Obama Seeks to Cool War Fever While Keeping Up Pressure on Iran

Nobody likely envies the challenge President Barack Obama faces getting his "messaging" right on Iran. He must meet the demands of election-year politics and continue to press Tehran's back to the wall over its nuclear program, all the while avoiding the eruption of a major new Middle East war.

In an NBC interview that aired Sunday, Obama sought to apply a cold compress to the fever of war hysteria that broke out in the media last week over a report that his own Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, believes Israel will start a war with Iran by launching air strikes on its nuclear facilities before June. The Washington Post's David Ignatius reported the views attributed to Panetta, and the media frenzy intensified when Panetta pointedly declined to confirm or deny the report.

Obama, by contrast, told NBC's Matt Lauer he didn't believe that "Israel has made a decision over what they need to do" on the Iran issue, and vowed that "we are going to make sure that we work in lockstep as we proceed to try and solve this, hopefully diplomatically" -- although he added that "all options" remain on the proverbial table. (PHOTOS: Israel Drills for a Missile Strike)

But the picture remains ambiguous since Israel has long insisted that it retains the right to make its own decisions over whether to take military action -- as Obama acknowledged -- and it is not directly involved in any diplomatic negotiations with Iran. Israel's primary contribution to such diplomacy, as currently exists, has been to play the "bad cop" role of threatening military strikes. Its hope is that this would either intimidate Iran into backing down (it hasn't, despite Israel continuously reiterating the threat of military action over the past five years) or at least press the Europeans into adopting harsher sanctions against Iran in order to restrain Israel from launching a war they're desperate to avoid. (On that front, Israel has been remarkably successful.)

Given the alarm signals issuing from Israel in recent weeks, U.S. and other Western officials have reportedly been seeking to persuade the Israelis to desist from launching a military attack. While speculating that Israel might attack by the summer, Panetta also said publicly that "we have indicated our concerns" over that prospect. And in a CBS interview last month, he stated that the Pentagon's priority, in the event of an Israeli strike, would be to protect U.S. troops from any Iranian backlash. One report even alleged that Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told the Israelis on a recent visit that they should not expect the U.S. to fall in behind them if they choose to initiate a war with Iran without coordinating such a step with U.S.

"The administration appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would trigger a strong U.S. response," Ignatius wrote, although he notes that if Israeli cities came under attack, the U.S. commitment to Israel's security would oblige it to come to Israel's defense.(VIDEO: One-Time Nomads in the West Bank Face Eviction)

While Israeli leaders publicly insist that the country must make its own decisions on a matter deemed so vital to its security, Israel's limited tactical ability to mount the sort of sustained air assault required to inflict serious damage on Iran's nuclear infrastructure means that it needs a plausible end-game scenario that won't make things worse. A surprise air strike that did some damage but brought a backlash in which the U.S. stayed largely on the sidelines could be a strategic disaster for Israel. It could leave Israel more isolated, cause international efforts to squeeze Iran to come to an end, and very likely -- as Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned last December -- prompt Iran to go ahead and build nuclear weapons, which it has not yet decided to do.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often argued that the only way to get Iran to back down is to present it with a credible threat of military action for failing to do so. But a threat is only credible if both sides believe it will be acted upon, and the danger is that if Iran chooses to ignore the threat, options are considerably narrow for those making it.(PHOTOS: Heartbreak in the Middle East)

The din created by Israeli saber-rattling, and its echo in the U.S. domestic political arena, has helped shape the Administration's narrative on Iran -- that under President Obama, the U.S. has managed to impose the most punishing sanctions ever imposed on Iran, and garnered the widest support yet for punitive action against the Islamic Republic. Those sanctions are beginning to hurt, and right now the focus should be on strengthening the measures in the hope they force Iran to relent on its nuclear work. In other words, Administration officials argue, sanctions could well succeed and render military action unnecessary. As if to underscore his commitment to tightening the squeeze on Iran economically, President Obama on Monday signed a new executive order impounding all assets of Iran's central bank traded or held in the U.S.