Romesh Ratnesar writes: The economic case against war is strong. Jitters about instability in the Middle East have caused the price of Brent crude to rise some 9 percent since the beginning of the year. Even a limited conflict with Iran—the second-largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, after Saudi Arabia—would jack up insurance premiums on oil tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf. Iran exports 2.5 million barrels per day, and OPEC lacks the spare capacity to make up for the likely loss of Iranian supply in the event of an attack, according to Robert McNally, president of the Rapidan Group, an energy consulting firm. That’s a formula for an oil shock far more painful than what global consumers are currently experiencing. “What we see now is a market that is very fearful and very tight,” says McNally, a former senior director for international energy at the National Security Council. “In those conditions, it doesn’t take much to send the cost of oil soaring.”
[…]
If the U.S. attacks, “the Iranians might feel they have less to lose” by retaliating aggressively, says Michael Makovsky, foreign policy director of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Tehran might attempt to sabotage oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, launch missiles into Israel, or deploy small attack vessels to harass tankers in the Arabian Sea. The nightmare scenario would be a move by Iran to choke off access to the Strait of Hormuz—most likely by unleashing its stockpile of 2,000 mines—through which as much as 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil travels. The U.S. has warned that such a step would provoke an all-out assault on Iran’s military. Would Tehran take that risk? “If Iran concluded its regime were threatened, it might try to make the conflict as big as possible, as quickly as possible, to bring other powers in to mediate,” says McNally.

An analysis by the Rapidan Group predicts that a targeted airstrike on Iran, followed by a token Iranian response, would cause oil prices to jump $23 a barrel before settling back down. (As of March 6, Brent crude was trading at $122 a barrel.) A more protracted conflict, if it involved even a brief closure of the strait, might cause oil prices to spike by more than $60 a barrel. “It would be the biggest geopolitical disruption in the history of the global oil market,” McNally says. Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup (C), estimates that if oil were to reach $150 a barrel, the U.S. would lose two percentage points in economic growth, enough to turn the nascent recovery into a recession.

The Associated Press reports: Iran’s top leader Thursday welcomed comments by President Barack Obama advocating diplomacy and not war as a solution to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, a rare positive signal in long-standing hostile transactions between Tehran and Washington.

The report on Iran’s state television quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as praising a recent statement by the U.S. president saying he saw a “window of opportunity” to use diplomacy to resolve the nuclear dispute.

Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters in Iran, told a group of clerics: “This expression is a good word. This is a wise remark indicating taking distance from illusion.”

It is one of the rare cases in which Iran’s top leader praised an American leader.

Haaretz reports: Most Israelis believe that if the United States does not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel must no try to do so alone, according to a Haaretz poll.

The Haaretz-Dialog poll, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University on Sunday and Monday during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, also showed that the prime minister’s Likud party would win big in the next election, taking between 35 and 37 seats.

Likud, the rest of the right wing and the ultra-Orthodox parties would get between 71 and 74 mandates. Under such a scenario, only Netanyahu would be able to form a government.

However, Netanyahu, who returned to Israel on Wednesday, is facing a complex political situation.

On the one hand, he and his party seem to be in top political form. On the other, 58 percent of those polled opposed an Israeli strike on Iran, without U.S. backing.

Thus it seems Netanyahu has not convinced those for whom he has been repeatedly threatening Tehran.

AFP reports: An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would only set back Tehran’s programme by a couple of years, the head of a respected London-based think-tank said Wednesday.

International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) head John Chipman said an Israeli attack against Iran was unlikely this year, following US assurances this week to Israel that it would not rule out military action.

Only the United States could conduct a serious campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said.

Furthermore, a pre-emptive Israeli strike could backfire because it is likely to push the Tehran regime to accelerate its nuclear ambitions, warned the IISS director-general at the release of its annual “Military Balance” report.

Western powers suspect Iran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, a charge denied by Tehran which says its atomic programme is for purely civilian purposes.

“My judgment is that an Israeli attack on Iran of an overt kind is unlikely this year,” Chipman told a news conference on the annual assessment of the global military power balance.

“Both Israel and the United States are conscious that Israel can conduct a raid; only the United States can conduct a campaign.

“I think that it’s the latter that would be necessary in order to delay, in any meaningful way, the acquisition of a confirmed Iranian nuclear military capability.

