This Jeffrey Goldberg article on the late stage of Iran’s nuclear project, and Israel’s need to stop it before completion, is essential reading. Goldberg has spent a lot of time talking to just about all the major players in Israel, and has come to some sobering conclusions. Such as the fact that if Iran won’t halt it’s nuclear program (it won’t) and Obama doesn’t have the United States (which is far better equipped to make sure a strike actually destroys targeted facilities) launch a strike instead, which seems very unlikely, then Israel will have no choice to strike on their own, and probably sometime in the next 12 months.
Israel perceives (quite correctly) that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapons project is an existential threat, something that could completely destroy the nation in a second shoah. Given that the first shoah happened within living memory, Israel is never going to let that happen. Other Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia have made no secret of the fact that they support a strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, even if it means letting the Israelis do it. Their biggest worry is that Israeli won’t be able to do enough damage to significantly set the mullah’s nuclear ambitions back.
Which is, of course, why many hope Obama will order a U.S. strike. Personally, I see nothing in Obama’s decisions thus far to indicate he actually cares enough about foreign policy in general (at least beyond basking in the approval of “the right kind” of transnational elites), much less the “hard” diplomacy of actually threatening military action, much less carrying through, to see him making a credible threat against the mullahs. Or indeed, of doing anything at all beyond throwing up his hands and saying “We tried!” when toothless UN sanctions fail and the mullah’s detonate their first nuclear device. All of his “outreach” to the Muslim world will prove to be meaningless if the other power-holders in the Middle East believe his resolve is inferior to those of the mullahs and drift into Iran’s orbit out of self-preservation, especially since compromise is viewed as weakness. Arabs respect the powerful and despise the powerless.
It looks like Obama is going to get a another war in the Middle East whether he wants one or not. The only question is whether it will be on his terms, or the mullah’s.
Tags: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jihad
[…] There have been a lot of reactions to the Jeffrey Goldberg piece on the coming Israel attack against Iran’s nuclear weapons program I talked about here. […]