Where's the great Christopher Walken when
we need him? "I've got a fever! [1] And the only
prescription is … Bomb Iran!" That's the story, at
least in Israel. Fever pitch will rule at least
for the next six months.
This past
weekend, the Israel Hayom newspaper - financed by
casino mogul and Mitt Romney groupie Sheldon
Adelson - dedicated a whole supplement to the
fever. Lead articles had titles such as "Bomb or
Bombing: Poker with the Cards Close to the Vest."
Yet earlier last week, a leak to the
Yediot Ahronot daily [2] revealed that the cream
of Israel's military leaders are against war on
Iran - known in its aseptic version as "preemptive
strike".
It's an impressive cast of
characters. Here we have chief of the
general staff Benny
Gantz; the chief of operations of the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) Ya'akov Ayash; Tamir Pardo,
the head of Mossad; Aviv Kochavi, in charge of
Aman, the military intelligence directorate; the
department heads of Mossad; the head of the
Israeli Air Force Amir Eshel; not to mention at
least four ministers of Prime Minister Bibi
Netanyahu's eight-man "kitchen cabinet".
There are qualifiers. Some admit they
would only support an attack on Iran if Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Khamenei - or International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors - announced
a major weaponization game changer. Some others
admit they will only support an attack if the US
is on board; that's the case of retired Mossad
heads Meir Dagan and Efraim Halevy and former
chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
The key
player here is of course Gantz. He's always kept
the attack option on the table. But he has also
leaked that he knows any attack, even successful,
won't smash Iran's nuclear program; besides, he
also fears the geopolitical repercussions. When
Gantz admitted a tiny sliver of all this on an
Israeli TV channel, Defense Minister Ehud Barak
ordered the report to "disappear". [3]
So
it boils down essentially to Bibi and Barak
against all the above. This poses at least two key
questions. How could Bibi possibly order an attack
when the best Israeli informed minds know that
would inflict a maximum six-month delay on Iran's
nuclear program, according to extensive American
calculations? And that a strike would definitely
lead Tehran to abandon its current, prudent,
"latency period" and go for broke on the
weaponization front?
Murphy, take my
call Non-denial denials will spring up
from all corners, but only people tripping on
Alice in Wonderland believe Israel would attack
Iran without an absolute green light from
Washington. Russia, China, Pakistan, everyone
knows about the US-Israel game of rearranging
musical chairs preceding a possible attack on
Iran. [4] Hebrew University Political Science
professor Ira Sharkansky, blogging at the
Jerusalem Post, mentions yet another former Mossad
head saying that Israel should not - and most
likely will not - act without US consent.
This new
collective foreign policy blog tried to answer
some of the imponderables. But it still boils down
to that old Hollywood maxim; no one knows
anything.
No one knows whether the Israeli
military may have come up with some magic, aerial
attack route (without, for instance, overflying
Iraq; forget about a ground attack and forget
about nuking Iran); whether it has the means to
launch a mini-Shock and Awe against Hezbollah
positions in Lebanon; whether it has enough
last-generation bunker busters to penetrate
Iranian installations deep underground; whether it
has just-in-time intel, for that matter.
Murphy's Law applies here. Even the Pentagon
knows that everything that may go wrong may
actually go wrong. [5]
And even if it
doesn't, the trillion-dollar question still
remains; what kind of game is US President Barack
Obama actually playing?
All would be
excused if this were just sunburn caused by
prolonged summer beach exposure. But we're talking
about war, preemptive war, bypassing international
law - and based on a concentric set of
hypotheticals, not to mention lies.
The
IAEA, US National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs),
and even Israeli intelligence know there is no
Iran nuclear weapons program. Russia - which has
thousands of technicians in Iran - also knows it.
The notion that Iran is a threat to Israel
springs up from a Dadaist manifesto. Israel is an
actual - undeclared - nuclear power (it never
subscribed to the NPT); Iran (which subscribes to
the NPT) is not. As John Glaser at
Antiwar.com succinctly summarized, "the US has
Iran militarily surrounded, has conducted covert
ops along with Israel, constantly threatens Iran
with preemptive military strike, and is heaping
harsh economic sanctions." [6] Threat? Who's
threatening who here?
Yet what is
extraordinary is how Tel Aviv manages to strike
one fabulous PR coup after another - at least in
terms of brainwashing American public opinion - by
just changing the red line. [7]
Just read
carefully this Barak interview
with CNN. [8]
It's all here. There is no
Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran is not a
threat - immediate or otherwise. What we have here
is the defense minister of a country saying that
another country should not be allowed to enter a
"zone of immunity" beyond which it cannot be
harassed, attacked, bombed, invaded.
Imagine if this was a Chinese or Russian
defense minister nonchalantly proclaiming it out
loud on American TV.
Back to the Great
Game The whole convoluted premise for an
Israeli attack on Iran turns out to be bogus.
A number of countries - such as Japan,
South Korea and Brazil - have the breakout
capability in terms of assembling a nuclear
weapon; the technology is decades old. This does
not mean that they will do it.
The fact
that Tehran allows immensely intrusive IAEA
inspections and has offered concessions over the
years that go way beyond its obligations under the
NPT proves it does not want to build a bomb
tomorrow (or yesterday, according to Israel). And
even if it did, that would be detected
just-in-time.
As it stands, Obama seems to
bet that poker player Bibi won't have the guts to
order an attack on Iran while he's in the Oval
office. This
is a plausible enough argument for why Obama might
be tempted to launch an October surprise; but
ultra-cautious, pragmatist Obama might only go for
it in absolute desperation. As for Bibi, he would
love Washington to do the dirty work for him
(Israel, technically, can't do it, and Benny Gantz
knows it). So Bibi is already on "Waiting for
Mitt" mode.
In terms of the Big Picture -
the New Great Game in Eurasia - the Iranian
nuclear program is just an excuse; the only one in
the market, actually. This goes way beyond Israel
and its own regional fever.
Cutting
through the fog enveloping the 33-year-long wall
of mistrust between Washington and Tehran,
Washington's fever remains the same, from Clinton
I and II to Bush I and II to Obama and beyond; we
need regime change, we need a Persian satrapy like
we had before, we need all that oil and gas in the
Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea for the West, and
not for the East, we need to control this vital
strategic node in Eurasia. For this fever, there
seems to be no cure.
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