The Obama administration has been careful not to overstate the report’s conclusions. A senior administration official told reporters yesterday that “[t]he IAEA does not assert that Iran has resumed a full-scale nuclear weapons program nor does it [say] how advanced the programs really are.”

But beyond detailing Iran’s foul play, at least pre-2003, the report shows that after two more years of both targeted and indiscriminate sanctions by the United States, the trajectory of the Iranian nuclear program has not changed. The prospects for a tenable solution remains elusive.

Where do we go from here?

The immediate impulse in Washington will be to opt for more sanctions. Behind closed doors, talks abound about more sabotage, computer viruses and even assassination.

Much can be said about the negative repercussions of indiscriminate sanctions, the questionable ethics of assassinations and the Pandora’s box that is opened by launching cyberwars. But if we focus specifically on the nuclear program, and assume for a moment that the West is behind the recent assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists. Assume, as has been reliably reported, that Israel helped develop the Stuxnet virus which crippled Iranian nuclear machinery the question that must be asked is whether these efforts change facts on the ground in Iran at a faster pace than the progression of the nuclear program itself.

Sanctions targeting the nuclear program have made procurement of material and parts for the nuclear program more difficult. The assassination of key nuclear scientists has been costly to Iran, as has the Stuxnet virus.

Still, these combined efforts still seem to have changed facts on the ground at a less rapid rate than the continued growth of the Iranian program itself; whether it be the growing stockpile of low enriched uranium, the enrichment at 19.75%, or the expansion in Iranian knowledge about these processes and their various applications.

The fact that the Iranians have not retaliated against the assassinations of their scientists raises interesting questions. Is it because Tehran lacks the capability to retaliate? Or is it because the Iranians simply can absorb the pressures from the combined efforts of sanctions, assassinations and sabotage without losing significant momentum? If so, retaliating against the assassinations and risking an escalation may be less attractive to Tehran compared to continuing a status quo where Iran faces painful sanctions, but can still outpace the problems these punitive measures inflict on their program.

A different approach

So if not doubling down on sanctions, how should Washington react to the IAEA report? The report shows that the greatest danger lies in the lack of transparency. During periods of insufficient inspections, the Iranians were engaged in suspect activities.

Rather than sanctions, a solution centered on inspections and verification is more effective in ensuring that Iran won’t divert its program in a military direction. The specific tool in question is the Additional Protocol (AP) to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would significantly enhance the IAEA’s ability to inspect and verify the nature of the Iranian program.

For instance, it would enable the IAEA to install instruments inside Iran’s nuclear facilities that would detect any foul play within 24 hours(compared to the 30-90 days that it would take with the existing tools). It would also enable the IAEA to have a permanent presence in Iran and to conduct un-announced spot checks. Currently, the IAEA can only inspect declared sites and the inspectors have to secure visas before travelling to Iran, giving Tehran ample heads-up.

Washington should make Iran’s adherence to the AP a key objective and devise a plan to reach this objective. A sanctions-centric approach is unlikely to yield the desired results. Even if it did, its value would be questionable since the AP is most efficient when states adhere to it voluntarily and find collaboration with the IAEA beneficial. Forcing the AP onto a state would likely only change the current cat-and-mouse game to a different game of deception.

It is only through a strategy centered on sustained diplomacy — one where instantaneous results are not expected and where the negotiations are insulated from domestic actors in Washington and Tehran who have a stake in the continuation of the status quo — that Iran’s full and effective adherence to the NPT can be achieved. And it is only through transparency on the part of Iran that nuclear diversion can be prevented – and the trust deficit between Iran and the West over this issue can begin to reverse.

Though their campaigns will center on the economy, there are four factors that will drive the GOP to make Iran one of its main foreign policy issues.

First, Iran unites all factions of the Republican Party (save the Ron Paul contingent) at a time when all other major foreign policy issues tend to divide them. For instance, the Republicans have been all over the map on the most important foreign policy development of the year: the Arab Spring.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee criticized Obama for not standing by Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, for instance, while others argued that Obama had been too slow in supporting the demonstrators. The Republican fault lines were even clearer on Obama’s intervention in Libya.

