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Jewish World Review July 18, 2008 /15 Tamuz 5768 US wants it absolutely clear it has no intention of attacking Iran's nuclear installations By Caroline B. Glick
That those negotiations will fail to end or even slow down Iran's progress
towards nuclear weapons capabilities is a certainty. Ahead of the talks,
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated for the umpteenth
time that Iran will make no compromises on its uranium enrichment
activities. And so far, Iran - as opposed to Washington - has been true to
its word.
Given Iran's forthrightness, there is only one reasonable explanation for
the administration's decision to send Burns to meet with Jalili: the US
wants it to be absolutely clear to Iran and everyone else that it has no
intention whatsoever of attacking Iran's nuclear installations.
It makes sense that Washington considers it necessary to make this point
clearly. In light of the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute
to US national security interests, it would have been more reasonable to
assume that the US would attack Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively than
to assume that the US would allow Iran to go forward with its goal to
acquire nuclear weapons.
A nuclear-armed Iran would place the US military's hard-won victories
against Iranian surrogates in Iraq and its tentative success in separating
Iraq's Shiite leaders from Teheran in jeopardy. So too, given Iran's
increasingly active support for the Taliban, an Iranian acquisition of
nuclear capabilities would cast doubt on the US's ability to defeat the
resurgent Taliban.
The US's economic well-being would be also endangered by a nuclear-armed
Iran. Teheran has repeatedly threatened to attack Saudi oil platforms and
endanger the oil shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz. And a nuclear
arsenal will give Iran unprecedented power to dictate price setting policies
for the OPEC oil cartel.
Beyond all that, a nuclear-armed Iran would directly threaten US territory
in two ways. First, there is no reason not to think that Iran would use
Hizbullah cells in the US to detonate nuclear devices in US cities. Iran has
already shown its willingness to use Hizbullah to carry out terror attacks
in the West - most spectacularly in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish
center in Buenos Aires.
Second, it is widely feared that Iran is developing the capacity to launch
an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack against the US mainland. An EMP
attack is conducted by launching a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere above a
country. It needn't actually hit the country. Simply by detonating a nuclear
device at sufficiently high altitude, an EMP attack can destroy the
electrical grids, communications systems and military-industrial foundations
of a society. Such an attack on the US would set the country back a hundred
years.
Fears of an Iranian EMP attack against the US were sparked last week by
Iran's test of an advanced version of its Shihab-3 ballistic missile. The
day of the missile test, William Graham, who heads a congressionally
mandated commission on the EMP threat to the US, gave testimony on the issue
to the House's Armed Services Committee. Graham explained that Iran has
already conducted missile test launches from ships in the Caspian Sea. If it
acquires nuclear weapons, it will apparently have the capacity to launch a
nuclear warhead capable of carrying out an EMP attack against the US from a
freighter sailing in international waters off the US coast.
While any of these threats would be sufficient to justify a preemptive US
attack against Iran's nuclear installations, the US still has a reasonable
excuse for not conducting such an attack: Iran has made clear that if it
acquires nuclear weapons, the US will not be Teheran's first target. Israel
enjoys that distinction.
And since the US is Iran's second target, the Bush administration has made
clear that if Iran attacks Israel, the US will launch an attack against
Iran. That is, the US will fight to ensure that Iran won't be able to attack
it if America moves to the head of Iran's target list. But as long as it's
only number 2, it will take no action.
The US cannot be accused of being unfair to Israel by deciding not to
prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. After all, defending Israel is
Israel's responsibility, not America's. And on this point, news reports in
recent weeks have made it clear that while the US will not attack Iran, it
has given Israel a "green light" to attack Iran's nuclear installations in a
preemptive attack. And this is no small thing.
The Bush administration's willingness to stand back and allow Israel to
attack Iran's nuclear installations in order to prevent a nuclear holocaust
of the Jewish state compares well with the President's father's
administration's treatment of Israel in the 1991 Gulf War. At that time,
Israel was under threat of Scud missile borne chemical weapons attack.
Although Saddam Hussein ended up not attacking Israel with chemical
weapons, the threat that he would was credible. He attacked Israel with Scud
missiles almost every night for the duration of the Gulf War.
Despite this obvious *causus belli*, the first Bush administration not only
refused to politically support Israel's right to defend itself against Iraqi
aggression, it took active steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iraq's
Scud missile installations. Then president George H.W. Bush refused to
provide Israel with the electronic codes that would allow Israeli and US
jets to identify one another as friendly aircraft. In so doing, he left open
the prospect that the US would shoot down IAF jets over Iraqi airspace if
Israel dared to defend itself.
