Midway through Barack Obama’s first term as president, U.S.
officials grew alarmed that Israel might launch a unilateral air strike against
Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran had snubbed Obama’s outreach after the 2008
election, and rejected an October 2009 international proposal to ship most of
its enriched uranium out of the country—stirring pessimism about prospects for
a future breakthrough.
“Militarily, I thought we needed to prepare for a possible
Israeli attack and Iranian retaliation,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates
writes in his new memoir, Duty. At a January 2010 Oval Office meeting, Gates
told Obama “he needed to consider the ramifications of a no-warning Israeli
attack,” including whether the U.S. would assist Israel and how it would
respond to Iranian retaliation.
Around the same time, senior officials met to discuss ways
the U.S. might dissuade Israeli Prime Minister from taking unilateral action.
In one such meeting, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised a bracing
question, according to two former Obama administration officials: Was it
possible that, instead of trying to restrain Israel, the U.S. should instead
provide what one of those official described as “a tacit green light to the
Israelis to take care of the problem for us”? In other words, instead of
begging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give diplomacy more time,
perhaps it was worth telling him to go proceed with airstrikes.
Clinton did not actually endorse the idea. She only raised
the notion “as one option to consider,” according to one former official, who
adds that it gained no traction inside the administration. Clinton’s current
press secretary, Nick Merrill, did not respond to requests for comment this
week on this matter.
While the very idea of a U.S.-approved Israeli strike on
Iran is dramatic, Clinton’s thought experiment was actually responsible act of
bureaucratic deliberation, says Kenneth Pollack, a former White House national
security aide under Bill Clinton and author of a recent book on Iran.
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