…Et quelques vagues notables

Et quelques vagues notables

Il y a eu déjà de nombreuses réactions à l’article de Goldberg, que nous présentons par ailleurs ce même 16 août 2010. Ces réactions sont très diverses, parfois contradictoires. On en mentionne deux ici, de commentateurs que nous connaissons.

• Steve Clemons fait un très long commentaire sur l’article de Goldberg. Il le débute par le constat assez étonnant que le risque d’une attaque de l’Iran avec le soutien ou la participation US était hier, du temps de Bush, moins grand qu’aujourd’hui, notamment à cause de la modération de Bush… (Dans The Washington Note, du 11 août 2010.)

«In an important article to be published in The Atlantic tomorrow, national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg recounts something many people didn't realize at the time and still have a hard time believing. President George W. Bush knocked back Dick Cheney's wing of the foreign policy establishment – both inside and out of his administration – that wanted to launch a bombing campaign against Iran. In a snippet I had not seen before, Bush mockingly referred to bombing advocates Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer as “the bomber boys.”

»George W. Bush was showing his inner realist not allowing his own trigger-happy Curtis LeMays pile on to the national security messes the US already owned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

»But that was several years ago. Today, there is a new US President, more Iranian centrifuges, and a different Israeli Prime Minister – and Bibi Netanyahu seems closer to a Curtis LeMay, John Bolton or Frank Gaffney than he does to the more containment-oriented Eisenhowers and George Kennans who in their day forged a global equilibrium out of superpower rivalry and hatred.»

Parmi les diverses observations, souvent assez désolées, de Steve Clemons, il y a celle-ci, où Clemons observe que, par crainte des actions d’un régime (iranien) jugé irrationnel par les Israéliens, – caractère irrationnel auquel Clemons ne croit pas, – ces mêmes Israéliens sont prêts à se lancer dans une offensive tout aussi irrationnelle, en sachant les multiples conséquences désastreuses qui les attendent.

«What simultaneously disturbs and fascinates about this essay by Goldberg, who in past conversations has told me that he is ambivalent personally when it comes to bombing or containing Iran, is that it lays out a fairly comprehensive roster of the probable high costs for Israel (and the U.S.) of a military attack – and yet Israel's national leadership, for the most part, as reflected in their interviews, maintains a consequences-be-damned posture on a military strike – as opposed to a containment strategy.

»In other words, doubts about the sanity and rationality of Iran's leadership may be driving Israel's leaders to abandon pragmatic rationality and serious scrutiny of costs and benefits as well. Is this all real? Or are both sides puffing up, acting like "crazy Ivans", as part of a military strategy that could be bluff, or could be devastatingly severe?

• Le 14 août 2010 sur Antiwar.com, Gareth Porter développe un commentaire qui s’attache surtout à montrer combien nombre de chefs militaires et du renseignement israéliens sont défavorables à l’attaque, et comment Netanyahou lui-même sut parfois composer avec les perspectives iraniennes, – mais c’était en 1996…

«But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an “existential threat” is unnecessary and self-defeating.

»Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996. […]

»Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defense minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel’s ability to retain its most talented people. But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked “worry that talk of an ‘existential threat’ is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people.”

»A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts “the usefulness of an attack.”w

» Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating. Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been “distorted.” Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran’s main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to “deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change,” according to Bergman.

»The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel — and Israeli intelligence officials’ disagreement with it — goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labor Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran’s missile and nuclear programs as an “existential threat” to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book Treacherous Alliance. An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric had been “self-defeating,” because it had actually made Iran more afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.

»Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a choice between making itself Iran’s enemy or allowing Iran to focus on threats from other states. Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and Israel.

»But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi’s account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of his predecessors.

»That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping the intelligence community’s more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from Hitler’s Germany.

»Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message to the Americans that they didn’t believe Obama would launch an attack on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so. But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it…»

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