The New Middle East (42 page)

The collective wisdom of many political commentators after both the cartoon bomb and the nuclear duck was that he had made a fool of himself. He certainly excited enough spoofs. And yet Netanyahu is no fool. If his political instincts let him down on these days it was because there is within him a genuinely stronger instinct, which is ‘that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to the state of Israel’.

‘He sees his place in history to defend Israel and the Jewish people from Iran,’ a Western diplomat who has had regular contact with Netanyahu told me after the cartoon episode. ‘Iran is this generation’s Hitler, and if he has been put in the job for a purpose that’s it. The Palestinian issue is an issue he has to deal with because the Americans and the Europeans are on his back about it, but he doesn’t have any sense of historical destiny for himself as the man who made peace with the Palestinians.’

Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran, and European fears that he might go it alone, were used by the Obama administration in the first term to push the EU towards tougher and tougher sanctions. In fact the Israeli prime minister didn’t want to go it alone, because Israel could not do the job all by itself. The best it could do, a senior member of the Israeli government told me, was ‘delay it by five years’ by destroying what he described as the ‘pinch points’ in the nuclear programme. Not being able to finish the job is why they wanted the Americans on board, because only the US has bombs big enough to destroy places like the heavily fortified uranium enrichment site of Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, no matter how deep down it is buried.

The Americans would not give those bombs to Israel. The US did not believe the threat was imminent, and Netanyahu had for years been in danger of being seen to cry wolf. He said as far back as 1992, when he was just a parliamentarian, that Iran was three to five years away from making a bomb and that the threat must be ‘uprooted by an international front headed by the US’.
⁷⁶

A nuclear Iran is a key concern for the Americans, and there is a sense in the State Department that one way or another Obama’s second term will be the period when the issue is conclusively dealt with. Aside from the threat to Israel, a nuclear Iran would kick-start a nuclear arms race throughout the region. But the clocks counting down to the decisive moment when action needs to be taken have always been out of sync between Washington and Jerusalem. They have also been out of sync between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the city where the Israeli military has its headquarters.

‘Where does Israel’s security stand now in the New Middle East?’ I asked one of Israel’s most senior men in uniform.

‘May fourteenth 1948 was much tougher,’ he said.

My father fought in ’48 and he told me once that my generation can’t even think about the sense of the crisis they felt at the prospect of losing even a battle. Nowadays if you lose a battle, OK the IDF will send two more battalions or two more F16s in order to help you. When they fought in ’48 they knew if they lost the battle they might lose the state. So we are not in that situation anymore. June fifth 1967 was two or three armies, October 1973 was much tougher. So from that perspective we are in quite good times right now. Of course there is the Iranian nuclear issue, which is a little bit different.

‘So you are not facing an existential threat from anybody at the moment?’ I asked.

‘No, except the Iranian issue, but we should keep it in proportion,’ he replied.

In the same building but at another time a senior Israeli intelligence official told me sanctions ‘can do the work’. And sanctions have crippled the Iranian economy
.

In fact all the senior Israelis in both the military and intelligence services that I have spoken to believe that sanctions and the regular mysterious deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists are more effective than Israel going it alone on a bombing run.

There has been a ban on US officials engaging or conspiring in political assassinations since the mid-1970s. There is no such ban in Israel. Its officials don’t publicly admit that it is behind the regular killings of the scientists, but privately they are willing to drop hints. ‘There is a clandestine war, there is an operational war,’ a senior defence official told me. ‘I don’t want to go into details but you can read about it in the papers, you don’t need me to explain, and if you do I can’t tell you.’ Then he added: ‘About Iran, I prefer the Syrian model. Allegedly, according to foreign sources, we destroyed the Syrian nuclear project with North Korea in five minutes. That’s it! We never proved we did and do you know why? Because if we had it would have dragged Syria into a retaliation because it’s a matter of Arab honour.’ He was referring to the attack in 2007, whose target has never been publicly acknowledged by either side, on Syria’s nuclear weapons programme at the al-Kibar plant.

And when it came to dealing with Iran, Israel and America had also developed something much more sophisticated than using speeding motorbikes to stick bombs on car doors in Tehran. It was codenamed ‘Olympic Games’, but when it broke out into the public domain it was dubbed Stuxnet.

The cyber worm was designed to attack the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment plant before the scientists even knew what was going on. It was partly designed and tested by the Americans using centrifuges turned over by Colonel Gaddafi after he gave up his own nuclear weapons programme in 2003, which were similar to those being used by the Iranians.
⁷⁷
The Israelis were brought into the plan because of their own technical expertise and their capacity to gather and use intelligence in ways America could not. By the time it was discovered, Stuxnet was estimated to have put back the Iranian nuclear programme somewhere between one and three years. What it didn’t slow was the spat with the Netanyahu administration over when it was time to bomb.

But if Obama was fed up with listening to Netanyahu and his then defence minister Ehud Barak going on about Iran, so too were some of the military leadership in Israel. Time and again after the two men made public professions of doom they were undermined by leaks which said that their military officials did not share their urgency.

In the end they started to deal with their internal troublemakers, but that just ended up embarrassing the government even more. In May 2011 Meir Dagan, the recently retired head of the Israeli foreign espionage agency Mossad, described carrying out an attack on Iran as ‘the stupidest thing I have ever heard’.
⁷⁸
In April 2012 it was the turn of Yuval Diskin, the recently retired head of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. He said: ‘I don’t believe in the prime minister or the defense minister. I really don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings.’
⁷⁹
Then he chose the final few weeks of the 2013 Israeli election campaign to damn them again on the issue: ‘Unfortunately, my feeling, and many others in the defense establishment share it, is that in the case of Netanyahu and Barak, the personal, opportunistic interests came first.’
⁸⁰
The PM’s office said in response that he was just bitter about not being appointed head of Mossad.