On Iran, however, there is unity. The Republican remedy is simply to up the ante and get tougher — no matter what. Whatever hawkish line Obama adopts, the Republicans will find a way to “outhawk” him. As the memory of the Iraq invasion slowly fades away, Republican strategists calculate, the American public will return to rewarding toughness over wisdom at the ballot boxes.

Second, just as Iran unites the Republicans, it divides the Democrats. As I describe in my forthcoming book on Obama’s Iran diplomacy, “A Single Roll of the Dice,” part of the reason Obama’s engagement with Iran was so short-lived (beyond all the challenges the Iranians themselves presented) was the pressure he faced early on from the Democrat-controlled Congress to abandon diplomacy and pursue sanctions.

Much of it had to do with Congress’ sensitivity to Israeli concerns. And much of it was a reaction to the Iranian government’s brutal human rights abuses following the 2009 election debacle. As a top Obama administration official explained to me, “skepticism in Congress against our strategy turned to outright hostility” after the 2009 elections. Congress’ honeymoon with Obama had not even begun before Democrats abandoned him on Iran.

Third, the Republicans believe that Iran provides an opportunity to portray Obama as weak. Glossing over the many differences between Iran, on the one hand, and Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya on the other, the Republicans will accuse Obama of abandoning the Iranian people by not taking sides in the 2009 election dispute. But with the developments in the Arab world — and Obama’s more interventionist response to those conflicts — the Republicans will argue (mistakenly) that a similar posture by the U.S. in 2009 would have ensured the downfall of the Iranian theocracy.

Moreover, with Iran’s nuclear program progressing in spite of Obama’s limited diplomacy and his crippling, indiscriminate sanctions, the Republicans will present a narrative that states that diplomacy was tried and failed, sanctions are tough but insufficient, and the only remaining option is some form of military action. Yet, Obama has been too weak to pursue that option. According to this (false) narrative, the president’s weakness jeopardizes not only American interests, but also the security of Israel. This narrative, it must be noted, is not so much to provoke military action but to portray Obama as too weak to order it.

Which brings us to the fourth factor, which permeates all the others: Israel. Beyond dividing the Democrats and portraying Obama as weak, focusing on Iran also enables the Republicans to cast Obama as insensitive to Israel. From the very outset, Israel opposed Obama’s diplomacy with Iran.

“We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue … is liable to be interpreted as weakness,” then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni said during an interview with Israel Radio only 24 hours after congratulating President-elect Obama on his historic election victory in 2008. Asked specifically if she supported discussions between the United States and Iran, she left no room for interpretation: “The answer is no,” she declared.

Once Obama took office, Israel consistently pushed back against his engagement policy by calling for artificial deadlines for diplomacy, by pushing for sanctions before talks had begun and by setting unreachable objectives for the diplomacy.

Though Obama eventually adopted the line on Iran favored by Israel, his many clashes with the Netanyahu government over this issue cast a dark shadow over U.S.-Israeli relations that likely will not be undone in time for the elections. And the Republicans are poised to exploit it. Just this week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry took a jab at Obama in an Op-Ed in the Jerusalem Post. “It was a mistake [by] President Obama to distance himself from Israel and seek engagement with the hostile regimes in Syria and Iran,” Perry wrote.

Most likely, Obama will take the bait. Instead of defending his diplomacy and pointing out that no U.S. president has been closer to resolving the nuclear issue than he has, he will likely adopt the line that his limited diplomatic effort paved the way for far greater international buy-in for crippling sanctions than George W. Bush ever managed to secure.

Though this line of argument is technically correct — Obama’s attempt at diplomacy helped unite the permanent members of the Security Council against Iran and prevented Tehran from taking advantage of divisions within the council -– it suffers from several weaknesses.

First, sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy and likely slowed the growth of its nuclear program, but it has not changed Tehran’s strategic calculations or shifted the trajectory of the program. In short, the nuclear clock has kept ticking. This plays straight into the Republican narrative that neither Obama’s diplomacy nor his sanctions have succeeded. With a few more alarmist reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the White House’s spin on having contained Iran will fall apart.

Second, by seeking to play up the hawkish aspects of his Iran policy, the Obama administration line permits the Republicans to set the metrics for success. However hawkish and pro-Israel the White House portrays its policy, there will always be a Republican willing to up the ante even further. If Obama permits hawkishness to be the criteria for success in the Iran debate, then he will set himself up for failure — even if he is technically right.