“The judgement of most military experts is that any attack — whether a raid or a campaign — would only delay such acquisition and could, of course, incentivise the regime, once it reorganises itself, to move ever quicker towards that goal.”

Is this a denial or a non-denial that Netanyahu will be supplied with more bunker-busters?

Haaretz reports: President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not discuss in their meetings this week a reported Israeli request for advanced U.S. military technology that could be used against Iran, the White House said on Thursday.

“In meetings the president had there was no such agreement proposed or reached,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters. Obama and Netanyahu meet in the Oval office for two hours on Monday and then had lunch together.

Carney’s comment came after an Israeli official quoted by the Maariv newspaper earlier on Thursday indicated that Israel has asked the United States for advanced “bunker-buster” bombs and refueling planes that could improve its ability to attack Iran’s underground nuclear sites.

On Tuesday, Haaretz quoted a U.S. official as indicating that Netanyahu had asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for the GBU-28 bunker busting bombs as well as for advanced refueling aircraft.

The source added that Obama then instructed Panetta to start work on a request to work directly with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the matter, indicating that the U.S. administration was inclined to look favorably upon the request as soon as possible.

However, Carney’s comments on Thursday seemed to specifically relate to those meetings participated by Obama and Netanyahu, while failing to comment about the content of other lower-level talks.

Robert Malley says that even if President Obama won this week’s argument in his ongoing struggle with Benjamin Netanyahu over how to confront Iran (a struggle that has already stymied any serious diplomacy), Obama appears to have narrowed his options so much that war may eventually be unavoidable.

For now at least, most commentators in the United States and in Israel have handed this round to Obama. He had two overriding objectives: to deflect Israeli pressure to conduct, or acquiesce in, a premature war; and to neutralize Republican criticism that he is too soft on Iran and too hard on Israel. On those fronts, one might say, mission accomplished.

But victory came at a price. In the longer run, Obama’s nuanced view and the arguments he marshaled on behalf of diplomacy may be less significant than the broader narrative in which, in order to prevail, he felt compelled to embed them. More openly than in the past, he took containment of a nuclear-armed Iran off the table — even before any serious discussion of this option has taken place and just as influential U.S. voices had begun making the case for it. More clearly than previously, he recognized Israel’s right to its own decisions; Netanyahu took the bait — or rather, grabbed it with enthusiasm, turning a banal acknowledgment of reality into an implicit license for Israel to unilaterally initiate action that will have broad and possibly dire consequences for all. And, more forcefully than before, Obama committed America to military action to halt Iran if other means fail to do so.

That day of reckoning may have been delayed. But short of a fundamental shift in U.S.-Iranian relations, it looks as though it will yet come. Israelis, not for the first time, likely are exaggerating the Iranian threat and its imminence. Yet they almost certainly are right in one respect: that sanctions could work and nonetheless fail, inflicting harsh economic pain yet incapable of producing a genuine change in Tehran’s calculus. There is no evidence that Iran’s leadership will yield to economic hardship; the outlook of its Supreme Leader rests on the core principle that the only thing more dangerous than experiencing pressure is surrendering to it. Seen through the regime’s eyes, such stubbornness is easy to understand. From its perspective, measures taken by its foes, including attacks on its territory, bolstering the arsenal of its Gulf enemies, and economic warfare, have a single purpose: namely, to topple the Islamic Republic. Under such conditions, why would the regime volunteer a concession that arguably would leave it weaker in a hostile environment? Even as he fought off the prospect of an imminent confrontation, Obama might therefore have bought himself — or his eventual successor — one down the road. For if and when sanctions fail, what alternative will there be to turn to?

Paul Pillar writes: Those in the United States who genuinely yearn for war are still a neoconservative minority. But the danger that war might break out—and that the hawks will get their way—has nonetheless become substantial. The U.S. has just withdrawn the last troops from one Middle Eastern country where it fought a highly costly war of choice with a rationale involving weapons of mass destruction. Now we find ourselves on the precipice of yet another such war—almost purely because the acceptable range of opinion on Iran has narrowed and ossified around the “sensible” idea that all options must be pursued to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Given the momentousness of such an endeavor and how much prominence the Iranian nuclear issue has been given, one might think that talk about exercising the military option would be backed up by extensive analysis of the threat in question and the different ways of responding to it. But it isn’t. Strip away the bellicosity and political rhetoric, and what one finds is not rigorous analysis but a mixture of fear, fanciful speculation, and crude stereotyping. There are indeed good reasons to oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, and likewise many steps the United States and the international community can and should take to try to avoid that eventuality. But an Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful, and far more costly, than most people imagine.

