Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  The ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means…

  This was the Qualitative Military Edge—QME—the DNA of the U.S.-Israel alliance. The purpose was not only to enable the Jewish State to defend itself, by itself, against any attack, but also to furnish Israelis with the security needed to make concessions. As much as it girded Israel for war, QME empowered Israelis to make peace. But now, in 2010, that double helix was in danger of unraveling.

  The reason was huge American arms sales to Arab states, including $60 billion worth of F-15 fighters, attack helicopters, and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs to Saudi Arabia. Though most of the recipient regimes were only technically at war with Israel, the 1967 and 1973 conflicts proved how quickly passive foes could turn into effective combatants. Moreover, given the region’s inherent instability, massive American-supplied arsenals could fall overnight into radical hands, as happened in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Consequently, the U.S. weapons packages—unprecedented not only in their size but also in their sophistication—threatened to empty QME of all meaning.

  And Israel was virtually powerless to prevent it. How, at the height of the recession, could Israelis ask the American people to sacrifice myriad jobs and tens of billions of dollars in national income? How could Israel’s ambassador in Washington openly question the administration’s claim that “our commitment to Israel’s qualitative military edge has never been greater”? Asked on live television whether Israel was concerned about the Saudi sale, I fell back on that time-honored diplomatic adage: when in doubt, dodge. “Security relations between the United States and Israel are exceptionally close,” I responded, “and we know how to make our interests known to the White House.”

  But transactions that immense could not remain secret for long. Nearly two hundred Congress members from both parties sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates inquiring how the United States could sell so much weaponry to the Saudis and still preserve Israel’s QME. Could the aircraft be positioned farther from Israeli airspace, the legislators asked. Such suggestions could be raised by Congress but not publicly by Israel. The Saudis were liable to be offended and take their business elsewhere. The world has no shortage of arms suppliers, and, as much as American jets in Arab air forces worried Israel, the purchase of foreign jets—not subject to QME considerations—worried us even more.

  So the deliberations on QME moved into the innermost rooms of the Pentagon and the Executive Office Building. An Israeli team headed by Major General Amir Eshel, a plucky fighter pilot and the IDF’s strategic planner, and the wise but curmudgeonly General Amos Gilad, the Defense Ministry’s senior political advisor, visited Washington repeatedly for often-heated discussions with Dennis Ross and other NSC officials. Part of the problem was how to measure QME in an era in which the classic metrics—pilot proficiency, territorial depth—were rendered less relevant by the advent of drones and long-range missiles. Compounding these difficulties was the administration’s determination to shield its arms dealings from Israeli eyes, denying Eshel and Gilad access to the confidential QME report that, by law, the White House had to submit to Congress. More than once, I listened as Eshel and Gilad exited these meetings grumbling, “Awful, simply awful.”

  But, as often occurs in diplomacy, prickly issues were smoothed by congenial rapports. For all his grumpiness, Gilad gained the confidence of Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, another of the administration’s seemingly limitless corps of Harvard and Oxford graduates, a redoubtable person who, though at first standoffish, eventually acknowledged Israel’s genuine QME concerns. Another personal connection ran through Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Major General Benny Gantz, the embassy’s defense attaché. Tall, taciturn, the image of a Special Forces commander, Gantz developed a close friendship with Mullen, who, far shorter and bespectacled, looked less like a warrior than a poet. At Gantz’s going-away party, Mullen whispered to me that he was in a rush and could stay only a few minutes. I arranged to have him speak first, and he did, praising Gantz and extolling Israel, for more than half an hour.

  Together, Gilad and Flournoy and Gantz and Mullen worked to redress the imbalance in Israel’s QME. Defense Minister Ehud Barak also swept through the capital repeatedly for QME-related discussions. The White House announced a grant of $205 million for Iron Dome, Israel’s revolutionary antiballistic system. The United States integrated its sophisticated radar and missile defense capabilities with Israel’s and offered to sell it the F-35 jet. But the F-35s would not be delivered for several years, and the presence of hundreds of advanced and lethally armed Saudi warplanes only a few minutes’ flying time from Tel Aviv still disconcerted Israelis. Such concerns unnerved Netanyahu in a July 6 meeting with Robert Gates.

