Making START a Jewish issue

I covered yesterday’s meeting between Israel’s military chief of staff, Gaby Ashkenazi, and his Pentagon counterpart, Adm. Mike Mullen. 

Mullen emphasized that the Obama administration still believed in sanctions and engagement as a means of getting Iran to stand down from its nuclear ambitions — enough for a brief, but I told a colleague that "the real news today has nothing to do with Israel."

That’s because, in an unusual political jab for the top soldier, Mullen took a reporter’s bait and lashed out at congressional Republicans for all but killing ratification of the renegotiated START nuclear compliance treaty:

I am extremely concerned that we — next month, I think it’s on the 5th of December, we will be without a treaty with Russia for one year. And the Russians and the United States possess 90 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world. And we have shown historically that the ability to agree on a treaty, obviously have it ratified, creates an incredibly important deterrent effect for these catastrophic weapons. And I think it’s critical that we move forward as rapidly as we can. 

I’m very comfortable with our military capability that’s represented in this treaty. I’m very comfortable with the verification piece. In particular, there was a very focused effort throughout this program and budget cycle to invest billions in our nuclear infrastructure, which had heretofore not been invested in recently, to modernize it, which is also a critical part here. 

So every part of this that people have concerns about have been addressed. The military leadership across the board in the United States military supports moving forward with this treaty, and I hope we can do it as rapidly as possible. 

I may have been wrong about it having nothing to do with Israel. The National Jewish Democratic Council issued an action alert tonight saying that ratification is, in fact, critical to containing Iran:

The arms reduction and verification aspects are plenty important. But what passing START will mean for the improving U.S.-Russia relationship – and our joint cooperation on confronting Iran – is even more crucial. As scholar Michael O’Hanlon noted yesterday in listing the reasons to pass START, ‘Most of all, the U.S.-Russia relationship is now helping apply greater pressure on Iran. Moscow has agreed to far tighter United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran’s high-technology trade, and it recently refused to sell Tehran advanced surface-to-air missiles.’ 

Can anyone deny that Russian cooperation is essential to ensuring a nuclear-free Iran? Can anyone deny that not passing START will be a dramatic blow to U.S.-Russian relations – and a disaster in terms of our Iran policy? Where is the outcry? Our actions – in this case, our action or inaction on START – will have profoundly important repercussions. 

The time has come for those in the American Jewish community who care deeply about confronting Iran to help pass START now. We can do no less, and we have no time to wait. We must lend our voices to the debate now.