To the pro-Israel advocates in the US, Tehran’s attempt to procure a nuclear weapon still perceived as biggest threat.
WASHINGTON — Despite all the threats Israel sees surrounding it, for the delegates assembled Sunday in the packed Washington Convention Center housing the 2013 AIPAC Policy Conference, Iran’s attempt to procure a nuclear weapon(?) still loomed largest.
At the conference, which takes place just weeks before President Barack Obama sets off to Israel for the first foreign trip of his second term, there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that 2013 will be a decisive year for Israel’s security, with dangers lurking north, south and east.
At the opening plenary session of the conference, two leading former US foreign policy officials spoke of their mutual, desired outcome for the Iranian nuclear standoff — prevention — yet offered two distinct views on how to reach it.
Ambassador Dennis Ross, a former Mideast envoy in the Clinton Administration and previously Obama’s top adviser on Iran in the National Security Council, advocated a P5+1 negotiation strategy aimed at a final offer to Iran on uranium enrichment. “It’s time to go to an endgame,” Ross said Sunday morning. The weakness inherent in a step-by-step negotiation strategy, Ross argued, is that “Iranians have been playing the rope-a-dope strategy.”
