By Hannes Artens

With merely a month to go until the Obama administration will have to helm the West's more or less united front against Iranian nuclear enrichment a fierce struggle for posts, policies and priorities of/in the Obama team is raging behind the Washington scenes. Far from brought to a conclusion, let alone a policy cast in stone, the world - Tehran and Jerusalem in particular - is trying to figure out what direction the new president will follow, whether his approach will be a more conciliatory one, defined by dialogue, engagement, and an unprecedented reaching out, or rather a continuation of W.'s ham fisted cluelessness with alternating variations of speaking softly and martial rhetoric. A nut almost as hard to crack as to decode Tehran's often contradictory signs and to discern its true nuclear ambitions.

The more so as matters are not so simple. As usual, the American media wallows in simplifications and exaggerations they believe their sheepish audience appreciates: carrots and/or sticks, hawks vs. doves, a boxing match between Thomas Pickering and Dennis Ross and who wins either hosts Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for dinner at the White House or bombs the odious mullahs back into the stone age. A world view as black-and-white dominated as the one we thought we had just trashed in the dustbin of history. And one that could not be less in line with realities on the ground. In the real world outside the Situation Room the battle lines within the Obama team are far from clearly drawn and what at first sight appears a kneeling down before the neocon altar of warmongers might emerge as a smart move and a win for diplomacy on the long run. A good case in point is the "nuclear umbrella" for Israel the Obama team deliberately leaked to the press last week.

At first, let us determine the initial situation. Mark Fitzpatrick, who just compiled a 100-page report for the London-based Institute for International Strategic Studies on Iran's nuclear program, predicts that "during 2009, Iran will probably reach the point at which it has produced the amount of low-enriched uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb." Given the pace at which Iranian scientists add uranium gas enrichment centrifuges in Natanz this estimation seems fairly realistic and coincides with other similar studies so that we can accept it as a fact: in 2010 at the latest, Iran will have acquired the capacity to theoretically (sic!) produce a nuclear warhead for its missiles.

But, and this factor is more important than any timeline, Fitzpatrick adds, "being able to enrich uranium is not the same as having a nuclear weapon." The mere capacity to theoretically produce a nuclear weapon does not violate a comma of the NPT, it would put Iran on the same level as Germany, Japan, or Canada. The jackpot-question is, does Iran want to convert this knowledge into building a nuclear arsenal? Here my humble self, Trita Parsi, Ray Takeyh and others have argued for a year and a day that Iran wants to acquire this capacity to use it as a bargaining tool in negotiations with the US, but does not intend to violate the NPT and actually develop a nuclear weapon.

Before drawing conclusions from this assessment, let us identify another fact. As of now, it seems that former "Clintonistas," most with long-time established links to AIPAC and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) - one of its mouthpieces - will dominate the Obama foreign policy team. The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss does an excellent job in unraveling the various networks of think tanks that connect Obama hopefuls with notorious Iran hawks and in highlighting how outfits like WINEP, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) even enable neocon crusaders like Patrick Clawson, Michael Rubin and Michael Makovsky to influence America's future Iran policy via the Coats-Robb report, "Meeting the Challenge," endorsed by Dennis Ross and the increasingly appalling Tom Daschle, and warned against here at the Agonist a month ago.

A third fact we can establish beyond doubt is that no matter what additional sanctions the West imposes, they won't deliver desired results. Never in the history of international relations have sanctions led a regime to yield, almost always they have triggered a "rally around the flag" effect among the general populace. This is the more true for Iran, where sanctions provide President Ahmadinejad with a welcome excuse to cloak his economic incompetence and the rampant corruption inherent in the Iranians system behind never-ending "blame the Great Satan" rhetoric.

Where does that leave us? With an Iran playing with loaded chips and seemingly hell-bent on bidding up to strength to exhaust the NPT to the max in order to force ever more concessions from the international community. With a president-elect who appears honestly committed to reaching out to Iran but as of now has left us in the dark on how his approach will differ from the carrots and sticks the EU-3 have unsuccessfully held out to Tehran for years. And last but perhaps most crucial, with a deeply divided US foreign policy establishment, in which hawks and AIPAC water boys seem to have won the upper hand.

Now, given this background, the security guarantee for Israel the Obama team ventilated last week, the so called "nuclear umbrella" of threatened massive nuclear retaliation if Iran were to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon, could be interpreted as an accommodation of the AIPAC hawks, as a carte blanche for Israel to continue playing the Middle East's strong man with American blessing and protection, as Sean-Paul fears. True, but it could also be interpreted differently. On the long run it might emerge as a true game changer, one I have called for for years.

First, it only states the obvious. That the Iranian regime would be annihilated after a nuclear attack on Israel is a no brainer. One the Iranian leaders are aware of and hence would have never dared anyway. Second, it is a one hundred percent departure from the Bush administration's idiotic zero enrichment doctrine. It not only recognizes Iranian nuclear enrichment as inevitable and in accordance with international treaty law, but tacitly allows for the above explained nuclear capacity to theoretically easily produce a nuclear warhead the Iranians aspire. Third, it could muzzle AIPAC, the self-declared defender of Israel, with the argument that Israel's protection is sufficiently taken care of (at least to the extent it was during the Cold War when Tel Aviv was on Soviet target lists). Forth, it actually could put hawks in Israel on the short leash. With an official obligation to come to Israel's defense, President Obama won't allow any Israeli hotheads to act as the 21st century's Curtis LeMays and trepan the United States into a nuclear war with unilateral and uncoordinated aerial strikes. With the stakes raised to nuclear destruction any reckless Israeli going-it-alone, if gone up against with vim from the Oval Office, should be off the table.

Fifth, it would significantly reduce the threat potential and thus the leverage Iran could bring to bear in negotiations. For almost a decade now an Iran with an even theoretical nuclear capacity was perceived as the ultimate boogey man, the irrational mullah state ruled by religious fanatics whose hand on the doomsday weapon would no doubt bring mankind one step closer to the abyss. Reduce the threat potential of this scenario by hedging your bets, i. e. by imposing a regime of assured destruction, and Iran will have to sit down at the green table with a much weaker hand. By conceding Iran the knowledge how to produce such a weapon, not the bomb itself, and thus allowing it the same rights any developed non-nuclear weapons state enjoys under the NPT, Iran also could no longer claim to be treated unfairly and would have to show by deeds, not only words, that it will live up to the obligations and responsibilities that come with such a privilege.

In sum, I believe, such a "nuclear umbrella," a security guarantee for Israel the United States has implicitly given anyway all these years, might under the most advantageous of all circumstances take Israel and AIPAC out of the equation and smooth the path towards serious negotiations that will have to tackle the real issue behind the US-Iranian standoff: future hegemony over the Persian Gulf and its oil reserves. Here, both sides will have to show their colors of what their true motives and positions are. But at least the AIPAC hawks will then no longer be able to allege Israel's security as a pretext.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.