Buried within James Risen's interesting New York Times front-pager about the easing of Iran tensions is an even more interesting story about the deep weirdness that is going on within Israel's national security establishment on Iran: 

At the same time in Israel, the conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been rocked by a series of public comments from current and former Israeli military and intelligence officials questioning the wisdom of attacking Iran.

The latest comments came from Yuval Diskin, the former chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who on Friday said Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should not be trusted to determine policy on Iran. He said the judgments of both men have been clouded by “messianic feelings.” Mr. Diskin, who was chief of Shin Bet until last year, said an attack against Iran might cause it to speed up its nuclear program.

Just days before, Israel’s army chief of staff suggested in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the the Iranian threat was not quite as imminent as Mr. Netanyahu has portrayed it. In his comments, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz suggested that he agreed with the intelligence assessments of the United States that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile,” General Gantz told Haaretz. He suggested that the crisis may not come to a head this year. But he said, “Clearly, the more the Iranians progress, the worse the situation is.”

Last month, Meir Dagan, the former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, said he did not advocate a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program anytime soon. In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Dagan said the Iranian government was “a very rational one,” and that Iranian officials were “considering all the implications of their actions.”

As someone who thought the Iran rhetoric coming from Jerusalem was decidedly overheated, I nevertheless have more mixed feelings about these developments than, say, Peter Beinart.  What's disturbing is that even though Israel's actual opposition party is evincing many of the same sentiments as the former military officers quoted above, they are not the ones moving the policy debate -- it's the ex-military/intel guys. 

That's a problem.  As much as candidates for higher office like to talk about "consulting the commanders on the ground" and the like, big decisions about national security policy should be the province of elected leaders.  Civilians need to be in control of these decisions -- the moment that elected leaders give up this control, then the voters have forfeited the most vital decisions of a republic.  This is why, in the United States, one of the rare sources of continuing bipartisan agreement is that when military commanders voice their policy opinions to the press in a way that contradicts the President, they need to be canned. 

Now, recently retired military and intelligence officials are in a slightly different category, but there's still a danger here.  I respect that these ;people should have a voice, particularly if they feel their country is on the precipice of a policy disaster -- but should their voice be louder than that of the main opposition party?  I don't think so, and it's a sign that there's a problem with Israeli democracy if that's the case.  I don't think this is entirely the fault of ex-IDF and Shin Bet leaders, mind you -- Netanyahu and Barak are part of the problem as well.  Still, at least the latter people won elections and must go back to the voters again. 

Developing... in a  very problematic manner. 

Barack Obama addressed AIPAC yesterday in anticipation of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington, which has led to some interesting responses.  There's something in Carol Lee and Jay Solomon's Wall Street Journal write-up that is worth considering in more detail, however: 

Mr. Obama's efforts to recalibrate the administration's position—cooling talk of war while nodding to the concerns of hawks such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—won some applause, including from the Israeli leader. Some of Israel's strongest backers on Capitol Hill weren't appeased, however.

"I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say," Mr. Obama said Sunday at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Washington's most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group....

By clarifying the administration's willingness to use force, the White House also hopes to lessen the chance Mr. Netanyahu will order a unilateral strike.

Mr. Netanyahu, who arrived in Washington on Sunday, praised Mr. Obama's speech and said it was an important step in unifying the U.S. and Israeli positions on Iran. "I appreciated the fact that he said that Israel must be able to defend itself, by itself, against any threat," he said in a written statement.

Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, said the speech was "a step in the right direction," but that "we need to make sure that this president is also going to stand by Israel and not allow his administration to somehow speak contrary to what our ally thinks is in its best interest." (emphasis added)

Now, this bolded part of the quote is quite extraordinary, if you think about it.  Apparently, Cantor's standard with respect to American policy towards Israel is that the U.S. government cannot and should not contradict anything that Israel's government says.  What's good for Israel's national interests -- as defined solely by Israel -- serves American interests as well. 

Step back for a second and ask yourself if this is true of any other U.S. ally.  A NATO member?  Nah, we disagree with them all the time.  Japan?  Nope, there was a pretty bruising fight with that country's government on Okinawa bases just a few years ago.  Canada?  Hell, Mitt Romney pretty much made it clear that the U.S. is gonna get Canada's oil and I heard nary a peep of criticism from the GOP foreign policy establishment.  I can't think of a Latin American, Pacific Rim or Central Asian ally that meets this criteria. 

A few months ago, I asked whether, in the eyes of some, Israel was now the most super-special ally we have.  I think statements like Cantor's are an excellent signal that the answer appears to be yes.  So I hereby propose the following definition:  if a prominent U.S. official or foreign policy commentator proposes a standard for U.S. policy towards Israel that would never be used for any other U.S. ally or treaty partner, then they have gone the full Cantor. 

With the AIPAC conference going on this week, I hereby summon my readers to alert me to any further statements or criticisms that suggest the U.S. alliance with Israel is in a super-special, unique category that No Other Allies can join.   

Congratulations to Reuters' Douglas Hamilton for winning this week's Vizzini Award.  The award, for new readers of the blog, goes to someone who uses a term of phrase that clearly does not mean what they think it means. 

