by Cheryl Rofer
We know that Israel will attack Iran some time in the near future with conventional weapons. Because Israel's conventional bombing power is not on a par with the US's, it will have to escalate to nuclear weapons.
So the rational thing for the United States to do is to attack Iran before Israel does.
Uh, yeah.
Benny Morris's op-ed in the New York Times today is based on the assumption that Iran's nuclear program is unacceptable to Israel and therefore any action by Israel is acceptable. These definitions of acceptable are of an Israel-centric paranoia that excludes the retaliation of Iran, a state that is very large in geographical area, against Israel, a state that is very small in geographic area. Presumably whoever is dreaming up these fantasies thinks that the United States would step in before such a thing could happen.
Morris raises the bugaboo of undeterrable, wild-eyed mullahs but ignores the mirror image of crazed Israeli militarists, who stand to lose a lot more, even with the US riding over the hillside to their defense.
Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program.Uh, yeah.
Morris has, in the past, given us a look at how Israel's leaders think. This op-ed doesn't delineate between the thinking of Israel's leaders and Morris's advocacy. It is so overheated that, if this is indeed the thinking of the leaders, it is time for President Bush to invite President Olmert and others for a calming meeting in the forests of Camp David and perhaps to send a crate of Prozac to Tel Aviv.
Update (7/19/08): I didn't say much about Benny Morris's background because I wasn't sure I was recalling it correctly, so bizarrely did this op-ed contrast with what I thought I recalled. And I didn't have time to google it up.
David Kaiser, who, as a historian, recalls much more clearly than I do, gives us the background here. I did recall correctly, although not in detail.
On the matter at hand, Kaiser's last paragraph is very worth reading. Read the whole thing.
It has occurred to me that the emergence of such an extreme appeal for a preventive war to prevent a preventive war may indicate that the extremists in Israel may see that the Bush administration is finally gravitating toward a foreign policy that is not designed for perpetual war. Thus, they feel that they have to posit more and more extreme scenarios to goad the US back toward military prevention. The ugly side of this is that we don't know whether this op-ed represents the thinking of the Israeli government.