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From The Sunday TimesMarch 29, 2009

US tries to defuse a ticking timebombMartin Ivens in Jerusalem

All eyes will be on Barack Obama at the G20 summit this week. Among
the great and good, the dull and dreary, in London’s Docklands he will
be the only superstar. But the young president knows that what is
decided inside a gleaming tower block in Tel Aviv will have more
bearing on whether his presidency is accounted a success or failure
than this talking shop.

High in the defence ministry building Major-General Amos Gilad points
to a photograph on his wall of three Israeli F-15 jets flying over the
site of Auschwitz. “I put it here to remind us of what happened and
what may happen,” says the old fire-eater. The press claims he has
been the real leader of the state for the past six months while the
politicians have been out wooing the voters.

On his shelves one book holds pride of place. It is a story written in
childhood by Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped almost three
years ago by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza
strip. As Israel’s security and foreign policy chief, Gilad has been
negotiating for Shalit’s release. He is prepared to free hundreds of
Palestinian prisoners to secure the return of one soldier. The
Hollywood myth of Saving Private Ryan is national policy here.

The spectre of an Iranian nuclear bomb is also never far from Gilad’s
thoughts. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic republic’s Holocaust-
denying president, has called for Israel to be wiped from the map.
Iran funds and arms Israel’s enemies to its immediate north and south:
Hezbollah, the armed Shi’ite movement that dominates southern Lebanon,
and Hamas in Gaza.

The clock is ticking on the clandestine Iranian nuclear programme.
Despite a series of United Nations security council resolutions and
mild western sanctions, the process of uranium enrichment to make a
bomb will soon be complete. The experts do not agree when that day
will come — any time between nine months and three years is suggested
– but come it will.

Whatever Iran’s ultimate intentions, the Arab neighbourhood is as
nervous as Israel of an Iranian bomb. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Algeria and non-Arab Turkey could swiftly join a nuclear arms race .
They fear Iran’s revolutionary support for Shi’ite populations in the
region and its traditional ambitions in the Gulf as heir to Persian
imperialism. So far the Arab nations have been able to live with a
balance of terror next door between India and Pakistan. Israel’s own
nuclear arsenal is unwelcome but tolerable as it has not threatened
their internal stability.

The danger to the rest of the world will be that the nuclear non-
proliferation treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, will be in ruins.
The old hopes of atoms for peace will become atoms for war as unlovely
regimes everywhere reach for the nuclear trigger. The doctrine of
mutually assured destruction (Mad) kept the United States and the
Soviet Union from blowing us all up and making the rubble bounce.
Whether Mad works among multiple hostile powers has never been put to
the test. It’s an experiment we can do without. The crazy regime of
nuclear-armed North Korea has already rattled its neighbours to
breaking point.

The Americans have ruled out a pre-emptive strike on Iran for now but
the Israeli air force has been on manoeuvres, conducting dummy bombing
runs as far afield as the Strait of Gibraltar. Such a course would be
militarily hazardous – “it’s at the very outer limit of our
capabilities” says a security source – and, because of the distance to
the target and the dispersal of the Iranian nuclear programme, even a
successful hit might only postpone the evil day.

Few Israeli politicians show any appetite for such a mission. They
would far rather work with the United States and their European
friends to stop it. Gilad, however, muses: “To delay the Iranian bomb
is not a bad idea.” As for the dangers, “in 1981 our intelligence
agencies also advised against a strike on Iraq”. That was when Saddam
Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak was levelled by an Israeli bombing
raid. (I am meeting Gilad on a trip arranged by the British Israel
Communications and Research Centre. The sabre-rattling is for my
benefit.)

George Bush refused to give the nod to an Israeli raid on Iran,
because retaliation against targets in Iraq, the Gulf and the West as
well as Israel might follow. Obama will be more reluctant still: the
White House’s attempt to reach out to old enemies would be ruined. The
president is not standing still as this danger beckons. New US
strategies are being applied at breakneck speed across the world – all
the old verities are being challenged. This has profound implications
for the Middle East: the problem child of the world is about to get a
kindly but firm American uncle.

Obama’s most breathtaking stroke so far has been to offer
reconciliation with the ayatollahs in an attempt to put an end to the
30-year quarrel between America and Iran. In a message to mark the
Persian new year he praised Iranian cultural achievements, dropped
talk of regime change and reached out the hand of friendship. The two
countries have mutual interests in pacifying Afghanistan and Iraq. If
Iran gains acceptance as a legitimate status quo power, will it cast
off its revolutionary ambitions?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s political and religious supreme leader,
gave a generally dusty answer to Obama’s appeal. But it was
significant that he, rather than Ahmadinejad, replied rapidly within
24 hours and conceded: “If America changes its behaviour, we will
change ours.”

The new administration is also impatient for a two-state solution to
the conflict of Jew and Arab. The last time I came here Israel was
withdrawing settlers and soldiers from Gaza. Since then there has been
a violent split among the Palestinian factions, missile attacks on
Israel and bloody retaliation in Gaza, and “Bibi” Netanyahu, a right-
wing prime minister, is being installed in Jerusalem. This record is
stuck. Obama wants to hear a new tune.

Democratic Israel will always have a firm friend in the United States.
But some in the administration share the fundamental insight of Ariel
Sharon, a former Israeli prime minister and super-hawk: there will
soon be many more Palestinians than Israelis because of a higher
birthrate. Rather than dilute the Zionist nature of the state it is
sensible to disengage from the occupied territories.

A group of hard-nosed foreign policy realists in Washington last
autumn produced a “bipartisan statement on US Middle East peacemaking”
that was handed to Obama by his senior economic adviser Paul Volcker,
a signatory. The wise men called for an “intense American mediation in
pursuit of a two-state solution . . . a more pragmatic approach to
Hamas” and American command of a multinational force to keep the peace
between Israel and Palestine. George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East
envoy (who acted as an honest broker in Northern Ireland), and General
Jim Jones, his national security adviser, are said to be highly
sympathetic.

Obama is taking out insurance if his policy fails. His overtures to
the Russians – I give up my anti-ballistic missiles in eastern Europe
if you back me at the UN security council – could result in harsh new
sanctions on Iran’s tottering economy should he be played for a
sucker: Iran may spin out talks to buy time to get its bomb. He also
knows that the presidency of a naive pre-decessor, Jimmy Carter, was
incinerated by playing with Persian fire. But as long as Washington’s
optimism is tempered by an understanding that the Middle East is the
dustbin of many an American initiative, it’s worth a try.

The president’s problem is that Jerusalem is working to a more urgent
timetable. As Gilad sees it, the Iranian bomb is “an existential
threat” and the point of no return is coming fast. If he is prepared
to go to such lengths to save one captured soldier, what will he not
do to safeguard his nation? Obama must reassure Israel if he is to
hold the ring.