When Defence Secretary
Leon Panetta told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius this week that he
believes Israel was likely to attack Iran between April and June, it was
ostensibly yet another expression of alarm at the Israeli government's threats
of military action.
But even though the administration is undoubtedly concerned
about that Israeli threat, the Panetta leak had a different objective. The
White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that
Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure
on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on
its nuclear programme in the coming months.
The real aim of the leak brings into sharper focus a
contradiction in the Barack Obama administration's Iran policy between its
effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its
desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on
Iran.
The Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously
Obama's effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli
attack. It seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen.
Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the
United States would not come to Israel's defence if it launched a unilateral
attack on Iran, as IPS reported Feb. 1.
A tell-tale indication of Panetta's real intention was his
very specific mention of the period from April through June as the likely time
frame for an Israeli attack. Panetta suggested that the reason was that Israeli
Defence Minister Ehud Barak had identified this as the crucial period in which
Iran would have entered a so-called "zone of immunity" – the
successful movement of some unknown proportion of Iran's uranium enrichment
assets to the highly protected Fordow enrichment plant.
But Barak had actually said in an interview last November
that he "couldn't predict" whether that point would be reached in
"two quarters or three quarters or a year".
Why, then, would Panetta deliberately specify the second
quarter as the time frame for an Israeli attack? The |