Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu continues to make public his worries about Iran’s new president Hassan Rowhani.  In one intervention since Rowhani’s inauguration, Netanyahu pointed out that since Rowhani was elected president, Iran has installed 7,000 more centrifuges.  Netanyahu’s main point, which he keeps hammering home, is that Rowhani and the Iranian government need to be judged by their actions not by their words. 

According to Netanyahu: “The Iranian president is trying to present a new face to the West, but progress on the nuclear programme continues.”  Last Wednesday (7 August) he said: “I know that some place their hopes on Iran’s new president.  He knows how to exploit this, and yesterday he called for more talks.  Of course he wants more talks.  He wants to talk and talk and talk.  And while everybody is busy talking to him, he’ll be busy enriching uranium.  The centrifuges will keep on spinning.  This isn’t a secret.  The new Iranian president boasts that that is his strategy,  He says ‘I talk and I smile and I enrich uranium’.”

With that thought in mind, Netanyahu will not have been reassured by a commentary in the reformist Iranian newspaper Etemad, published on the same day as Netanyahu was making his comments.  The commentary praised Rowhani’s track record of protecting Iran’s nuclear programme in the following terms:

“President Rowhani can protect our nuclear technology and installations from harm and aggression through his unique experience as a former chief nuclear negotiator who preserved and strengthened our political position.  Firming our legal position was an important achievement of the negotiation team under his leadership.  For the two decades of the construction and reforms governments of Rafsanjani and Khatami, Iran turned the nuclear crisis into an opportunity due to the smart running of nuclear diplomacy.  The completion of the fuel cycle without any resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency against Iran or any economic sanctions by the Security Council is an example of such an opportunity.”

A central issue for Israel remains the extent to which it can rely upon American support, and the closure on 4 August of 21 US embassies and consulates in response to an al-Qaeda terror threat did not instil confidence.  In Israel the move has widely been seen as a panic response that will only bolster al-Qaeda’s self-esteem and wider image. 

A commentary published by Haaretz on 8 August summed up this feeling when it said: “Expressions of weakness [by the US], it seems, have become the norm.  Thus Israel’s working assumption must be that the United States will also demonstrate weakness against Iran and won’t keep its public presidential promise not to allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons.”

Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz told the Washington Post recently that the international community must make it clear to Iran that it only has two options: end its nuclear programme voluntarily or “see it destroyed with brute force”.  Steinitz claimed that Iran’s nuclear programme could be destroyed with “with a few hours of air strikes, no more”.  He also said that he thought that Iran would only be able to inflict “very limited damage” on Israel in return.

But however accurate Steinitz’s assessment may or may not be, the problem for Israel (as well-placed sources in Jerusalem put it) is that the election of Rowhani has created an atmosphere of “zero tolerance” within the international community for military action against Iran.  It can be assumed that the question as to how long this period of zero tolerance will last, and what Iran will be doing with the breathing space it provides, will remain the most pressing question on Netanyahu’s mind, notwithstanding the reopening of talks with the Palestinians.