Israel Matzav

Krauthammer on whether Israel will attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons

Here's Charles Krauthammer's take on whether Israel will attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons.

I think everybody understands that any Israeli government, even the previous, the more dovish, if you like, Ehud Olmert, the government in Israel, would have attacked if nothing is done by the end of this year.

It's not about the new prime minister. It's about Israel itself. No government will tolerate a nuke in the hands of Iran.

The only question is, does Israel have the capacity to actually destroy this nuclear capacity on the part of Iran enough to set it back about half a decade? If it doesn't, then it would be a futile and dangerous act.

I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with Krauthammer. Here's why.

To call an attack on Iran 'futile and dangerous,' you have to look at what Israel's alternatives are. As far as I can tell, if sanctions don't work (as appears likely) to dissuade the Iranians from continuing their pursuit of nuclear weapons, our only alternative to an attack on Iran is to live with a nuclear Iran. That's not an option.

A nuclear Iran would have a chilling effect on life in Israel. It would make people fearful of living here, it would make business people fearful of doing business here and it would make tourists fearful of visiting here. We'd all be sitting around waiting to be attacked and to die (as would the 'moderate' Arab world). Our economy and our day-to-day life would collapse and we would become like a family sitting around and watching our country die in an intensive care ward. And all of that is before an attack ever takes place. Quite simply, a nuclear Iran would likely mean a massive and permanent exodus of a sizable portion of this country's population. That's a result we cannot live with.

Iran cannot be bought off with a 'Palestinian state' either. Ahmadinejad has been quite clear that's not what this is all about.

I've heard that one of them [PM Olmert] recently said that the idea of Greater Israel is dead. I would like to declare that the idea of "smaller Israel" is also dead. The very notion of Israel is dead, but they are lagging behind the times. Just like the idea of Greater Israel died 30 years ago, and they did not realize this, and have continued to perpetrate crimes for 30 years... Today, I say to them: The idea of smaller Israel is dead.

Maybe Krauthammer thinks that's just trash talk, but sitting on the ground here in Jerusalem, we can't take that chance.

Would an attack against Iran be 'futile and dangerous' even if it 'only' set Iran back for two years (for example)? It would be less futile and dangerous than sitting around waiting for Iran to go nuclear. Further, we have no way of knowing in advance whether an attack would be successful and we have no way of knowing in advance how Iran would respond. In this respect, Israel's experience with destroying the Iraqi reactor at Osirak and the Syrian reactor at al-Kibar are instructive.

In both cases, the country attacked was expected to respond militarily and was expected to rebuild the reactor. In neither case has that happened. Neither Iraq nor Syria responded militarily. Neither Iraq nor Syria rebuilt their nuclear reactors. Iraq tried, but was cut off by the US invasion in 2003; Syria converted their reactor remains to a biological and chemical weapons plant thinking that would somehow be more palatable. Will Iran be different? We can hope that its reaction to being attacked won't be different than Iraq's and Syria's reactions. But even if Iran does respond militarily and does reconstitute its nuclear program after an attack, Israel will have bought time - whether it's one year or two years or five years - to give the West an opportunity to implement the real sanctions that we have been told can be implemented and can succeed. That's far from a worst case scenario.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:46 AM