What difference would it make to Iran’s behavior and influence if the country had a bomb? Even among those who believe that war with the Islamic Republic would be a bad idea, this question has been subjected to precious little careful analysis. The notion that a nuclear weapon would turn Iran into a significantly more dangerous actor that would imperil U.S. interests has become conventional wisdom, and it gets repeated so often by so many diverse commentators that it seldom, if ever, is questioned. Hardly anyone debating policy on Iran asks exactly why a nuclear-armed Iran would be so dangerous. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has accused Republican presidential candidates of casually “beating the drums of war” over Iran without having the political courage to directly advocate a military attack or considering the human cost of battle.

In his first press conference of the year on Tuesday, Obama turned on the Republican politicians who for days have been accusing him of weakness and naiveté over Iran, ramped up by the visit of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and a meeting of the US’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby group.

The president said his policy of sanctions has united much of the international community to pressure Iran and that “we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically”.

“That’s my track record. Now, what’s said on the campaign trail – those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not commander-in-chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war,” he said.

“I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy. This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it.”

Aluf Benn writes: In his speech to the AIPAC conference Monday night Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved closer than ever to the point of no return en route to war with Iran.

Netanyahu compared Iran to Nazi Germany, its nuclear facilities to death camps, and his current trip to the White House to a desperate plea to former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt by the U.S. Jewish community to bomb Auschwitz.

The request, as Netanyahu told a sympathetic AIPAC crowd, was denied, using justifications similar to those used today by those who object to a military strike against Iran.

“Israel has patiently waited for the international community to resolve this issue. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work, we’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer,” Netanyahu warned, adding that, as Israeli premier, he would “never let Israel live under the shadow of annihilation.”

It was the same reason former Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981: preventing the possibility that Jewish children would face the peril of another Holocaust. Now it’s the turn of his successor, Netanyahu, to remove the danger hovering over the heads of Jewish children.

Netanyahu was in the habit of comparing the Iranian nuclear threat to the Holocaust back when he was opposition leader, claiming that the western powers were not doing enough to thwart it. But, since coming back to power, three years ago, he has refrained from making these kinds of statements, opting for a vaguer rhetoric and asking his ministers to keep the fervor down. That vagueness dissipated on Monday. In his speech to AIPAC, coming mere hours after his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House, Netanyahu escalated the tone, both in his reference to a clock that was running out, and in his expressed disappointment from U.S.-led diplomatic sanctions.

The Holocaust talk has but one meaning: they force Israel to go to war and strike the Iranians. The justifications against an attack, weighty as those may be, turn to fumes when put up against the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. No calculus of missiles falling on Tel Aviv, rising oil prices and economic crisis can hold water when compared to genocide. If that’s the situation, the option of sitting quietly, expecting the “world” to neutralize Iran, or of a stable balance of terror, becomes nonexistent. If Netanyahu doesn’t act and Iran achieves nuclear weapons capabilities, he’ll go down in history as a pathetic loud mouth. As a poor man’s Churchill.

But Netanyahu booby-trapped himself back when he was still making his way to Washington, when he presented Iran with a public ultimatum: dismantle the underground enrichment facility near Qom, cease all enrichment activity, and remove the medium-grade uranium from Iranian territory. He realizes that the Iranian government will never agree to those terms, which seems more like setting up a casus belli that a reasonable diplomatic demand. But Netanyahu’s Holocaust speech at the AIPAC conference went much further than that.

Obama asked Netanyahu to avoid inflammatory statements in regards to Iran, to keep gas prices down in America’s gas station. It’s an important issue when trying to rebuild the American economy as well as, of course, his reelection bid. And while Obama’s thinking may seem reasonable, he’s living in an entirely different world than that of Israel’s prime minister. From the White House, Iran looks like a strategic problem, not as a Holocaust. Thus, time isn’t of the essence, and diplomacy and sanctions should still be given a chance. Netanyahu is motivated by other things.

It’s possible to detect enough loopholes that would allow Netanyahu to escape an imminent decision to go to war. Netanyahu has a political interest to aid his Republican friends against Obama, so his statement that “there wasn’t a decision to attack” seems more like an attempt to stir things up ahead of the U.S. presidential elections than a command to Israel Air Force units. There are those who believe he’s just a second-guessing coward who would never take it upon himself to initiate a war. It could be that all those interpretations are true. Nevertheless, Netanyahu took on a public obligation on Monday that would make it very hard for him to back away from the path of war with Iran.

