Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu

George Washington, the first president of the United States whose Farewell Address in 1796 warned against entangling foreign alliances.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veterans for Peace

SUBJECT: You Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu

We members of Veterans for Peace have served in every war since WW II. We know war. And we know when it smells like war. It smells that way now, with drums beating loudly for attacking Iran.

Information offered by the media to "prove" Iran a threat bears an eerie resemblance to the "evidence" ginned up to "justify" war on Iraq -- evidence later described by the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a five-year committee investigation, as "unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent."

The good news this time around is that sane policy toward Israel and Iran can find support in a principled U.S. intelligence community, which has rebuffed attempts to force it to serve up doctored "evidence" to justify war. U.S. intelligence continues to adhere to the unanimous, "high-confidence" judgment, set forth in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007 that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.

(It may be of more than incidental interest to you that both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have openly admitted that the 2007 NIE put the kibosh on U.S.-Israeli plans to strike Iran in 2008.)

We hope you have been adequately briefed on the findings of the November 2011 report on Iran by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Those findings are consistent with the key judgments of the U.S. intelligence community expressed four years earlier. The IAEA report contained no evidence that Iran has yet decided to build nuclear weapons, despite widespread media hype to the contrary.

Needed: Presidential Action

We believe that you have the power to nip the current warmongering in the bud by taking essentially two key steps:

1-Announce publicly that you will not allow the United States to be drawn into war if Israel attacks Iran or provokes hostilities in some other way.

In threatening and planning such attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are assuming you would have no option other than to commit U.S. forces in support of Israel. To assume automatic support from the world's sole remaining superpower is a heady thing and an invitation to adventurism.

We are aware that you have dispatched emissary after emissary to ask the Israelis please not to start a war. We mean no offense to those messengers, but there is very little reason to believe that they are taken seriously.

We are convinced that only a strong public demurral from you personally would have much chance of disabusing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders of the notion that they can expect full American support, no matter how hostilities with Iran begin.

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