President Obama has now told the Israeli people to their face that he will not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. ‘This is not a danger that can be contained,’ he said. ‘And as president, I’ve said all options are on the table for achieving our objectives.’ What remained ambiguous was how close to a nuclear weapon America would allow Iran to get. Could the Iranians remain immune from attack if they had all the parts for a bomb but stopped short of screwing them together?

As one of Netanyahu’s aides pointed out to me over lunch, 2012 was frustrating for Netanyahu because from his point of view it was a great year to have attacked Iran. Hamas had shifted sponsors and so would not necessarily fire what rockets it had left into Israel in response. Hezbollah might not have wanted to use up its precious arsenal, because with the civil war raging next door arms might prove difficult to replace. The Arab public were contemptuous of Iran and were unlikely to rally around after Tehran had tried to climb on their revolutionary bandwagon with all the hypocrisy it could muster. There was inevitably also going to be pressure from the US to see how the events surrounding the 2013 Iranian presidential elections changed the dynamic. And now Netanyahu has lost his co-cheerleader over the issue, Ehud Barak, who has left politics. He’s been replaced as defence minister by Moshe ‘Boogie’ Ya’alon. He is a hardliner on the Palestinian issue but much less of a hawk over Iran. Netanyahu had to row back during his own spring 2013 deadline for action against Iran, saying: ‘If Iran decides to go for a nuclear weapon, that is, to actually manufacture the weapon, then . . . it would take them about a year.’
⁸¹

The US will want to test out the new political leadership that emerges in Iran before it bombs them. Obama made that clear in his second inaugural address when he returned to the theme announced at the beginning of his first term: engagement with friend and foe alike. ‘Enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war . . . We are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war; who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends – and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.’
⁸²

In principle most Iranians support their nation’s right to nuclear power, though they may not believe it is worth the suffering currently being inflicted upon them by sanctions. But what the liberal middle classes in Tehran want more is a way out from under the oppressive rule of the mullahs, because, in the long run, the way Iran is governed means that the outcome of Iranian elections is often more about style than substance. Ahmadinejad did try though to take control, and for a period it looked as if he really might manage it, but he ended his period in office beaten and humiliated by Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei. He sank so low he was at one stage even being accused by al-Qaeda of spreading ‘ridiculous conspiracy theories’.
⁸³

Khamenei is still Iran’s most powerful figure, and it is he, not the elected leadership, that will call the shots. The supreme leader appoints the heads of the judiciary, the military, the state broadcasters and six of the twelve members of the powerful Guardian Council that supervises all elections and decides who is suitable to even stand. Ayatollah Khamenei has stated that ‘we are not seeking nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic of Iran considers possession of nuclear weapons a sin . . . and believes that holding such weapons is useless, harmful and dangerous’.
⁸⁴
The governments in the West and parts of the Middle East say he is lying. But their accusations are weakened by the fact that they were wrong on the same issue in neighbouring Iraq. The regime there did not have weapons of mass destruction, despite elaborate Western claims to the contrary.

Are the Iranians using the Western intelligence failures in Iraq as a smokescreen to cover their own ambitions? There is the real possibility that Ayatollah Khamenei may be saying he doesn’t want a nuclear weapon when he really does. He could always say after the fact that he was mistranslated. His government has already shown some skill in the art of sophistry. And its position after the Arab Spring revolts is certainly more vulnerable.

The Arab uprisings left Shia Iran in a bit of a bind. They hated the old Arab dictators like Mubarak because they were tied to the West. However, the way these men were turfed out was a little too close to home. And their Sunni Islamist replacements were not much friendlier either.

In August 2012 it was Iran’s turn to host the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, one of the final relics of the Cold War era. The last three chairmen of NAM had been Egyptian, because Egypt had held the chair since the last summit meeting in Cairo in 2009, and since then it had had three heads of state: Mubarak, Tantawi and then Morsi. The chair was being passed to Tehran, but the new Egyptian president at his first grand event on the world stage clearly meant his country’s tenure to end with a flourish. Iran and Egypt have not had full diplomatic ties since Sadat signed his peace deal with Israel. This was the first visit by an Egyptian leader since the 1979 Iranian revolution. In terms of drama it was worth the wait. By going to Iran despite US attempts to diplomatically isolate the country, Morsi was showing an independent streak. But he soon wiped the smiles off the Iranians’ faces. With their leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sitting at his side, Mohamed Morsi tore into the host nation’s closest ally, Syria: ‘We should all express our full support for the struggle of those who are demanding freedom and justice in Syria and translate our sympathies into a clear political vision that supports peaceful transfer [of power] to a democratic system.’ The world, he said, had a ‘moral duty’ to support the opposition ‘against an oppressive regime that has lost its legitimacy’.
⁸⁵

The Syrian delegation walked out. The Iranian delegation couldn’t walk out because it was their conference, so they had to sit and listen.

Iranian TV had a problem. It was the opening speech of the summit, they couldn’t just ignore it in their reports. So they mistranslated it instead and changed the word ‘Syria’ to ‘Bahrain’.
⁸⁶