From Hamilton's Jerusalem dispatch:

If Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday.

Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness. (emphasis added)

Now, there is a purely short-sighted short-term geopolitical logic out there to justify a stalwart defense of Hosni Mubarak.  Claiming that support for legitimate Egyptian demands is an example of "political correctness" seems, well, completely and totally wrong-headed.  The most one could say that the United States is now in the semi-awkward position  of honoring its own high-powered rhetoric on democracy in the Middle East.  

Even from a strictly realpolitik perspective, however, I'm not sure exactly what Israeli pundits think could be gained from backing Mubarak to the hilt.  Before his Friday speech, most Obama administration statements were at least mildly supportive, calling the Egyptian government "stable" and denying that Mubarak  was a "dictator."  Mubarak's disastrous Friday address, however, dramatically raised the policy costs of backing a crackdown (not to mention that I'm not sure the Egyptian army could have pulled it off anyway).    As Steve Walt notes on his blog: 

To maximize their own security, states want allies that are strong, stable, and that do not cause major strategic problems for them (i.e., by getting into counterproductive quarrels with others). Other things being equal, states are better off if they don't have to worry about their allies' internal stability, and if an allied government enjoys considerable support among its population. An ally that is internally divided, whose government is corrupt or illegitimate, or that is disliked by lots of other countries is ipso facto less valuable than one whose population is unified, whose government is legitimate, and that enjoys lots of international support. For this reason, even a staunch realist would prefer allies that were neither internally fragile nor international pariahs, while recognizing that sometimes you have to work with what you have.

Or, to quote Michael Clayton, "there's no play here." 

This story is still interesting, however, because it certainly represents a data point against the Israel Lobby argument for American foreign policy.  Scanning this good Washington Post write-up from Karen DeYoung, what's interesing is the dog that isn't barking -- namely, not one mention of Israel.   

I suspect this is partly because the prospect of Arab democracy causes a serioius split between Israeli strategists and neoconservative supporters in the United States.  Or it could be because, you know, the explanatory power of the Israel Lobby thesis has been vastly exaggerated. 

UPDATE:  I see that Geneive Abdo argues over at the Middle East Channel that Egypt 2011 is not like Iran 1978/79.  Meanwhile, for another data point that neoconservatives are splitting from Israeli strategists, consider this Max Boot post:

I am hardly one to romanticize ElBaradei or to underestimate the difficulties of dealing with him. But what do his critics propose we do anyway?

Encourage Mubarak to kill lots of demonstrators to stay in power? Because at this point, that is probably what it would take for Mubarak to remain as president. Yet it is not even clear at this juncture that he could employ violence to save himself, given the fact that the Egyptian army has announced it will not fire on the demonstrators.

So what should the U.S. do? Demand that ElBaradei step down as the leader of the protest movement? Any such demand would be laughed off by the demonstrators, who are certainly not going to let their tune be called by Washington. Whom, at any rate, would we want to replace ElBaradei? There is not exactly a surfeit of well-respected liberal leaders, which is why ElBaradei was able to become the leader of the anti-Mubarak movement after having spent decades away from Egypt.

Perhaps we should demand that ElBaradei disassociate himself from the Muslim Brotherhood? Again, such a demand would be ignored, and probably rightly so. It is hard to see how any figure can claim to represent all the protesters without also speaking on behalf of the Brotherhood, which is the country’s largest and best-organized nongovernmental organization.

From Steve Walt: 

For some reason, AIPAC didn't invite me to speak at its policy conference this year.

Philip Weiss posts today about an old bloggingheads exchange I had with Henry Farrell as follows: 

The Boston Globe has a little piece following up the bogus controversy started by Jonathan Chait when he wrote that Steve Walt did not hurt his career by writing, The Israel Lobby. Chait is wrong, and either foolishly misleading, or fraudulently so. A statement on this matter from the New Republic, which called Walt an antisemite, has the same authority as, say, Roy Cohn's opinion on whether there was a blacklist in Hollywood. Now Daniel Drezner has taken up the issue, in a further motion of deceiving the public about the power of the Israel lobby.

Some day maybe I'll tell these academics about New York journalism...

Weiss doesn't have any contact information on his blog, so I'll just ask him here.  Please do tell me about New York journalism.  Seriously.  I want to know what evidence Weiss has for his claims beyond mere assertion. 

And, in the process, I'd love for Weiss to describe exactly what I said in my bloggingheads exchange that was, "a further motion of deceiving the public about the power of the Israel lobby."  He seems to think that I was refuting the notion that The Israel Lobby cost Walt a DC job.  I'm pretty sure I said that Walt not getting a DC job is an overdetermined outcome, of which publishing The Israel Lobby is certainly one viable explanation.  Weiss' evidence for this explanation, a quote from Walt, is not particularly persuasive.  There are many other explanations, some of which might be less flattering to my esteemed co-blogger. 

Some day, maybe, I'll tell those New York journalists about the academic-policymaker pipeline...   

As much as I love doing bloggingheads, this is the second time in two months someone has twisted what I said way out in one of those diavlogs of context.  I attribute this to be an occupational hazard of moving to Foreignpolicy.com. 

Damn you, Moises Naim!!  Damn you to hell!!!