Former intel chief says Iran issue will test US-Israel ties

Gaps exist between American and Israeli points of no return on Iran, the former director of military intelligence admitted this week, and while trust can bridge the gap, signs point to a fraying bond between the two allies.

Media reports have proliferated over the past few weeks of both Israel’s supposed willingness to attack, and Washington’s attempts to convince Jerusalem to let sanctions have a chance to work.

Speaking at a defense conference this week, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, the director of military intelligence from 2006 to 2010, said the reason the US is willing to play wait-and-see while Israel frets was because they have set different milestones as the deadline for making a move to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel’s outer limit for action is the date at which Iran “reaches the capacity” to assemble a nuclear warhead, he said, while the United States can wait much longer, until the very cusp of attainment. The gap between the two deadlines could be as wide as three years, “and the only way to bridge it is with trust,” Yadlin said at a forum organized by The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

With tensions over Tehran coming to a boil, though, trust may becoming a rare commodity.

The former and current US secretaries of defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, have both aired their strong opposition to an uncoordinated and unauthorized Israeli strike against Iran. Most recently Panetta spoke of a possible Israeli strike in the spring, comments that the Washington Post editorial board called on Wednesday “an undercutting of one of America’s closest allies.”

Earlier media reports had stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak refused to warn Panetta before a possible pre-emptive strike.

“Rather than publicly arguing with Israel they should be more clearly spelling out U.S. willingness to take military action if Iran is discovered taking steps toward bomb-making,” they wrote, a move that would allay Israel’s existential fears and perhaps postpone a strike.

Yadlin, one of the eight F-16 pilots to take part in Israel’s 1981 strike of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, refused to comment on whether he felt that the necessary trust currently exists. He did acknowledge that there is “a gap that is starting to open” between Israel and the United States, citing “the occupation” as something that is seen as standing in contradiction to the countries’ shared values.

“When two professors, one from Boston and the other from Chicago, write a book about Israel, there’s no need to pay attention,” he said of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “The Lobby”, “but when the former commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command and current director of the CIA starts to question whether Israel is an asset or a liability, then we must pay attention.”

The U.S., in an election year and hobbled by a frail economy, defense budget cuts and lingering wars in the Middle East, may not be capable of convincing the current Israeli leadership that it will follow through when the time comes.

Speaking at the forum, Gordon England, the deputy secretary of defense under President George Bush, hinted that the future might hold a deviation of interests on Iran.

His warning was phrased in terms of dollars and cents. The US military budget has been slashed by nearly $32 billion in 2012. The annual deficit stands at $1.3 trillion, he said, and the Pentagon plans to cut a total of $260 billion from the defense budget over the next five years.

US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, told the Senate Armed Service Committee on February 14 that the cuts, while painful, “will not lead to a military in decline. Rather, this budget will maintain our military’s decisive edge and help sustain America’s global leadership.”

England disputed this. He said that security and economy were two sides of the same coin and that the slimmer the budget the less chances of foreign deployment. The United States, he said, would likely spend the next few years looking “more inward than outward.”