  The defense secretary had long harbored a visceral dislike of Netanyahu. As a security advisor to George H. W. Bush twenty years earlier, Gates was offended by then deputy foreign minister Netanyahu’s “superficiality,” his “glibness…his arrogance and outlandish ambition,” and recommended that he be banned from the White House. Though a self-described “very good friend and supporter of Israel,” and enormously fond of Ehud Barak, the secretary still bristled at the prime minister. Netanyahu, Gates maintained, was intransigent on the peace issue and “ungrateful” for U.S. military aid.

  That animus was discernible in the Blair House reception room, where Netanyahu promptly took Gates to task for the Saudi sale. “It poses a serious threat to Israel,” he said bluntly. “We need a new understanding with the United States on how to counterbalance it.” Gates, an éminence grise not known for easygoingness, visibly stiffened. So, too, did Michèle Flournoy and Mike Mullen, who were also present. Gates replied by citing the administration’s unprecedented backing for Israel’s defense and the benefits of supplying the Saudis with American—rather than foreign—arms. “How long will those planes work without U.S. support?” he snapped. “And when did the Saudis ever attack Israel?” The secretary quoted the Middle Eastern axiom, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” to which Netanyahu replied—“acidly,” according to Gates—“No, in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my frenemy.”

  Following our upbeat meeting with Obama at the White House, the tension with Gates was jarring. Outside the room, I learned from Flournoy and Admiral Mullen that the secretary felt blindsided by Netanyahu. Ehud Barak, they explained, had assured Gates that Israel would not object to the Saudi sale and was feeling more confident about its QME. “You guys should get your stories straight,” they advised me. Barak, it seemed, had once again placed me in a janitorial role, sweeping up.

  Frankly, I agreed with Netanyahu. I recalled all too poignantly the instability of Arab states and the times when Israel’s frenemies turned overnight into aggressive foes. It vexed me deeply to read in that activist’s email how, at my Rosh Hashanah reception, I had praised President Obama for restoring Israel’s QME.

  Yet the email’s second claim was even more untrue—and more dangerous. According to the activist, I assured my guests that Israel was delighted with the administration’s position on Iran. “President Obama and his team are spending more time on this issue than almost any other issue facing our country today,” I allegedly said. If unconcerned about QME, I was also supposedly blithe about another three letters that had become DNA-like in U.S.-Israel relations—HEU, meaning highly enriched uranium.

  The Twenty Percent Solution

  “Rarely in modern history have nations faced genuine existential threats,” I once wrote in Commentary magazine, then asserted that Israel uniquely confronted many potential cataclysms on a daily basis. Three of them, alone, were posed by Iran’s nuclear program. The first arose from Iran’s attempt to produce a bomb that it could place atop one of the many missiles it already possessed a
nd which could hit any city in Israel, “a one-bomb country,” according to a former Iranian president. The second mortal danger derived from Iran’s status as the world’s largest state supporter of terrorism. If Iran got the bomb, so would the terrorists who did not need a missile to deliver it, but merely a ship container. And lastly, once Iran acquired military nuclear capabilities, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would develop them as well, locking Israel into a fatally unstable neighborhood. Apart from Israel, I concluded in Commentary, “it is…impossible to find an example of another state in the modern epic that has faced such a variety of concurrent existential threats.”

  Helping Israel to surmount those perils together with the United States remained my core objective. I remember hearing Prime Minister Rabin back in the early 1990s explain that peace with the Palestinians would enable Israel to meet the ultimate challenge. The radical Islamic regime of Iran, he revealed, was covertly working to produce nuclear bombs.

  Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran was prohibited from developing such weapons. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were supposed to expose such illicit activities. But Iran had grown adept at evading these monitors and expert at importing industrial machinery, tunneling equipment, even auto parts that could be dually used to make nuclear arsenals.

  Secretly, Iran began testing the centrifuges needed to spin uranium to weapons grade. In 2001, it constructed a vast underground enrichment plant near Natanz in central Iran and tried to conceal it from inspectors. Finally, after years of hesitation, the Bush administration publicized Iran’s lies and accused it of attempting to build a bomb. But, while placing Iran in his “axis of evil,” an Iraq- and Afghanistan-wearied Bush was unwilling to embark on yet another Middle Eastern war. A U.S. intelligence estimate published at the end of 2007 suggested that Iran had long ceased working on a weapon. Just then, a North Korea–supplied nuclear site was discovered in Syria, but Bush refused to bomb it, leaving the task—purportedly—to the Israelis.

  But could the IDF take on Iran? Far more distant than Syria, and with multiple facilities, Iran represented a formidable challenge for Israel’s air force, equipped with fighter jets rather than strategic bombers. One hundred Israeli F-15s and F-16s maneuvered over the Mediterranean in June 2008 in what many observers interpreted as a warning to Iran. But while an Israeli action might at best set the Iranians back, it could also ignite a regional conflagration. The specter of tens of thousands of Iranian, Syrian, and Hezbollah missiles devastating Israeli cities was also nightmarish. Yet what choice did Israel have? As Yossi Klein Halevi and I wrote in The New Republic, “A Jewish state that allows itself to be threatened with nuclear weapons will forfeit its right to speak in the name of Jewish history.”

  The optimal solution, then, was diplomatic. Starting in 2006, the Security Council passed five resolutions calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear program and open its plants to international inspection or else face sanctions. All transactions liable to assist Iran with its nuclear project were prohibited. But Israel believed that these sanctions had to be painfully ratcheted up and combined with a credible military threat. Iranian leaders had to internalize that the many billions they had already spent on the nuclear project—and the additional billions it would cost—were wasted. Just short of grasping their atomic weapon, the ayatollahs had to know, Iran would be bombed.

  Formally, at least, this was also the American position. “An Iranian nuclear weapon is unacceptable to the United States,” President Obama declared, and opaquely warned that “all options remained on the table.” My public statements similarly emphasized the common U.S. and Israeli goals of preventing Iran from nuclearizing. But beneath this outward confluence of policies yawned several chasms.

  Some of these clefts were structural. America, a very large and supremely armed country located far from the Middle East and not threatened with national annihilation by Iran, could afford to take chances on the nuclear issue that tiny and less powerful Israel, situated in Iran’s backyard and slated by its rulers for destruction, could not. While Defense Secretary Gates could say that the Iranians “have the intention of having nuclear weapons,” but did not yet make the “formal decision” to produce them, Israelis acted on the assumption that the Iranians had long ago determined to weaponize. Gates, who opposed the 2007 action against Syria, told CNN, “The reality is that there is no military option that does anything more than buy time…three years or so.” Back in 1981, Israeli jets bombed the Osirak reactor with the goal of gaining a one-year respite from the Iraqi nuclear threat. Iraq never produced an atomic bomb. A three-year delay in Iran’s nuclear activities could be, for Israel, an eternity.

  Beyond their geographic and tactical differences over Iran, though, the United States and Israel were also divided conceptually. While Netanyahu doubted that Iran would concede its nuclear program without first enduring crippling sanctions and confronting a serious military threat, Obama remained committed to the principle of engagement. By entering a “meaningful dialogue,” the president said, and opening its facilities to international inspectors, Iran could “rejoin the community of nations.” Until then, the United States would pursue a dual-track policy of pressuring Iran while still holding out the offer of talks.