Democrats have failed in this game before. In the 1990s, Republicans in Congress dismissed the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and forced President Bill Clinton to adopt additional measures, including making “regime change” official U.S. policy and providing funding for the now-disgraced Iraqi “opposition” groups through the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Clinton’s attempts to push back against this pressure by out-hawking the Republicans only helped create a false binary choice between accepting a nuclear Saddam and taking military action. The parallels with developments with Iran today are plenty.

In spite of the Republicans’ recent gains, the candidate that stands the greatest chance of defeating Obama 2012 is Obama ’08. Instead of running away from his record and betraying the foreign policy values he promised to bring to the White House in 2008, Obama should restate the case for diplomacy and point out its benefits and virtues, including the superiority of diplomacy in addressing Iran’s flagrant human rights violations. And point to Iraq to remind the American public of the unacceptability of failure when it comes to diplomacy.

As Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me recently in a sharp reminder of what the end game of the hawks is: “If diplomacy fails and the economic sanctions fail, [then] everybody understands that all options are on the table.”

The Libya experience pointedly shows the fallacy of the neoconservative thesis that talking to your enemies strengthens and legitimizes them. This argument was repeated so frequently during the Bush presidency that it became a truism. The United States shouldn’t talk to North Korea because that would be a concession. It shouldn’t talk to Iran, because Tehran does not deserve our company. And Washington should not talk to the Syrians because that would strengthen Assad’s rule.

Yet Bush did not shun the regime of Gadhafi. The Bush administration itself continued the secret negotiations with Tripoli that had begun under President Bill Clinton. After almost exactly seven years, a deal was struck. Libya gave up its nuclear program and the West began lifting its sanctions.

And it wasn’t just the United States. French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who credits himself for having been the force behind NATO’s decision to intervene in Libya, hosted Gadhafi in Paris in December 2007. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tried to do the same in December 2008. He extended an invitation to Gadhafi to come to London, but a final date for the visit was never secured. 

In fact, almost exactly a year ago, leading neoconservative Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham met with Gadhafi in Tripoli and assured him “that the United States wanted to provide Libya with military equipment.”

Neither these visits, nor the preceding diplomacy, secured Gadhafi from the wrath of his own people. It did not bestow upon his revolting regime a single drop of legitimacy. It simply remained its rotten, corrupt and dictatorial self.

The same was true for the regime of the Shah of Iran and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. The Shah was one of America’s closest allies. President Jimmy Carter toasted the Shah in Tehran on New Year’s Eve 1977, calling Iran an “island of stability” in a troubled Middle East. A year later, following a popular uprising, the Shah’s regime was no more.

Yet for all this experience in the Middle East, neoconservatives continue to assume that America is the universal source of legitimacy. Like King Midas, anything it touches — or talks to — is legitimized and turns into gold. Thus, to talk to another country is to do it a favor. And we should only do favors to our friends. Our enemies, we should defeat by force, not through conversation.

This line of thinking reveals three additional false notions, relevant not just to Libya, but also to the Arab Spring and to U.S. policy toward Iran.

First, that indigenous populations have essentially no ability to bestow legitimacy on their governments. America decides what is legitimate or not for them; they themselves have no say in this. The social contract is not between the populations and their state, but rather, between the state and the government of the United States.

Second, that if the United States ends up talking to an unsavory regime, that act, in and of itself, disenfranchises the local opposition and ensures the survival of the regime. Once Washington bestows legitimacy on the regime by talking to it, the internal opposition is left helpless and powerless. 

Third, that the United States stands at the center of all political analyses. The United States is assumed to be — contrary to all empirical evidence — virtually omnipotent. All other actors are at best reacting to U.S. policy and thinking. There isn’t much distribution of power to speak of — the United States holds (or should hold) most cards, and other states are left fighting for the bread crumbs that fall off Washington’s dinner table.

These assumptions invariably lead to Washington’s knee-jerk instinct to think that the U.S. government always has to do something. And that it is also responsible for almost all developments and outcomes. Taking a step back, observing developments, or showing patience are near treacherous acts according to this mind-set; hence the ferocious criticism of Obama’s handling of the Arab Spring.

