Iran: Watch the Skies

In this month's Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg has a major article about Israel, Iran, The U.S., and an almost inevitable strike by Israel on the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Those who have been reading Seraphic Secret recognize our belief that the current Iranian regime--genocidal yearning theocrats--is an existential threat to the Jewish State. Further, we believe that Istael has an obligation to attack Iran before she crosses the nuclear red line.

The Iranian leadership has denied the Holocaust even as they promise a new Holocaust.

If there is one lesson easily derived from Jewish history it is this: every single time an enemy of the Jewish people has threatened to annihilate the Jewish people they have tried to make good on this promise. This holds true from Haman to Hitler.

There are no exceptions.

And every time we publish a story about the Iranian nuclear threat I receive a blizzard of private emails from either lawyers or academics--always, sigh, Jewish liberals--in which they argue in tedious detail why the Iranians really don't mean what they say.

Please, no more emails. Frankly, I'm out of patience with those who are so generous with Jewish blood. Especially when, in the back of their minds, is the assumption that their blood will not be shed.

Once again, let me quote Herr Hitler's favorite Latin proverb:

Mundus volt decipi, ergo decepiatur.

The world wants to be deceived, therefore let it be deceived.

It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran's reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime's ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that "foiling operations" conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers--programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists--will have hindered Iran's progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran "unacceptable," will order a military strike against the country's main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.

But none of these things--least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran--seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran--possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq's airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It's so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)

In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Snip.

The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Obama. The Israelis are struggling to answer what is for them the most pressing question: are there any circumstances under which President Obama would deploy force to stop Iran from going nuclear? Everything depends on the answer.

The answer is simple. There is no way Obama will attack Iran. His temperament is that of a glorified community organizer. He does not understand geo-politics and his reflexive hostility to Israel is evident to everyone, except Jewish liberals who overwhelmingly support him.

The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the United States, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well. A few weeks ago, in uncommonly direct remarks, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, told me--in a public forum at the Aspen Ideas Festival--that his country would support a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. He also said that if America allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the American orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. "There are many countries in the region who, if they lack the assurance the U.S. is willing to confront Iran, they will start running for cover towards Iran," he said. "Small, rich, vulnerable countries in the region do not want to be the ones who stick their finger in the big bully's eye, if nobody's going to come to their support."

Several Arab leaders have suggested that America's standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue self-interestedly that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. "This is not a discussion about the invasion of Iran," one Arab foreign minister told me. "We are hoping for the pinpoint striking of several dangerous facilities. America could do this very easily."

Snip.

Negotiating with the Iranian leadership is not just futile, but dangerous because these are not rational actors:

[The hatred of Israel and Jews is] in a line of Shia Muslim thinking that views Jews as ritually contaminated, a view derived in part from the Koran's portrayal of Jews as treasonous foes of the Prophet Muhammad. As Robert Wistrich recounts in his new history of anti-Semitism, A Lethal Obsession, through the 17th and 18th centuries Shia clerics viewed Jews variously as "the leprosy of creation" and "the most unclean of the human race." I once asked Ali Asghar Soltanieh, a leading Iranian diplomat who is now Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, why the leadership of Iran persistently described Israel not as a mere regional malefactor but as a kind of infectious disease. "Do you disagree?" he asked. "Do you not see that this is true?"

Full article here.
H/T Israel Matzav