Israelis Grow Confident Strike on Iran’s Nukes Can Work - Bloomberg
For Netanyahu, visits to Uganda are weighted with sadness. It was at the airport in Entebbe that his older brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, was shot dead by a Ugandan soldier. Yonatan was the leader of an Israeli commando team dispatched by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in July 1976 to rescue Jewish hostages held by pro-Palestinian terrorists. The terrorists had diverted an Air France flight to Uganda, where the then-dictator, the infamous Idi Amin, gave them refuge.
The raid was a near-total success. The hijackers were all killed, along with dozens of Ugandan soldiers posted to the airport by Amin to protect the terrorists. Only three hostages died; 102 were rescued. (A fourth was later murdered in a Ugandan hospital.) Yonatan was the only Israeli soldier killed.
In his 2005 visit, Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed by the current president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, who was an anti- Amin guerilla leader at the time of the Entebbe raid. Museveni accompanied Netanyahu to the airport, and unveiled a plaque in his brother’s memory. The Ugandan president told him that the Israeli raid on Entebbe was a turning point in the struggle against Amin. It bolstered the opposition’s spirits and proved to them that Amin was vulnerable. Amin’s government would fall some two and half years later.
Unclothe the Emperor
A widely held assumption about a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is that it would spur Iranian citizens — many of whom appear to despise their rulers — to rally around the regime. But Netanyahu, I’m told, believes a successful raid could unclothe the emperor, emboldening Iran’s citizens to overthrow the regime (as they tried to do, unsuccessfully, in 2009).
You might call this the Museveni Paradigm. It’s one of several arguments I’ve heard in the past week, as I’ve shuttled between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that have convinced me that Israeli national-security officials are considering a pre- emptive strike in the near future.
Last week, I argued that Netanyahu’s campaign to convince the West that Iran’s nuclear program represents a threat — not only to his country but also to the entire Middle East and beyond — has worked so well that it could represent the perfect bluff. After all, on his recent visit to Washington, Netanyahu managed to avoid discussing the Palestinian issue with President Barack Obama, and he heard Obama vow that the U.S. wouldn’t be content to merely contain a nuclear Iran.
After interviewing many people with direct knowledge of internal government thinking, however, I’m highly confident that Netanyahu isn’t bluffing — that he is in fact counting down to the day when he will authorize a strike against a half-dozen or more Iranian nuclear sites.
One reason I’m now more convinced is that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are working hard to convince other members of the Israeli cabinet that a strike might soon be necessary.
But I also heard from Israeli national-security officials a number of best-case scenarios about the consequences of an attack, which suggested to me that they believe they have thought through all the risks — and that they keep coming to the same conclusions.