As erroneous as this line of thinking is, it resonates strongly among large portions of the American public because it bestows on the United States a form of divine responsibility and strengthens the sense of American exceptionalism. (It is no coincidence that Obama has also been fiercely criticized for his remarks on the very phrase.) And it tends to win support among disgruntled exiled opposition groups as well because it provides them with an opportunity to exonerate themselves of any responsibility for independent leadership while putting additional responsibility on America’s shoulders.

Even the outcome in Libya ultimately shows that America’s ability to drive events in lands far away is limited at best. But shunning dialogue and diplomacy on the theory that we do our enemies a favor by talking to them only limits that influence further.

“If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Obama will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack,” Goldberg writes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Goldberg’s description, is a man whose back is against the wall. He cannot accommodate the Obama administration on the Palestinian issue because that would upset his 100-year-old father, and he cannot afford to have faith in Obama’s strategy to prevent a nuclear Iran through peaceful means because the threat from Iran is “existential.”

Goldberg interviewed roughly 40 former and current Israeli officials for his piece. Although his access to Israeli officials certainly doesn’t seem to be lacking, the same cannot be said about his treatment of the assumptions behind the Israeli talking points.

The most critical assumption that Israeli officials have presented publicly for the past 18 years — long before the firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepped on the scene — is that the Iranian government is irrational and that Iran constitutes an existential threat to Israel.

These departing points in the Israeli analysis eliminate all options on Iran with the exception of preventive military action. An adversary who isn’t rational cannot be deterred or contained, because such an actor — by definition — does not make decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis. In addition, if the foe is presented as an existential threat, then preventive action is the sole rational response. These Israeli assumptions short-cut the entire policy process and skip all the steps that normally are taken before a state determines that force is necessary.

Judging by Israel’s rhetoric, it is easy to conclude that these beliefs are genuinely held as undisputable truths by the Israeli security apparatus.

But if judged by its actions rather than its rhetoric, a very different image emerges — one that shows an astute Israeli appreciation for the complexity of Iran’s security calculations and decision-making processes, and a recognition that conventional arguments are insufficient to convince Washington to view Iran from an Israeli lens.

Goldberg mentions in his article that the Jewish people and the Iranians have a long and common history. It is a history that has been overwhelmingly positive until recently. Iran is still home to the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel itself, and the Jewish community’s impact on Iranian culture, politics and society runs deep.

In modern times, a strong security relationship developed between these two non-Arab states due to their sense of common threats — primarily strong Arab nationalist states such as Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, as well as the Soviet Union (which, besides its own designs on the region, was the military backer of these Arab powers).

From the Israeli perspective, this relationship was strategic. The periphery doctrine put in place by David Ben Gurion dictated that Israel’s security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the region’s periphery to balance the Arab states in Israel’s vicinity. Iran was the most important periphery power, due to its strength and its coveted energy resources.

For the Shah of Iran, however, the relationship was at best a marriage of convenience. An alliance with Israel was needed to balance the Arabs, but only until Iran was strong enough to befriend the Arabs from a position of strength. “If Iran becomes strong enough to be able to deal with the situation [in the region] all by itself, and its relationship with the United States becomes so solidified so that you won’t need [Israel], then strategically the direction was to gravitate to the Arabs,” Gholam-Reza Afkhami, a former advisor to the Shah, told me in 2004.

In spite of the different value that Iran and Israel ascribed to their relationship, geopolitical factors ensured that it was kept intact — even after the Islamic fundamentalists took power in Iran through the 1979 revolution.

Goldberg’s lengthy essay fails to recognize that throughout the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian government’s venomous rhetoric against Israel and its anti-Israeli ideology, the Jewish state sought to retain relations with Iran and actively aided Iran in the Iraq-Iran war. Only three days after Iraqi troops entered Iranian territory, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan interrupted a private visit to Vienna to hold a press conference to urge the United States — in the middle of the hostage crisis — to forget the past and help Iran keep up its defenses.

From Israel’s perspective, an Iraqi victory would have been disastrous due to the boost it would give the Arab bloc against Israel. By aiding Iran, Israel hoped to prove to the new rulers in Iran the strategic utility of continuing the Iranian-Israeli security collaboration.

