by Jonathan Tobin
Jeffrey Goldberg takes nearly 10,000 words in the current Atlantic to ruminate about whether Israel or the United States will ever use force to stop the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons. His answer is that if the United States doesn't act, sooner or later, the Israelis will. No surprise there.
As for whether the Obama administration is capable of launching a strike to forestall Iran from going nuclear, Goldberg professes he is closer to believing that it is possible. That was certainly the intent of many of those in the administration who discussed it with him. But, like much of the spin being delivered by both American and Israeli sources quoted by Goldberg, that strikes me just as likely to be disinformation as not.
Much of the piece centers on whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be forced by circumstances or by his father, the 100-year-old, formidable scholar Benzion Netanyahu, to pull the trigger on Iran. For all of his considerable knowledge of Israel, Goldberg is still stuck on the trope of figuring out how right-wing Bibi is, even though this issue transcends the right/left divide of Israeli politics because it is literally a matter of life and death.
More to the point, the endless speculation about an Israeli strike is at the same time both unhelpful and misleading.
It is unhelpful because, as Shimon Peres seems to be telling Goldberg in the conclusion to his essay, dealing with Iran is America's responsibility, not Israel's. The consequences of an Iranian bomb are enormous for Israel, but they are no less scary for the United States. A nuclear Iran would destabilize the Middle East, start a chain-reaction of nuclear proliferation among other countries in the region, and empower Islamist terrorists. If America stands by and meekly attempts to contain Tehran once it has the bomb, it won't be just international law that won't mean a thing, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out. America's credibility as a great power will be shredded. Putting the onus on Israel to act to save the day also has the unfortunate side effect of lessening the pressure on Obama to face his responsibilities.
Even worse, the impulse to let the Israelis do the dirty work — while the United States and its moderate Arab allies stand by tut-tutting about Likud hardliners as they reap the benefits of a preemptive strike — also creates the illusion that Israel can do just as good a job as America in terms of achieving the military objective. We should not shortchange the Israeli Defense Forces. As history has shown, the Israeli military can do amazing things. But there is simply no comparison between its capabilities and those of the armed forces of the United States. Knocking out or significantly damaging Iran's nuclear facilities is a job for the Americans, not the Israelis.
And for all the bravado that emanates from Israel about its military, not everyone there is all that confident about the IDF's ability to perform such a task. As one Israeli friend pointed out, it is more than optimistic — it is probably delusional — to expect this of a country whose intelligence agencies weren't able to coordinate their efforts to deal effectively with a flotilla of small ships on their way to Hamas-run Gaza; that isn't able to locate and rescue Gilad Shalit in a Hamas hideout only kilometers away from IDF bases; that didn't make mincemeat out of the Lebanese army after it participated in a cross-border murder of an Israeli soldier last week; and whose top army command could go to a general who hired a political consultant to help him campaign for the job. Under these circumstances, many Israelis rightly see America as the world's only hope for preventing the nightmare of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who run that tyrannical regime acquiring a nuclear option.
Rather than wasting time worrying about whether Netanyahu's daddy will shame him into preventing another Holocaust, as Goldberg has done, what is needed now is focusing all our attention on whether Barack Obama has the wisdom — and the guts — to do what needs to be done about Iran.
Jonathan Tobin
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
1 comment:
The IAF quite likely cannot sustain a bombing campaign against Iran - certainly not without overfly rights that would have to come from the US.
But they don't need to. The Israeli Navy, with its Dolphins, and the Israeli strategic rocket forces are more than up to the job - not just of counterforce against Bushehr, but also in the accompanying countervalue strikes that would be required in such an effort.
Make no mistake - Israel is up to the job, Bushehr will not become operational - whatever the lillylivered traitor in the White House things.
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