Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and the Obama Doctrine

Of course, the Obama Doctrine will likely take on many forms, and so, I will be one of the first to assign an Obama foreign policy directive the monikor "the Obama Doctrine". By this, I mean President Elect Obama's assertion that we will violate Pakistan's sovereignty if necessary in going after Al Qaeda. Now, my problem with his pronouncement is that it was so public. I think any President would be a fool not to take an opportunity to kill a high value target within Pakistan with or without their permission. What Obama did was announce his intention as a point of foreign policy assertion.

By doing this, President Elect Obama also announced to the world that under his administration sovereignty would take a back seat to national security. By doing so, he also gave license to any other country to then invade another if they made the same justification that their national security was threatened. In fact, Jake Tapper asked President Elect Obama an excellent question regarding this in the context of Pakistan and India. Tapper asked Obama if he thought that India had the right to invade Pakistan in search of the perpetrators of the Mumbai bombings if they were in Pakistan. Obama danced around the question, but the implication is clear. If Obama is going to assert that we can invade Pakistan in search of Al Qaeda, the Obama Doctrine states that sovereignty takes a back seat to national security.

This brings me to Israel and Iran. Earlier this week, news reports came out that Israel is making contingency plans to strike Iran's nuclear facilities with or without the permission of the United States.

Israel is drawing up plans to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and is prepared to launch a strike without backing from the US, it has been reported.

Officials in the Israeli Defence Ministry told the Jerusalem Post that while they prefer to act in consultation with the US, they were preparing plans that would allow them to act in isolation.

"It is always better to coordinate," a senior Defence Ministry official told the newspaper. "But we are also preparing options that do not include coordination."

However defence officials played down the reports today, telling The Times that an attack by Israeli forces alone would probably fail to take out all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, which experts say are scattered across several sites, some deep underground.

Now, a nuclear Iran is at least as much of a threat to Israel as high value Al Qaeda targets are to the United States. As such, Israel can and will view nuclear facilities in Iran as a national security threat much like Obama views Al Qaeda in Pakistan as a national security threat to us. Still, an invasion or even an airstrike would also violate Iran's sovereignty. How would a President Obama treat an airstrike by Israel of Iran? That remains to be seen, but he has certainly backed himself into a corner on this. Whether he truly supports such a mission or not, he is left in no other position but to stand behind it. In fact, the Israelis should, and frankly better, point out that they would only be doing in Iran what he has made clear he would do in Pakistan.

This brings me to the second part of the Obama Doctrine. This part says that we need to engage our enemies more. Now, how will a President Obama square this part of his doctrine, with the first part which says that sovereignty rights take a back seat to national security? While President Obama will make every effort to end the nuclear stand off with Iran peacefully, Israel has no such intentions. Israel is not about to wait for months or years of more diplomacy in order to remove this threat. Yet, it's hard to imagine Iran engaging in any diplomacy on any level without assurances that they won't be attacked by Israel, at least while diplomacy is occurring.

Obama will be stuck trying to thread a very sharp needle. Will he sell out Israel in a cynical and totally hypocritical geopolitical power play and demand that they cease what he never would, or would he scrap plans for diplomacy? Unfortunately, one thing is clear. The two beginnings of the Obama Doctrine are going to be difficult to square.