  I knew too well the inherent dissimilarities between America and Israel but still wrestled with the conceptual gap. Obama’s bar for Iran, I thought, was far too low. The ayatollahs had merely to admit international inspectors to Natanz and all of their lies about their nuclear program, their sponsorship of world terror, and the suppression of their own people would be forgotten. So too would Iran’s stated determination to obliterate Israel. “It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Israel is a hideous entity which will undoubtedly be annihilated.”

  In impugning the justice of Obama’s assertion, made in this 2009 Cairo speech, that “any nation—including Iran—should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power,” I also questioned the efficacy of simultaneously coercing and engaging Iran. “It’s difficult to build up steam in a steam room if you keep the door open,” I once observed to Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. For seven years under two administrations, Stuart forfeited a lucrative law career to scour the world for loopholes in the UN sanctions, and my sauna analogy made him wince. The policy nevertheless continued, enabling Iran—so Israel saw it—to play for time, dragging out negotiations while the centrifuges spun.

  Yet no gulf more fathomlessly separated Washington from Jerusalem than the possibility of military action. “One night of strategic bombing will restore all your lost prestige in the Middle East,” I heard Ehud Barak tell American leaders on more than one occasion. “The Iranian nightmare is a full-blown American attack.” But the response Barak received was silence. Long entangled in two exhausting Middle Eastern wars, Americans scarcely needed a third against Iran that they feared would prove more depleting. Nor did Washington welcome an Israeli attack that the White House believed would embroil U.S. forces in the almost-certain Iranian retaliation and spike the price of Persian Gulf oil. Without exception, virtually every administration official I met in this period insisted that striking the nuclear facilities would rally Muslims around the ayatollahs and spur, rather than deter, their drive for nuclear weapons. Perhaps more than the prospect of an Iranian bomb, I realized early in my term, Obama feared the impact of a preemptive Israeli strike.

  That fear helped motivate the president’s staff to maintain an intimate dialogue on Iran with their Israeli counterparts. I participated in all of these discussions and understood—we all did—that they also represented another hug to keep tabs on Israeli thinking on Iran. Still, the exchanges were exceptionally friendly, professional, and frank. The Americans assured us that they had no intention of reviving the Cold War concept of containment—that is, allowing
the Iranians to make a bomb and then threatening to nuke them if they used it. Similarly, we heard that the United States was confident of knowing in real time whether the Iranians moved to break or sneak out of the international inspection system and quickly enrich their stockpile to military levels.

  These assurances did not entirely assuage the Israelis, though, many of whom wondered whether the administration would be content to contain an Iranian ability to break out. Even this capacity, they feared, would trigger the dreaded Middle East nuclear arms race and weaken Israel’s deterrence power over Hezbollah. Japan, too, had the means to break out and quickly make atomic bombs, but Japan-like capabilities in Iran’s hands were nearly as deadly as a weapon. Israeli officials warned that the ayatollahs would wait for the moment when the world’s attention was diverted elsewhere—to a war or a natural disaster—and then rush to place their newly spun uranium 238 inside a bomb. They would then mount this on one of the intercontinental ballistic missiles that they already possessed and that could reach any Israeli city.

  Such scenarios did not, however, indicate deep differences between the Israeli and American readings of the Iranian program. On the contrary, the intelligence communities of both countries tracked the same developments and derived very similar conclusions. There was little disagreement over the size and speed of Iran’s nuclear “clock.” Unfortunately, there was little chance of synchronizing the other two clocks in the room. When it came to Iranian nuclearizing, America’s clock was large and slow, while Israel’s remained small and rapidly ticking.

  —

  The Israeli clock rang alarmingly in the summer of 2009 when intelligence revealed the existence of yet another massive, secretly constructed nuclear facility in Fordow, near the Iranian holy city of Qom. Israel had long warned about the possibility of such “immune and redundant” sites—difficult to attack and detect. Fordow, built under a mountain and equipped with one thousand centrifuges, confirmed Israel’s gloomiest fears.