WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel inserted himself into the most contentious foreign policy
issue of the American presidential campaign on Tuesday, criticizing the Obama
administration for refusing to set clear “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear progress
that would prompt the United States to undertake a military strike. As a
result, he said, the administration has no “moral right” to restrain Israel
from taking military action of its own.
Mr. Netanyahu’s unusually harsh public
comments about Israel’s most important ally, which closely track what he has
reportedly said in vivid terms to American officials visiting Jerusalem, laid
bare the tension between him and President Obama over how to handle Iran. They
also suggested that he is willing to use the pressure of the presidential
election to try to force Mr. Obama to commit to attack Iran under certain
conditions.
In another sign of tensions in the
American-Israeli relationship, a senior Israeli official said late Tuesday that
the Obama administration had declined a request from Mr. Netanyahu’s office for
a meeting with Mr. Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States this
month to attend the United Nations General Assembly. The Obama administration
confirmed that no meeting would occur, but it said the decision was due to a
scheduling problem and had been conveyed to Israel long ago.
The United States says it has no evidence
that Iranian leaders have made a final decision to build a bomb. However, the
International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report says the country has amassed
a stockpile of low- and medium-enriched uranium that, with further enrichment, could
fuel as many as six nuclear weapons.
The United States concluded several years
ago that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons development program at the end
of 2003, though there has been evidence of sporadic work since. The Israelis
say Iran is quietly reconstituting a much larger effort, and must be stopped.
In demanding that Mr. Obama effectively
issue an ultimatum to Iran, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to be making maximum use of
his political leverage at a time when Mr. Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt
Romney, has sought to make an issue of what Mr. Romney says is the
administration’s lack of support for Israel.
It is not clear what level of development
in Iran’s nuclear program would constitute a “red line” in Israeli eyes. Dore
Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a research
institute, and a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, said in an
interview last week, “It is very important to draw a line about the quantities
of enriched uranium and the levels of enrichment.”
One option that has been widely discussed
among experts advising the United States government is capping Iran’s uranium
enrichment at a reactor-grade level. Also, Iran would be permitted to stockpile
no more than 1,764 pounds of that uranium, less than is required, if further
enriched, to make a single bomb.
Mr. Netanyahu, who is highly attuned to
American politics, seemed to be using his comments to pressure Mr. Obama to
specify at which point the United States would be prepared to take military
action against Iran, perhaps this month at the opening of the United Nations
General Assembly, which both will attend.
The Israeli ambassador to the United
States, Michael B. Oren, echoed Mr. Netanyahu in an interview in Washington on
Monday night and said the Israeli leadership wanted Mr. Obama and the leaders
of other nations to agree on clear limits for Iran.
“We know that the Iranians see red,” Mr. Oren said. “We know they can
discern the color red. We know that the redder the line, the lesser the chance
that they will pass it.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
publicly rejected that approach over the weekend. She avoided discussion of
Iran’s stockpile and said that “we’re not setting deadlines” beyond which the
United States would turn to a military solution.
It appeared that Mrs. Clinton’s statement
set Mr. Netanyahu off. “Those in the international community who refuse to put
red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before
Israel,” he said in Jerusalem at a news conference with the prime minister of
Bulgaria, Boyko M. Borisov.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly argued — with the
support of some leading Israeli officials — that the United States and Israel
have closer security cooperation now than at any point in history. The United
States provided much of the Iron Dome missile defense system for Israel, and
for the past five years the two countries worked closely on a major covert
operation against Iran called “Olympic Games,” an effort to sabotage Iran’s
enrichment capability with cyberattacks.
But Mr. Obama has stopped well short of
saying he would prevent Iran from developing the capability to produce a bomb.
He has said only that he would not allow Iran to obtain a weapon; Mr. Netanyahu
has said that is not enough.
Depending on how one defines the term, Mr.
Obama’s aides and former aides acknowledge that Iran may already have that
capability. It possesses the fuel and the knowledge to make a weapon, but that
would take months or years, and Mr. Obama has argued that allows “time and
space” for a negotiated solution.
Mr. Romney had no immediate comment about
Mr. Netanyahu’s challenge to Mr. Obama, and one of his informal advisers on the
Middle East said, “It’s probably better at this point to let Netanyahu make the
point, because it’s more powerful that way.” The adviser said he was not
authorized to speak on the record.
But the Netanyahu comments play right to
the Republican nominee’s critique of Mr. Obama. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday,
Mr. Romney declared that the progress of Iran’s nuclear program was Mr. Obama’s
“greatest failure” in foreign policy.
“The president hasn’t drawn us any further away from a nuclear Iran,”
he said.
There is little doubt that the Iranian
effort has progressed. When Mr. Obama took office, Iran had produced enough
fuel to make, if enriched further, about one bomb, compared with the
International Atomic Energy Agency’s current calculation of five or six.
But Mr. Romney’s proposed solutions have
also delicately steered clear of describing with any precision how far Iran
could go before he would use force to stop its program. Like Mr. Obama, he has
not said how much progress he would allow Iran to make toward a weapons
capability before he authorized a strike.
Instead, he has insisted that Mr. Obama was
late to the task of placing “crippling sanctions” on Iran. Yet those sanctions
have begun to strike at the heart of Iran’s greatest source of national revenue
— oil sales — something that the Bush administration shied away from.
Mr. Netanyahu has been dismissive of
sanctions. They are an indirect form of pressure, he has argued, and have not
forced Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to scale back the
country’s nuclear program.
In recent days, the Israelis had appeared
to be dialing down the pressure on Washington, with the Israeli news media
reporting that Ehud Barak, the defense minister, was rethinking the wisdom of
an attack in the coming months. There was speculation that Israeli officials
feared that the long-term jeopardy to Israel’s relationship with Washington was
not worth the short-term gain of setting back, but probably not destroying,
Iran’s capability.
A number of American officials, in trips to
Israel, have argued that an Israeli attack would only drive the nuclear program
underground and most likely result in the expulsion of international
inspectors, who are the best gauge of the program’s progress.
But Mr. Netanyahu revived the tough talk of
the last few months and the message that time is running out for Israel.
“So far, we can say with certainty that diplomacy and sanctions
haven’t worked. The sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, but they haven’t
stopped the Iranian nuclear program,” Mr. Netanyahu said, adding, “The fact is
that every day that passes, Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear bombs.”
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