:36am


There are very worrying signs about Israel and Iran, amid new threats from
Israeli officials that they won't long tolerate Iran's nuclear program
before they strike militarily. But, at the same time, there are reports that
President Obama's national security team isn't buying the Israeli line that
time is running out. 

For instance, a top Israeli military official, in Washington, was not
exactly given the red carpet treatment by Obama's top officials -- yet even
so, he met Jim Jones, Obama's national security adviser, Hillary Clinton,
and Dennis Ross. 

The Israeli armed forces chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, met yesterday with
top US officials in Washington, including General James Jones, the national
security adviser, and Dennis Ross, the State Department's special adviser on
"the Gulf and Southwest Asia," and he warned that Israel is preparing for a
military strike on Iran. According to Haaretz, the Israeli daily: 


Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on Monday said that
while Israel was interested in exhausting diplomatic options against Iran's
nuclear program, the army must nevertheless prepare itself for a military
attack. ... 

During a visit to Washington, D.C., Ashkenazi met with Dennis Ross, the
designated U.S. envoy to the Persian Gulf, and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton to discuss the Iranian issue. The IDF chief told Ross that Israel
would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. He said that a diplomatic approach to
Iran's contentious nuclear program must be taken first, but said Israel must
also prepare for other possibilities.


It's interesting that he met Ross, the hawkish former official of the
pro-Israel thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs, who's
taken over the Iran file at the State Department. 

Meanwhile, the still-in-formation government of Bibi Netanyahu, Israel's
uber-hawk, has made some important appointments that relate to Iran, too. 

First, Netanyahu has reached an agreement with Avigdor Lieberman, the
far-right, anti-Arab hardliner, who will become Israel's foreign minister.
According to the Jerusalem Post, which obtained a copy of the
Netanyahu-Lieberman agreement, Lieberman will be given a big stake in
Israel's Iran policy: 


The coalition agreement that the Likud signed with Israel Beiteinu at 1 a.m.
on Monday not only makes party leader Avigdor Lieberman foreign minister, it
also puts him in charge of Israel's strategic dialogue with the United
States on issues such as Iran, according to a draft of the deal obtained by
the Jerusalem Post. 

The joint American-Israel strategic dialogue committee is where key
decisions are made regarding both countries' policies toward the emerging
nuclear threat, and on other key strategic issues in meetings twice a year. 

The committee's work is so sensitive that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
appointed Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former IDF chief of General
Staff, to head Israel's delegation rather than Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni,
because she is a novice on military matters. 


Notably, Lieberman was given the post of "minister of strategic affairs" in
2006 by Prime Minister Olmert, in which he had responsibility chiefly for
the question of the Iranian threat to Israel. At the time, an official of
the Labor Party, Ophir Paz-Pines, citing Lieberman's radical views on Iran,
said: "A minister of strategic affairs is a joke. Lieberman is himself a
strategic threat." 

The second important appointment is that of Uzi Arad, who will become
Netanyahu's national security adviser. Arad, a long-time member of the
Mossad, Israel's spy agency, was also mixed up in the spy scandal that
involved two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committe, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, and a Pentagon official, Larry
Franklin. (Rosen, who was charged with leaking classified information in the
scandal, is the blogger who led the onslaught that killed the appointment of
Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council.) The center of that
scandal involving Franklin's alleged passing of secret US plans about Iran
to officials from AIPAC and the Israeli embassy. 

According to the Washington Times, for the past two years the US government
has barred Arad from entering the United States, citing the "espionage and
sabotage" provisions of the immigration laws. Reports Eli Lake: 


Uzi Arad, who is expected to serve as national security adviser in the next
Israeli government, has been barred from entering the United States for
nearly two years on the grounds that he is an intelligence risk. 

Mr. Arad, a former member and director of intelligence for the Mossad,
Israel's spy service, is mentioned in the indictment of Lawrence Franklin, a
former Pentagon analyst who pleaded guilty in 2005 to providing classified
information about Iran in a conversation with two employees of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). ... 

Mr. Arad was a member of the Mossad spy service from 1975 to 1997. After
retiring, he became Mr. Netanyahu's foreign policy adviser. While in the
Mossad, Mr. Arad worked mainly on analysis, but he also served as a liaison
for intelligence operations with allied services such as the CIA. 


According to one report, visiting General Ashkenazi didn't exactly find the
welcome mat rolled out for him: 


Last year, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi had no problem
setting up meetings with top officials in the U.S. government. 

On his current trip to Washington, Ashkenazi sought to meet the
administration of President Barack Obama, but most officials were
unavailable. 

Diplomatic sources said Ashkenazi failed to obtain access to any Cabinet
member, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The Israeli military
chief, who sought to discuss the Iranian nuclear threat, won't even meet his
counterpart, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.


"The administration is sending a very clear message to Israel, and this is
we want to talk about Palestine and not Iran," a diplomat who has been
following U.S.-Israel relations said. 

On March 12, Ashkenazi left for a five-day visit to the United States meant
to lobby the Obama administration to abandon the planned U.S. dialogue with
Iran. Ashkenazi, scheduled to meet with the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee, was expected to have brought new Israeli intelligence on Iran's
nuclear weapons and missile programs. But the diplomatic sources said the
administration made it clear that nobody in a policy-making position was
available to sit with Ashkenazi. This included the president, Vice President
Joseph Biden, Gates, National Intelligence director Dennis Blair or Mullen. 

Ashkenazi has obtained a meeting with National Security Advisor James Jones.
But the sources said the meeting would focus on U.S. demands for Israel to
ease military restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  

The Israeli chief of staff has also scheduled a session with Dennis Ross,
the special adviser on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But the
sources said Ross was not regarded as being in a policy-making role. 

The diplomatic sources said the White House and the senior echelon of the
Obama administration have refused a dialogue with Israel on the Iranian
threat. They said Ms. Clinton, during her visit to Israel, was largely
silent during briefings by Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear and
missile programs.


The slap at Ross, in the above report, that he is "not regarded as being in
a policy-making role." and the report that Clinton "was largely silent"
while Israeli officials harangued her about Iran, is a good sign. 

If this latter report is true, it means that, so far, Obama and his team are
standing strong against Israel's attempts to elevate the Iran problem to the
level of a crisis. The real crisis, of course, is not Iran but Israel's
refusal to talk seriously about a deal with the Palestinian



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu