Ahmadinejad’s Miscalculation
By JERUSALEM POST EDITORIAL
28/08/2010
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad purports to know: Israel, he
reiterated for the umpteenth time last week, is “too weak” to strike
militarily at Iran, and “lacks the courage” to intervene decisively to
thwart Teheran’s steady progress toward the nuclear bomb.
The Iranian president is mistaken. Neither weak nor lacking in courage, Israel
is, rather, temperate, humane and pragmatic. It is also, above all, resolute on
the matter of its survival.
In 1981 it struck, reluctantly, at Iraq’s reactor at Osirak because it
determined that Saddam Hussein, if allowed to achieve the means, was capable of
getting out of bed one morning and deciding, in defiance of any rational
analysis of costs and benefits, to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. In 2007,
it hit Syria’s nascent reactor, again without hubris, clinically preempting a
dire threat from a ruthless enemy.
Israel has thus far chosen not to militarily challenge the mullahs’ march to
the bomb – chosen, that is, not to follow its proven doctrine of preventing
enemies from attaining the means to achieve its demise – because, quite
simply, it has not felt the imperative to do so.
Leaders and the public alike here have been horrified by years of apparent
international indifference to the escalating threat posed to the free world by
the Iranian program.
Iran, after all, has made no secret of its determination to remake the world
order in its fundamentalist, religiously skewed, brutal, misogynistic image. A
nuclear weapons capability would help nicely. Ahmadinejad himself will soon be
setting off on his scandalously permitted annual journey to the UN General
Assembly, there to advise the great powers, led by the United States, to repent
or be damned.
Of late, the US and Europe have led a slightly more robust campaign of economic
sanction, and Israel, with one eye on the Iranian nuclear clock, has quietly
seethed at the wastage of time while publicly applauding efforts at pressure
that it fears may be too little, too late, But, to date, Israel has not felt
that the moment of truth had arrived.
THE LAST few days, however, have seen a flurry of reports suggesting that Israel
has either now made up its mind that it will have to strike at Iran, or that it
is on the point of reaching such a decision. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The
Atlantic recently and basing himself on what he said were interviews with some
40 current and past Israeli decision-makers, asserted “a better than 50
percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”
Goldberg went so far as to claim that the Pentagon has already ordered US
commanders in this region not to shoot down Iran-bound Israeli aircraft they may
encounter in their airspace.
The selection of Yoav Galant to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of the General
Staff has also been widely ascribed, at least in part, to the relevance of
Galant’s ostensibly bold and confident persona in the Iranian context.
“Considering that the coming year is expected to be a year of decisions,”
our own military correspondent Yaakov Katz wrote on Tuesday, “Defense Minister
Ehud Barak felt that he needed someone who would be able to make the decision to
use the IDF if the government were to decide to give the green light for such an
operation.”
Iran is not an easy read for intelligence analysts. Would it strike at Israel if
it got the bomb? Would it seek to avoid an Israeli response by supplying the
capacity to a nonstate actor, that would strike in its stead? Or would it
“merely” use a nuclear capability to remake the regional balance of power to
Israel’s drastic detriment? There are no simple answers to these questions.
And at the same time, the consequences of Israeli military intervention in Iran
are close to unthinkable. For a start, in contrast to Saddam, Iran could both
rebuild and retaliate.