Israeli war drums muted on Iran

There are increasing signs that the threat of military action is receding, for now
Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu
Will he or won't he? The odds are moving away from Netanyahu trying to strike before the US election Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The odds against an Israeli military strike on Iran in the next few months appear to be lengthening, and perhaps the strongest evidence comes from none other than Binyamin Netanyahu, the man who has beaten the war drums loudest over the past few months.

By calling for clear international (read US) 'red lines' containing Iran's nuclear programme, the Israeli prime minister has put the focus back on diplomacy, and given himself a ladder to climb down from his earlier rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Ehud Barak, the defence minister who had claimed that Iran was approaching a 'zone of immunity' beyond which it could not be stopped, is now reported to be against an Israeli attack (£) before the coming US presidential elections.

Consequently, Mike Rogers, the head of the US House intelligence committee returned from a visit to Israel with the conviction that Israel will not launch an attack before the US vote in November. According to The Hill online, the Republican congressman said the Israeli threat had lifted for now, "because I think they believe that maybe after the election they could talk the United States into cooperating".

Such cooperation would be more likely in the event of a Mitt Romney victory in November, and with the poor state of the US economy, that seems increasingly possible. Netanyahu would look particularly foolish if he led Israel into a conflict on its own, just weeks before a close US ally came to power in Washington. The former CIA chief and current Romney adviser, Michael Hayden, was in Israel yesterday echoing the Obama administration message that military action can wait.

Writing in Haaretz, the columnist Amos Harel, notes that Israel Hayom (£) , owned by the American casino magnate and one of Romney's biggest backers, Sheldon Adelson, and which is widely viewed as a Netanyahu mouthpiece, has considerably toned down its coverage of Iran's nuclear programme in recent days. Harel's reading is that Netanyahu and Barak have overplayed their hand in poker terms, and have realised they have damaged Israel's relationship with the US for little or no strategic gain.

David Remnick reports in the current edition (£) of the New Yorker on the substantial lobby in the Israeli security and intelligence agencies who are opposed to unilateral Israeli action this year. The patron saint of the dissidents, the former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, tells Remnick in a particularly striking passage:

After 33 years in the military and intelligence...[y]ou discover it is possible to get dragged into something and then it is hard to explain why it all happened. It's easy to go from being a victim to being an oppressor. You always have to pay attention to your internal moral compass and ask the right questions.

The background to all this is the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the Iranian programme which failed to provide an unambiguous springboard for urgent action. It showed relentless progress, with a rough doubling of the number of centrifuges installed at Fordow, a heavily-protected site dug into the side of a mountain, and the main focus of Israeli and western concern. But the new centrifuges have not been turned on. The number of machines actually producing 20%-enriched uranium (critical because it can relatively easily be turned into weapons grade material) at Fordow has remained constant.

And although IAEA reported that Iran has so far produced near 190 kg of 20%-enriched uranium, (theoretically enough for a warhead if it was further enriched) it has used 71 kg of that total for the production of reactor fuel plates, which are harder to turn into weapons-grade fuel.

As Shashank Joshi argues in an analysis for the Royal United Service Institute, it is questionable whether Barak's 'zone of immunity' idea made much sense in the first place. Fordow is under IAEA safeguards monitoring, so any attempt to "break out" and enrich to weapons grade would be flagged in advance. As there is no sign that Fordow is being fortified any further, the immunity of the programme does not seem to change. The 'zone of immunity' concept, Joshi says, should be 'understood primarily as a rhetorical device', and that rhetoric - this week at least - is sounding increasingly hollow.