Dennis Ross: No major disagreements between Obama and Netanyahu on Iran

There are no major disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem, and the upcoming meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama will focus on formulating a timeline for the two nations’ course of action regarding the Iranian nuclear threat, one of Obama’s closest Middle East advisers said Thursday.

The question of how to stop the Islamic republic from attaining nuclear weapons will take center stage on Monday when Obama and Netanyahu meet in Washington. According to some reports, Netanyahu and Obama are in discord about the right strategy. But according to Dennis Ross, who in November left the White House after two years as a senior director of the National Security Council, the two leaders agree that sanctions are the preferred ways to twist Tehran’s arm. They are also on the same page regarding intelligence about Iranian nuclear capabilities.

Following weeks of high-level talks between senior defense and intelligence officials from both countries, the Obama and Netanyahu meeting will focus on discussing time frames according to which the two nations will act, said Ross.

“There is a time-line issue,” he told reporters during a conference call. “It has less to do with the question of where the Iranian nuclear program is standing, it has more to do with what [Israel’s Defense Minister] Ehud Barak calls the zone of immunity.”

Iran is moving at rapid speed to move its nuclear enrichment facilities underground, which would make it increasingly difficult for the Israeli air force to destroy them. Barak argues that Israel needs to act before Iran enters a so-called “immunity zone,” after which Israel can no longer penetrated the facilities. Since the US has considerably stronger military capacities, the White House could theoretically wait longer than Israel to strike.

Ross, who served two years as Obama’s special assistant and one year as special Iran adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said he is not sure whether Obama would consider attacking Iran before the US elections in November. Yet he reiterated the president’s commitment to ensure that Tehran does not get its hands on a nuclear weapon.

“While the president has made it very clear that he prefers to find a diplomatic solution to this, he’s also made it very clear that he’s determined to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear weapons capability,” said Ross, who is now a counselor the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but continues to advise Obama. “This is a president that I believe doesn’t choose his words lightly, and he acts on what he says he’s going to do.”

According to media reports, Netanyahu intends to pressure the White House to explicitly threaten Iran with a military strike if it doesn’t abandon its nuclear ambitions. Also, Amos Yadlin, the former chief of Israel’s military intelligence demanded an “ironclad American assurance” that Obama will act to prevent a nuclear Iran in case Jerusalem refrains from doing so while it still could.

But Ross rejects any calls for the White House to make detailed declarations of its policies and actions. Israel can legitimately seek for broad understandings, but it is misplaced to ask for specific assurances, he said.

“I’ve known every Israeli prime minister for the last 30 years and the one thing I have been struck by was that they always wanted to preserve their own decision space and their own freedom of action because they want Israel in the end to be able to take the steps it needs to take to deal with national security as it defines it,” Ross said. “The more explicitly you begin to seek from one side certain kinds of commitments, the more you are going to be asked to make commitments of your own.”

On the flip side, Ross said that while the Obama administration would probably like to know in advance if Israel is going to launch a strike, it did not necessarily insist on being made aware of all the details of such an operation. “The notion of great specificity on either end is something that is overstated,” he said.