Key to this was convincing Washington to engage with Iran. This desire eventually climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal — an Israeli initiative led by Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin aimed at bringing the U.S. and Israel into a “broader strategic relationship with Iran.” American neoconservatives at the time aided the Israeli effort to lobby the U.S. to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and to ignore Iran’s venomous rhetoric against the Jewish state.

In 1982, Ariel Sharon (then Israel’s defense minister) proudly announced on NBC that Israel would continue to sell arms to Iran — in spite of an American ban on such sales. This occurred while Iran routinely introduced resolutions to expel Israel from the United Nations — to which the Israelis responded by selling more arms to the Khomeini regime.

With the end of the Cold War came the end of Israeli overtures to Iran. The defeat of Iraq in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated the two common threats that had formed the basis for any Israeli-Iranian collaboration. Though this improved the security environments of both Iran and Israel, it also left both states unchecked. Without Iraq balancing Iran, Tehran could now become a threat, Israeli strategists began to argue. Combined with efforts to define a new order for the region, Iran and Israel were thrown into a strategic rivalry that has continued and intensified till today.

It was at this time, in late 1992, that Israeli Labor Party officials began to publicly depict Iran as an existential threat. Rhetoric reflected intentions and, having been freed from the chains of Iraq, Iran was acquiring the capacity to turn intentions into policy, they argued. The charge was led, incidentally, by Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, who only five years earlier had advised Washington to disregard the rhetoric of the mullahs and view Iran as an opportunity rather than a threat. “Death is at our doorstep,” Rabin concluded in 1993 of the Iranian threat, though only five years earlier he had maintained that Iran was a strategic ally.

But it wasn’t new Iranian capabilities or a sudden discovery of Iran’s anti-Israeli rhetoric that prompted the depiction of Iran as an existential threat. Rather, it was the fear that in the new post-Cold War environment in which Israel had lost much of its strategic significance to Washington, improved relations between the US and Iran could come at the expense of Israeli security interests. Iran would become emboldened and the U.S. would no longer seek to contain its growth. The balance of power would shift from Israel towards Iran and the Jewish state would no longer be able to rely on Washington to control Tehran. “The Great Satan will make up with Iran and forget about Israel,” Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University in Israel told me during a visit to Jerusalem.

While this Israeli fear of abandonment was poorly understood in Washington at the time and believed to be exaggerated, the rationale for Israel’s concerns has grown significantly over the years due to disagreements with the U.S. on what the ultimate American red line on Iran’s nuclear program should be.

During the Bush administration, no daylight could be detected between Washington and Tel Aviv’s positions — enrichment in Iran was not acceptable, period. The Obama administration has been much more ambiguous on this point, however, fueling fears in Israel that America would ultimately — within a larger settlement with Tehran — accept enrichment on Iranian soil under strict international inspections.

This has, understandably, fueled more Israeli wariness of Obama’s engagement policy with Iran, leaving the Jewish state fearing the success of diplomacy more than its failure, since success by American standards would not qualify as success by Israeli standards.

Two days after President Obama’s election victory in November 2008, then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed her categorical opposition to U.S. engagement with Iran.  “We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue — in a situation where you have brought sanctions, and you then shift to dialogue — is liable to be interpreted as weakness,” Livni told Israel Radio. Asked if she supported any U.S. dialogue with Iran, Livni replied in no uncertain terms: “The answer is no.”

A year later, on the eve of sensitive negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva on a fuel swap aimed at removing 1,200 kilograms of low enriched uranium from Iran, Defense Minister Ehud Barak expressed his fears that anything less than a total halt to uranium enrichment would still leave the possibility of Iran making bomb material. “Not only should enriched material be removed, but enrichment must be stopped in Iran,” Barak said. He added that diplomacy must be given only a “short and defined” time before “serious and immediate” sanctions are imposed on Iran.

The Obama administration was angered by Barak’s statement, according to Israeli papers, but it also revealed the real fear of the Israelis — that successful diplomacy would lead to an agreement between the U.S. and Iran that would limit but not end Iran’s nuclear program while leaving Israel alone in facing the Iranian challenge. Iran’s strengthened position in the region would be recognized by Washington, legitimizing the shift in the balance of power in Iran’s favor and ending American efforts to reverse that shift.

