Obama trying to "restrain" the Israelis

According to the Wall Street Journal, president Obama has been pushing hard to prevent Israel from taking any military action against the Iranian nuclear facilities. Officials from Obama on down are telling their Israeli counterparts to wait to let new strong sanctions have their desired effect rather than using force to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. This would be comical were it not for the terrible consequences of an Iranian nuclear weapon. There indeed are new sanctions which are in the process of being put in place. First there are the American sanctions which Congress enacted over the objection of the Obama administration. These new sanctions, however, do not go into effect for another six months. Then there are the proposed sanctions under discussion by the European Union. Of course, these sanctions have not been approved, and the current economic chaos in Europe makes it much less likely that the EU will force its members to buy more expensive oil from sources other than Iran. Japan has acted to cut somewhat its oil imports from Iran, but China has stepped in to buy that oil instead of the Japanese. In summary, there are no strong sanctions against Iran at the moment. There may be some in six months or longer, but right now there is just nothing in place that would actually move the Iranians to change their policy.

So Obama is telling Israel to give time for non-existent sanctions to have an effect. My guess is that this will not play too well with the Israelis.

In a rather strange way, conditions are now much more favorable for an Israeli strike against Iran than they were even a few months ago. At that time, US air forces still defended Iraqi airspace. Now, thanks to Obama, all US forces have left Iraq. Were the Israelis to overfly Iraq on their way to attack Iran, there would be no American air force to get in the way. The Iraqis no longer have much of a functioning air force. This leaves a big opening for the Israelis to come through. Even more likely, however, is that an Israeli attack would be coordinated with -- of all countries -- Saudi Arabia. The Saudis fear the theocratic Iranian Shiite state even more than they hate the Israelis. Were the Saudis to secretly let the Israelis use Saudi airbases to launch an attack on Iran, they could avoid blame (who would know?) and accomplish the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program at the same time. An attack coming from Saudi Arabia could be upon the Iranian forces long before they even knew what was happening. The Israelis could get in and get out and even fly all the way back to Israel over Iraq and Jordan.

The real truth is this. Israel sees its very existence threatened by an Iranian nuclear bomb, and quite rightly so. I doubt that any amount of cajoling or threatening from Obama will stop the Israelis from protecting themselves. Indeed, the Israelis probably know that Obama will not do anything in 2012 that might hurt his re-election chances, and taking action against Israel for protecting itself is almost unthinkable in that context.