Israel Is Preparing To Attack Iran. What Should Washington Do?
If you thought the biggest news story between now and November 6 was going to be the U.S. presidential election, guess again. It looks like the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to attack Iran’s nuclear program well before election day in the U.S. That is not what the Obama Administration wanted or expected, but Netanyahu and his advisors have bigger concerns than getting the president reelected. Like preventing Iran from using nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map, a threat that Iranian supreme fanatic Ali Khamenei repeated again this week.
As former U.S. diplomat Nicholas Burns observed in a Boston Globe commentary on Thursday, the Obama Administration has been following an approach to Iran similar to that adopted by the administration of George W. Bush: impose tough sanctions while offering to negotiate. The sanctions are definitely biting in Teheran, but so far there’s no sign of movement on the diplomatic front. Meanwhile, Iranian scientists continue assembling the items needed to build Iran’s first nuclear weapons. The Teheran regime periodically puts on a show to demonstrate how much progress it has made in developing ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to Israeli population centers.
Western skeptics are correct in noting that Iran has yet to successfully test a nuclear device, and that even when it does that device probably won’t be suitable for delivery on any of Iran’s existing missiles. But put yourself in Netanyahu’s position. If you were the first prime minister to be born in Israel since the Jewish state was forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and had fought in two wars aimed at destroying that state, would you be prepared to wait indefinitely for diplomacy to produce results? Probably not when your intelligence agencies keep reporting new evidence of progress in the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, and Teheran’s leaders keep saying it is their religious duty to save Palestine “from the clutches of Zionist occupiers.”
So with Washington distracted by the presidential campaign, Netanyahu is accelerating the timetable for taking military action. It isn’t a coincidence that Israel’s new civil-defense chief, Avraham Dichter, served in the same elite commando unit where Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak did. The prime minister is assembling a war cabinet because war is coming. In fact, the outgoing civil-defense chief went into considerable detail this week describing how long a war might last and how Israel has prepared for that eventuality. The main concern is Iran’s missiles, but the way Netanyahu sees it, at least if Israel acts now there’s no danger those missiles will be carrying nuclear warheads.
What should Washington do about the prospect of a yet another war in Southwest Asia shortly after Labor Day?