It’s close to new.
Near as I can tell the only times Israel has attacked Iran directly was in April and October of last year (and now today).
If Iran ever questioned whether it needed nukes those questions are gone now. Iran will absolutely work diligently to get its own nukes and, while there may be setbacks like today, I have no doubt they will succeed in getting them eventually.
And now they are pissed off too.
You have an admirable trust in fanatic dictatorships. Neville Chamberlain’s trust worked well,too–when his agreement was in place, everybody was in compliance… for 6months .
It was working for 3 years. Then Trump abandoned it, getting nothing in return.
I have trust that an agreement that’s working shouldn’t be abandoned for no reason at all (other than Trump’s refusal to allow Obama to get credit for anything) and with nothing to gain.
Iran has been working towards nukes for years, always with the stated purpose of destroying Israel. And they’ve spent the last year and a half using all of their assets - namely, their so called “Axis of Resistance” in order to attack Israel with as much force as they can muster.
You can’t attack someone full force and then pretend that if they fight back you’ll escalate. We’re already in a de facto state of all out war.
You are envisioning a mutually-assured-destruction scenario, or minimal deterrence?
Cite? If you officially say you are going to attack/destroy the enemy then who is going to diplomatically blame them for a preemptive strike? Note that Israel has a nuclear policy of “ambiguity”.
MAD is deterrence.
The agreement included inspections, precisely because we can’t trust them. To be fair, the world can’t trust democracies, either: Everyone wants nukes.
If Iran stopped passing the inspections, or if they stopped allowing them, then, under the terms of the agreement, we would have justification for further action, possibly including military action. With the agreement revoked, as it was under Trump, that justification no longer existed. Israel, of course, being already at war with Iran, needed no particular justification.
It is certainly a type of deterrence. In fact, under MAD conditions nobody can use nuclear weapons. (Too bad it is unstable.)
Threatening a first strike or planning for a limited or protracted or preemptive nuclear war is not MAD at all, it is NUTS.
I think the concern is that Iran supports terror organizations. So, Iran might give (say) Hezbollah a nuke and they set it off and Iran shrugs and tut-tuts the use of nukes but it wasn’t them!
And who would believe them? Also there are ways to determine the origin of a nuclear weapon if I’m not mistaken.
The same people who believe them when they say that they don’t provide conventional weapons to Hezbollah. Which is to say, nobody. But still they do it.
Honestly, smearing of Chamberlain as an appeaser is an absurdly reductive and inaccurate view of history, and in any case, the JCPA trading a few sanctions for nuclear development is in no way comparable to trading away part of Czechoslovakia to postpone a war that Britain wasn’t in any way prepared to fight. Arguably, Chamberlain’s deal bought some much-needed time to prepare for the inevitable.
Your cute little winking comparison isn’t nearly as clever as you seem to think, and depends on a simpleton’s version of history that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Yes but for MAD concerns the only party that matters is the one who was just attacked with nuclear weapons, If Israel is the recipient of a nuclear attack by terrorists it will retaliate against Iran, no matter what denials they make.
And you make a good point. Given that Iran absolutely has been openly saying that they want to destroy Israel for years, I have no idea why anyone would criticize a preemptive strike in that scenario.
Because a pre-emptive strike (otherwise known as a “strike”: “pre-emptive” is a justification, not a description) is an act of war.
Because killing people who hate you with extreme violence isn’t conducive to solving the problem. How did the Oct. 7 attacks work out for Hamas and the Palestinians?
Iran’s government is a problem. Nuclear weapons are a problem. Neither is solved by bombing. At most, you give temporarily subdued people more justification for their hatred of you.
Great for Hamas. Not so great for the Palestinians, but nobody asked them.
How’s Iraq’s nuclear program going? (More to the point, how did it go between 1981 and 2003?)
Not all problems have kinetic solutions, but nuclear weapons programs are kinetically solvable.
I don’t want to hijack the thread with other examples. My broader point is that so-called “pre-emptive” violence isn’t a good long-term solution. Wars rarely really improve the losing side or its neighbourhood. I don’t think a violent attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is going to make Iran re-think its plans. I certainly don’t think this makes Israel a safer place.
Did Israel declare war on Iran? Were they already on a state of war? Or has the whole “declaration” thing gone out of style internationally, as well as in the US?
Iran is ideologically committed to destroying Israel. Nothing short of regime change would make it rethink its plans, and since that’s not on the table, the next best thing is to remove their capacity to carry out their intentions.
And as noted above, Iran is already actively deploying their proxies to their fullest extent. They’re already going all out against Israel. Just because they deploy Hezbollah or Hamas instead of the Revolutionary Guard doesn’t mean they aren’t already attacking.