So mindful of the precedent set by his father, President George W. Bush's
decision to leave the door wide open for an Israeli preemptive attack
against Iran is a positive development. But an open door is only significant
if someone is willing to walk through it. And it is far from clear that the
Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has any intention of walking through
it.
For an Israeli government to walk through that door, its leaders would have
to be vested with a sense of national destiny and a modicum of
responsibility and competence. But as Wednesday's bodies-for-murderers deal
with Hizbullah demonstrated, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has no
sense of national destiny and no competence to lead the country. What
Wednesday's spectacle showed is that Israel's leaders' horizons are limited
to the space between yesterday's news and tomorrow's headlines.
Wednesday Israel received the corpses of IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud
Goldwasser in exchange for baby murderer Samir Kuntar, four fellow Hizbullah
terrorists and two hundred bodies of Palestinian and Lebanese murderers.
Ahead of the swap, the Almagor terror victims' advocacy group published the
names of 180 Israelis who were murdered by terrorists Israel released in
recent years.
As the Almagor report showed, many of the terrorists Israel released - like
Saleh Shehadeh, Nasser Abu Hmeid, Abdullah Kawasmeh and others became senior
terror commanders, responsible building the terror infrastructure that
caused the death of hundreds of Israelis. Others, like Matzab Hashalmon, who
was released as part of the 2004 terrorists- for-drug dealer-
and-Hizbullah-spy Elhanan Tenenbaum were quickly recruited as suicide
bombers. Hashalmon murdered 16 Israelis when he detonated on a bus in Beer
Sheva a couple of months after he was released.
The government knows for a fact that Wednesday's deal will lead directly to
the murder of more Israelis and to the abduction and murder of more IDF
soldiers. It simply doesn't care. The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government
doesn't care about protecting the public. It only cares about tomorrow's
headlines. And Wednesday's deal allowed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Industry and Trade
Minister Eli Yishai to give speeches where they waxed poetic about Israel's
loyalty to its dead soldiers and to have their pictures taken as they leaned
somberly over Regev's and Goldwasser's flag-draped coffins.
They looked so impressive in those photos that it was easy for the public to
miss what they had just done. The public could have easily missed the fact
that in their "deeply moral, and patriotic" decision to trade Samir Kuntar
who murdered four-year-old Einat Haran by crushing her skull on a rock after
he executed her father Danny in front of her, for Regev's and Goldwasser's
body parts, these politicians signed the death warrants of untold numbers of
Israelis. And if they go forward with their pledge to release a thousand
terrorists for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit, they will sign the death warrants
of still more Israeli men, women and children.
The government's devotion to its yesterday-to-tomorrow's-headlines policy
horizon is fed by the local media. Disgracefully, the Israeli media's
coverage of events is so mindlessly shallow, that senior journalists simply
refuse to make any connection between tomorrow's threats and today's
decisions. That this is the case was born out in the media's grotesque
treatment of Wednesday's corpses-for-murderers swap.
In the weeks leading up to the government's decision to accept this Faustian
bargain, the media cast the issue as the personal affair of the Regev and
Goldwasser families and ignored completely the ramifications of the deal for
the Israeli people as a whole. In their puerile depiction of the story as a
personal story, the media stooped to treating Kuntar as the personal enemy
of the Haran family, instead of as the enemy of the Jewish people as a
whole. Refusing to note the national repercussions of the deal, the media
acted as though the entire story was a struggle between opposing families:
the Regevs and Goldwasser on one side and the Harans on the other. Israel as
a nation was nothing but an abstract, unimportant bystander.
Given the media's refusal to cover anything that they can't personalize and
trivialize, the media are incapable of adequately reporting the danger that
Iran's nuclear program constitutes to Israel as a whole. And since they will
not concentrate on this basic reality, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai
government feels no pressure to contend with the danger. It is a non-story.
And non-stories produce no policies.
Aside from that, although a successful strike against Iran's nuclear
facilities would win them considerable clout with the public, and
unsuccessful strike would end their political careers. And their careers are
the only thing Israel's leaders are concerned with.
This being the state of affairs in Israel today, all the open doors in all
the world won't help Israel in its moment of crisis. Only two things can
guarantee that Israel's leaders will take action against Iran. Either
someone will come up with a way to guarantee success - and this is not
likely; or the government will fall and the nation will elect new leaders
who understand their responsibility for Israel's national destiny and are
capable of walking the nation through that open door.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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