6/17/09

By Aluf Benn

The prize for this week's most stupid remark has to go to the officials,
officers and experts who described Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the candidate Israel prefers to win the election in Iran, and were even happy he did. It is hard to think of a more blatant manifestation of the narrow horizons of Israeli strategic thinking.

The claim of pro-Ahmadinejad Israelis goes like this: The president in Iran is a puppet of the real powers - the religious leaders, led by Ayatollah Khamenei. Iran's nuclear plans have advanced and will continue no matter who is president and what that person's positions are.
Therefore, it is better for us that Iran's most prominent spokesperson
to be a Holocaust-denier who threatens to destroy Israel; that way it
will be easier to garner support from around the world for pressure on Iran.

To understand how baseless this approach is, it is enough to look at
what has happened over the four years of Ahmadinejad's rule. The Iranian
nuclear project has crossed the "technological threshold" and reached
the capability to independently manufacture enriched uranium without
really being bothered from abroad except for hollow sanctions. During
this period, Israel enjoyed a loving relationship with the Bush
administration and a reasonable relationship with Europe, yet did not
manage to get the international community on board to stop the
centrifuges in Natanz. Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran's allies, armed
themselves uninterrupted.

Israeli PR ostensibly had an easy job. All it had to do was distribute
Ahmadinejad's hate-filled speeches and harvest the fruit. But it
achieved nothing. The bizarre initiative, which enjoyed Benjamin
Netanyahu's support, of putting Iran's president on trial in The Hague
for incitement to genocide, got no attention. No one in the world
accepted the argument that Iran is Nazi Germany and Israel is
Czechoslovakia, and the year is 1938. Bush, the friendly president who
gave Israel a green light in Lebanon and Gaza and to bomb Syria, did not
allow Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Barack Obama is specifically demanding that Israel does not attack, and
that it does not spring any surprises on the United States. The
presentation of Ahmadinejad as Hitler and Iran as a police state a la
"1984" ignores the internal pressure in Iran for greater democracy and
openness. Those who see Iran only through its centrifuges will also find
it hard to understand and accept the Obama approach, which seeks
dialogue with Tehran's rulers and smiles at the Muslim world. To the
Israeli establishment this amounts to kowtowing to the neighborhood bully.

Less than two weeks after his Cairo speech, Obama has reasons to smile:
Hezbollah lost the election in Lebanon and in Tehran, hundreds of
thousands have taken to the streets to protest election fraud and
support the reformist Mousavi. The demonstrations forced the Guardian
Council, headed by Khamenei, to announce an investigation and a recount
of some of the ballot boxes; that is, to sacrifice Ahmadinejad in an
attempt to save themselves from the irate masses. It is difficult to
imagine such an outcome in Hitler's Germany.

Obama was right not to intervene. He did not accept the results of the
election but he did not publicly declare support for the protesters.
Thus he gave the reformists room, without seeming to be pulling the
strings from afar. It is too early to tell how events will pan out in
Tehran, if the regime will really mellow, but the demonstrations offer a
chance of change in Iran for the first time in 30 years.

It is also clear that "the world" has come to terms with Iran being a
"nuclear-bomb threshold" power which possesses the technology but not
the actual bomb. The world may will also come to terms with an Iranian
bomb. Israel will have difficulty bombing Iran with Obama against it,
and may even be too late. Under such circumstances, it would be best for
Israel if there were people in the Iranian leadership who could calm
things down in the region, not stir up strife.

Netanyahu has internalized the strategic change that Obama generated. He
quickly responded to the Cairo speech with agreement to a Palestinian
state, and also changed his public position on Iran: Instead of
threatening war and talking about the Holocaust, he returned to Ariel
Sharon and Ehud Olmert's approach that the problem is international and
not only Israel's. Perhaps after meeting Obama, Netanyahu understands
the reality better than his officers and his officials.