Even an Iran that doesn’t have nuclear weapons but that can build them would damage Israel’s ability to deter militant Palestinian and Lebanese organizations. It would damage the image of Israel as the sole nuclear-armed state in the region and undercut the myth of its invincibility. Gone would be the days when Israel’s military supremacy would enable it to dictate the parameters of peace and pursue unilateral peace plans.

This could force Israel to accept territorial compromises with its neighbors in order to deprive Iran of points of hostility that it could use against the Jewish state. Israel simply would not be able to afford a nuclear rivalry with Iran and continued territorial disputes with the Arabs at the same time.

However problematic this scenario would be for Israel, it does not constitute an existential threat. Presenting it as such may have the benefit of pressuring the U.S. not to engage with Iran in the first place, or at a minimum create hurdles to ensure that diplomacy doesn’t lead to any U.S.-Iran agreement. But that is not the same as declaring that the Israelis truly believe Iran to be an existential threat, as Goldberg argues.

In fact, several senior Israeli officials have rejected that claim and pointed out the risks it puts Israel under. For instance, Barak told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in September 2009 that “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel.”  A few years earlier, Haaretz revealed that in internal discussions, then-Foreign Minister Livni argued against the idea that a nuclear Iran would constitute an existential threat to Israel. This past summer in Israel, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi told me the same thing and pointed out that speaking of Iran as an existential threat exaggerates Iran’s power and leaves the false — and dangerous — impression that Israel is helpless and vulnerable.

This echoed what Halevi told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in 2007. “[Iran] is not an existential threat. It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel — at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible,” he said.

Rather than a factual, critical presentation of where Israel currently stands on Iran and why, Goldberg’s article is perhaps better understood as the starting salvo in a long-term campaign to create the necessary conditions for a future war with Iran.

Whether characterizing it as “mainstreaming war with Iran” or “making aggression respectable,” Goldberg’s article serves to create a false narrative that claims that the two failed meetings held between the U.S. and Iran last October constitute an exhaustion of diplomacy, that deems the Obama administration’s crippling, indiscriminate sanctions on Iran a failure only weeks after they’ve been imposed, and that then leaves only one option remaining on the table: an American or Israeli military strike. And on top of that, if President Obama doesn’t green light a bombing campaign, Israel will have no choice but to bomb itself, even though it isn’t well-equipped to do so, according to Goldberg.

It is important to note that the aim of this unfolding campaign may not be to pressure Obama into military action. It could just as much serve to portray Obama as weak and indecisive on national security issues that are of grave concern to the U.S. and that are of existential nature to Israel. This portrayal will give the Republicans valuable ammunition for the November congressional elections as well as for the 2012 presidential race.

Indeed, the likely political motivation for this unfolding campaign should not be underestimated. Just as much that the building blocks of the Iraq war were put into place under the Clinton years — most importantly with the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 — serious preparation for selling an Iran war to the American public under a Republican president (Palin?) in 2013 must be undertaken now, both to establish the narrative for that sell and to use the narrative to remove any obstacles in the White House along the way.

What is lost in this shadow discussion that only pays lip service to the repercussions of war is the impact any military campaign — or the mere constant speculation of military strikes — will have for the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy and human rights.

Iranian activists have warned that even raising the specter of war undercuts the opposition in Iran. In the words of the prominent Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, “Since Iranians, in particular opposition groups, do not want to see a repeat of Afghanistan or Iraq in Iran, they’ve actually had to scale back their opposition to the government [during the Bush administration] in order not to encourage an invasion [by the U.S.]“

The Obama administration’s less bellicose approach to Iran provided space to the pro-democracy movement that Iranian activists were quick to seize upon in 2009. “The mere fact that Obama didn’t make military threats made the Green Movement possible,” Ganji said. “A military attack would destroy all of that.”

If Goldberg’s article is the starting salvo of a campaign that does not take into consideration the existential threat this constitutes to the Iranian pro-democracy movement, and that aims to push out Obama and push in a Republican president amenable to a U.S. war against Iran for the sake of avoiding an Israeli war against Iran, then the risk of war in the short term may not be as great as Goldberg claims.

But the long-term risk of a war that is boldly framed as a test of an American president’s commitment to Israel should not be easily dismissed.