The Guardian reports: Hamas will not do Iran’s bidding in any war with Israel, according to senior figures within the militant Islamic group.

“If there is a war between two powers, Hamas will not be part of such a war,” Salah Bardawil, a member of the organisation’s political bureau in Gaza City, told the Guardian.

He denied the group would launch rockets into Israel at Tehran’s request in response to a strike on its nuclear sites. “Hamas is not part of military alliances in the region,” said Bardawil. “Our strategy is to defend our rights”

The stance underscores Hamas’s rift with its key financial sponsor and its realignment with the Muslim Brotherhood and popular protest movements in the Arab world.

Bardawil’s words were echoed by a second senior Hamas figure, who declined to be named. Hamas, he said, “would not get involved” in any war between Iran and Israel.

The Daily Beast reports: Benjamin Netanyahu, in Washington today, is laying more political groundwork for a possible preemptive Israeli airstrike against Iran’s nuclear sites.

But as Netanyahu rallies his American supporters and discourages diplomatic engagement with Tehran, some intelligence officials and Iran experts tell The Daily Beast that an Israeli attack may be exactly what Tehran’s most hard-line leaders have been trying to provoke.

Marty Martin, a former senior officer in the CIA, ran the unit that hunted Al Qaeda terrorists from 2002 to 2004. Iran’s most militant leaders “are goading the Israelis,” he tells The Daily Beast, “because a bombing will help them put their internal problems aside.”

Martin, who spent most of his 25-year career at the CIA in the Middle East, argues that some clerics and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, confronted with a discontented and restless population, are looking for ways to solidify public support. “The way they see it, if Israel bombs them it relieves the internal pressure,” says Martin. “Amid this turmoil, its always good to have an outside enemy.”

Iran’s internal troubles include a 12 percent unemployment rate, a shattered economy (due in part to international sanctions), resentment over the oppressive regime, and widespread disgust over corruption.

Martin, who retired from the agency in 2007, now works as an independent consultant. He was prominent inside the agency not just for his leadership against Al Qaeda but also for his expertise on the Middle East: his Louisiana drawl disguises the fact that he speaks fluent Arabic.

“If you are an Iranian,” he says, “there is actually a benefit to an Israel strike—an Israel strike which won’t be successful completely militarily, but will be successful for saying ‘game on’!”

Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, agrees, though he emphasizes that only part of the Iranian leadership is likely plotting this way. “It’s quite rational,” he said, “from the perspective of the specific elements in the regime that believe it would work to their political advantage.” Pillar, who spent 28 years at the CIA, is now a professor at Georgetown University. “I strongly believe that the net political effect of an attack would be to help the hardliners,” he says.

Robert Naiman writes: A funny thing happened on the way to the Showdown at the AIPAC Corral, where pro-war Republicans and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu have been planning to ambush President Obama with charges of being “soft on Iran” because US military commanders have said that an Israeli military attack on Iran would be a very bad idea.

Someone asked the Israeli public what they thought.

And it turns out that the majority of Israelis have their shekels on the lanky guy from Chicago.

In a poll conducted this month by Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland and Israel’s Dahaf Institute, only 19 percent of Israelis said they would support an Israeli military attack on Iran if it is not approved by the US.

But that’s not even the most striking result of the poll.

The poll suggests that the reason that the majority of Israelis don’t support an Israeli military strike on Iran without US approval is not because they are afraid of making the US angry. The poll suggests that the reason that the majority of Israelis do not support an Israeli military strike on Iran without US approval is that they share the cautions of US officials against an Israeli strike on Iran: they think that the costs would be high, and the benefits small or nonexistent.

That is, they see the assessments of US officials of the dubious merits of an Israeli strike as good data – better data than they are getting from Prime Minister Netanyahu.

A majority of Israelis think an Israeli war with Iran would last months or years. Two-thirds think Hizbullah would join Iran in retaliating against Israel. As many Israelis think an Israeli military strike would strengthen Iran’s government as think it would weaken it. A slim majority think an Israeli strike would delay Iran’s nuclear program by more than a year; nearly a third think it would have no effect on Iran’s nuclear program or even accelerate it.