By AMY R KAUFMAN
http://www.jewishreview.org/local/AIPAC-crowd-sees-Iran-threat
article created on: 2009-04-01T00:00:00
A sellout crowd of more than 350 attended the Oregon AIPAC Community Dinner at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center March 29.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski; Secretary of State Kate Brown; Attorney Gen. John Kroger; U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.); Sen. Richard Devlin, Senate Majority Leader; and 22 other elected officials attended or were represented at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee dinner. The audience included Portland rabbis; pastors and other representatives of the Christian community; students from Oregon State University, Portland State University, University of Oregon, Lewis and Clark and Willamette University; and about 40 soldiers and friends of the Israel Defense Force.
Award-winning columnist Peter Beinart, a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations and editor-at-large of the New Republic, said in his keynote address, “The central work for AIPAC is to make sure Obama and Netanyahu both succeed in their goal of preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
Although he said Iran “is at the top of both their agendas,” he described the leaders in terms of a typical movie theme: “two guys, complete opposites, who don’t like each other and have limited time to catch a bad guy together.”
“Potentially, Obama and Netanyahu can be great allies in this effort,” he said.
Beinart said one reason Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu “worked so hard” to achieve a partnership with Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s Labor party is that, “given what Israel may have to do in the future, he needs a stronger base of support.”
According to Beinart, “Netanyahu is preparing for the day he goes to the Oval Office and says to Obama, ‘Israel needs to take military action against Iran, and we need your support.’ … Obama knows that military conflict can lead to terrorist acts against the United States, and he hopes Netanyahu never has to have that conversation because he can resolve it diplomatically.”
He said Israelis are “increasingly pessimistic about Iran, more so than (are Jews) in the U.S. The clock in Jerusalem is ticking faster than in Washington.”
Beinart said Obama “has a keen interest in putting Iran at the center of Middle East diplomacy.”
He said he believes the president “made an appeal to the people of Iran in the belief that having done that gives the U.S. a greater ability to ask for another round of sanctions.”
“Obama sees a grave threat in the domino effect … with unstable governments like Iraq getting nuclear weapons,” he said. “Were Obama to preside over Iran getting nuclear weapons, it would threaten him because he would seem weak.”
He said at this point the best hope of containing Iran’s nuclear capability is to “freeze” its nuclear program in the short term through intrusive inspections and try “to outlive this government,” which may be replaced in the June elections. He said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “very unpopular with his own people, who are fairly Westernized.”
Zack Bodner, Pacific Northwest regional director of AIPAC, depicted the composite threats to Israel.
“Hamas is running things like the Taliban. To the north, Hezbollah has four times more arms than it had, and now it