WORLD VIEW:The existential fear of Iran among Israel's decision-makers must be fully appreciated, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
TONY BLAIR told Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show last week that worries about weapons of mass destruction in the build-up to the US-led war against Iraq in 2002-2003 are “exactly the same” as those currently circulating about Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons programme. Fidel Castro this week told the Israeli-American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, author of a detailed report in the September Atlantic Monthly on Israeli plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear plants, of his fears about a nuclear war between the US and Iran. He condemned Iranian anti-Semitism.
Today’s ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, coinciding with the end of Ramadan, finds US public opinion engulfed in controversies over the building of a mosque near the 9/11 site and the threatened burning of the Koran by a Florida pastor, stoked by Islamophobe right-wing media. It could be fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of another war, just as US combat troops are withdrawn from Iraq.
Such a danger is reduced by open scepticism about the alleged Iranian threat to build and use nuclear weapons against Israel and defence of the rights of ordinary Muslim believers against Islamic extremists. But the timing of such speculation to coincide with renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians raises questions about who benefits from it and what motivations there are for such detailed accounts of US and Israeli policy thinking.
Goldberg’s report gives a gripping and fascinating insight into the official Israeli state of mind under Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Based on interviews with the prime minister and intimate briefings from leading military, diplomatic and political personnel, together with rare access to Obama administration meetings on the subject ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections, it conveys two central messages.
First of all, the existential fear of Iran among Israel’s decision-makers must be fully appreciated. President Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats to eliminate Israel together with its build-up of nuclear facilities leaves no room for compromise in Netanyahu’s mind. Inspired by his historian father’s account of the Holocaust, he sees a direct parallel between it and the current threat, creating an over-riding imperative for preventive action before a tipping point is reached over the next year or so. Only caution in the face of US opposition to any pre-emptive attack constrains it.
But secondly, Goldberg reveals a wide-ranging debate among the Israeli policy elite about the pros and cons of an attack on Iran. Israeli bombers would have to fly across neighbouring Arab airspace, a very tall order even given shared Saudi, Gulf and Egyptian fears of Iran. An attack would have to be mounted without advance US approval but assuming its subsequent endorsement. It would almost certainly require follow-up assaults by Israeli commandos to confirm destruction of the facilities.
A successful action would substantially reduce Iran’s regional leverage and that of its Hizbullah and Hamas proxies, facilitating compromise with the Palestinians. But Iran’s threat to make any such attack into an all-out war radically offsets these neat calculations that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations can be so sectioned off.
Responding caustically to Goldberg’s article, veteran US experts on the Middle East Juan Cole and Marc Lynch echoed some of the Israeli objections. After an Israeli action, Iran would organise attacks on the 50,000 US troops remaining in Iraq and broaden assaults on its combat units in Afghanistan. Hizbullah and Hamas would be brought into play. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and similar oppositions in other Arab states would be emboldened as the Iranian regime triumphed over its domestic opponents. Inevitably the US would be drawn into such conflicts, not least because the cost of oil would soar, copper-fastening trends towards a global double-dip recession. Thanks, Israel.
Castro’s fears should be given credit because of his experience of the 1962 nuclear standoff between Krushchev (whom he now condemns for threatening a nuclear attack on the US) and Kennedy, to whom he compares Obama’s potential role in any contemporary crisis.
Castro can hardly have overlooked Goldberg’s previous role in stoking up tension before the Iraq invasion. In March 2002 he wrote an article in the New Yorker linking Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime to the Islamic fundamentalist al-Qaeda. Accompanied by the equally false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, these allegations were crucial for the neo-conservative case for a war within the Bush, and Blair, administrations. Many of the same figures now demand an attack on Iran.
Confronted with such disquieting parallelism, more thoughtful Israeli, US and Arab commentators draw on the established doctrines of extended nuclear deterrence during the cold war rather than on Castro’s advocacy of total nuclear disarmament, including by Israel.
Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar argues that the “right way to cope with the Iranian threat is by boosting regional peace, in combination with an American assurance of a nuclear umbrella and an improvement in Israeli deterrence”. In that case Netanyahu faces an unpalatable choice between conceding land and getting an umbrella and an attack on Iran.