I’m sorry, but the level of contempt you’re displaying toward the Iranian people is kind of offputting.
You have more people than Russia and more land than France. To us, that’s huge.
More ill-will towards Israel? The whole population already believe that Israel is the Devil itself and their President has vowed to wipe it off the map. It’s hard to see how they could possibly think worse of Israel.
Thanks for this article. Could we drop the other conversations this thread has devolved into? They don’t seem to make much sense, they’re boring and they’re not what I started the thread for.
For anyone who’s interested I’ve just recently read another couple of very good articles on the topic; one was the cover story in the Economist a few weeks ago summarized online, and the other is Michael Levi’s article here. That contains links to almost every other interesting article on the subject recently, including this one from J Street in which a range of top Israeli ex-security figures explain why bombing Iran would be a mistake. As far as I can tell the main factors seem to be these ones:
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It’s not certain Israel can carry out the raid at all on its own: It would require tough logistics because Iran is so far away; for instance Israel would need to conduct extensive mid-air refuelling that it has limited capacity for. It might need the USA to conduct the raid on its behalf.
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It’s not certain the raid would be successful: Iran is in the process of hiding its nuclear development program beyond the range of bombs. Its recent facility uncovered in Qom is buried into a mountainside. Reaching them might require “bunker busting” bombs which, again, America has in abundance but Israel has few of. Even if they have access to those types of bombs, the raids still might not completely destroy the nuclear facilities.
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The raid would only delay the Iranians by a few years, and would then give them a reason to openly pursue a nuclear bomb: This was the factor a lot of the top Israelis were worried about. Destroying Iran’s facilities would not destroy the know-how they’ve already acquired about the process of building nuclear weapons. It would just be a case of rebuilding the physical infrastructure, which would only take 1-5 years (depending on who you ask). So it would be like “mowing the grass”, potentially requiring another raid a few years later, and an enormous attack on Iran would give the Iranian leadership a genuine reason to hold its hands up and say “this program was completely peaceful before; but now we’ve had this massive unprovoked attack on our sovereign territory by a nearby nuclear-armed state, it’s incumbent upon us to defend ourselves by developing a nuclear weapon.” Iran has resources in this sense that Iraq and Syria did not have before.
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The consequences could be dire for both Israel and the US: It’s impossible to know how far Iran would go with its reaction to a bombing raid, and most experts don’t think it would go far enough to necessitate a US invasion of its territory (by, for instance, attacking the US Fifth Fleet in the Gulf or directly attacking US army bases in Afghanistan). But it could do a range of things: bomb Tel Aviv in Israel; drive up oil prices by blocking the Strait of Hormuz; instruct its proxies in Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel; supply more roadside bombs to the Taliban in Afghanistan. World opinion could turn sharply against Israel and the US, and public opinion in Iran could turn sharply in favor of the Iranian leadership and developing nuclear weapons.
Overall a lot of experts believe a better means of preventing Iran from getting weapons is by exerting so much pressure on them in the form of sanctions, diplomatic efforts, cost and internal public opinion that it doesn’t become worth it. President Obama said in his recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the only time any country has given up its nuclear weapons program is by choice (meaning South Africa and Libya, although I suppose that glides over the cases of Iraq and Syria), which seems to back up that this is his preferred option.
Israel has bombed Iran in the past and certainly will do it again should they find it expedient. They’re just waiting for their master (the U.S.) to give them the word.
Your link refers to the bombing of the Iraqi reactor. Can you give a proper cite or do you not have one? Or do you not distinguish among four-letter countries in the middle east that start with ‘I’?
Oops, sorry!!!
Ultimately, the question is:
Are Iranian threats just tough talk about a convenient bogeyman for local consumption?
Or are the leaders really fanatics mainly focussed on nothing else but the destruction of Israel?
My bet is the first option - but then I have the luxury of (a) not being their primary target and (b) an ocean and a continent between us.
The middle eastern mentality is always toward tough talk and boastfulness. The pattern of the rhetoric is the same as any country whose leaders are trying to stir up the population against a common foreign enemy and distract them from internal problems, plus to stifle dissent. (Freedom fries, anyone?).
It had to come to this eventually with a big enough country - you cannot stop a nuclear program with a few well-placed small bombs; you probably can’t even do it with the US Air FOrce unless you are willing to bomb the country back to the stone age.
Hezbollah and/or Hamas may be their tool but considering how much damage Iran could do if they wanted to cause real and on-going trouble for Israel, these guys have been pretty quiet comparatively. They get enough support from Iran to remind them who their real friends are, but not enough for a heavy campaign.
So is it all talk and bluster? Well, after a first-strike sneak attack, there’s a really good reason for it not to be.
I think this question may be on topic. In the US-Israel relationship, which is the tail and which is the dog?
One is tempted to make jokes about the two parts that meet at the anus, but…
In diplomacy, rarely is the answer simple and rarely can one side tell the other what to do. Every threat has a counter threat with equally bad results; every international move has domestic consequences.
Ignoring religious issues (!!??) the USA would hate to lose a friend and ally and democratic partner in the middle east. However, from a detatched view, they see that compromise is necessary to make peace, and even then peace will be a long and rocky road. Israel can play its Jewish lobby and left-wing sympathy card in US politics, but must not act so aggressively and unfairly that it loses as many votes in the general population; in this it is helped by the irrational excesses of its neighbours. The crazier the Arabs and Iranians act, the more secure Israel’s position. The USA cannot press Israel to do things that it fanatic fringe in the Knesset would not allow (like significant compromises on West Bank settlement encroachment). Both sides are stymied, and it’s more like a pair of siamese twins trying to do their own different dances than a dog-vs-tail situation.
How much does Iran actually care about Israel? This has been discussed in other threads, and there did seem to be a significant feeling that the reality is that Iran finds Israel vastly less of a worry than the long term issues with its other neighbours. It wasn’t in a war with Israel that they lost hundreds of thousands of their young men only two decades ago. If you want a national calamity that will still sit front and centre in the feelings of the populace and their leaders I would look here first.
It is also worth noting that the first air attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor was not made by the Israelis. It was made by the Iranians.
Israel may feel justifiably vulnerable if other nearby states gain a nuclear capability, but assigning fear and hatred of Israel as the main driver for other states to want that capability is probably significantly overestimating Israel’s importance. Indeed one often wonders if Israel’s main role is to provide a local proxy for the US in grandstanding politics.
A Haaretz article about Israel quietly acquiring bunker-busting bombs and advanced refueling aircraft from the US: Netanyahu Asked Panetta to Approve Sale of Bunker-busting Bombs, U.S. Official Says - Haaretz Com - Haaretz.com
Would these be inadequate to accomplish the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, ignoring for the moment other considerations?
Probably. An article in a recent NY Times had good details from experts who have had access to and studied the site. One expert claimed that it’s not certain whether the GU-28 “bunker buster” bombs could actually penetrate the Iranian nuclear facilities; thus it would require multiple bombing raids with them over a number of days to collapse so much of the surrounding earth and infrastructure to render the sites inoperable. The US has the capability to conduct multiple raids like that but Israel doesn’t.