Ambiguity of American–Israeli Attack on Iran

American and Israeli declarations of an attack on Iran to prevent it from developing its nuclear program create a very perplexing issue. There are moments when Iran feels the presence of the Israeli air force in the Iranian sky, precisely over where its nuclear facilities are, only waiting for an order from the Pentagon to engage. There are also moments when one can think that the West has forgotten or pretends to have forgotten about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Arab experience with American and Israeli intentions says that no talk of military intervention can circulate in the media or in daily deliberations. It stays totally secret up to the point of its execution. Only later are diplomatic and political groups, which defend this measure, created. It stems from the fact that arguments for war are always weak and even more so when those who defend it are forcing lies and errors onto the crowd in order to convince the world’s public opinion of their point of view. We experienced that in Iraq in 2003 with the lies of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. When Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, was asked, “Why do you support a US attack on Iraq?” he literally said that Britain would participate in the attack even if Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction!

Former Israeli General Amos Yadlin wrote in The New York Times that he supports military action on Tehran as a preventive attack. However, he set his hopes on Washington, saying that Obama has to make a decisive pledge about the attack if Iran does not stop its nuclear activity.

But the biggest lapse comes in the next part of the article when he tried to refute counter-arguments saying that the attack would only cause the delay of the Iranian program and probably not a long one. He wrote: “After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed.”

This argument is at best somewhat misleading; at worst it is simply wrong. Technically, no one denies that the resumption of either an Iraqi or Syrian program has not occurred – even if it is true that there was indeed a Syrian reactor to begin with. But what happened during the 26-year gap between the strike on the Tammuz reactor in 1981 and the strike on the Syrian reactor in 2007? What happened during these years? Destruction of the Iraqi Tammuz reactor led to the elite consensus that Iraq needed a deterrent power of its own. This notion led the Iraqi regime to double its interest in scientific research in various branches of science as well as its interest in scientists and in providing them with proper work conditions in Iraq. The regime tried to attract scientists with better incentives than those provided by Western countries. These efforts were successful to the point that, when UN inspectors arrived in Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991, they were surprised by how extensive the program was and how close it was to the production of a nuclear bomb. That is why the onslaught on the scientists was the first priority of the alliance.

Therefore, in my opinion, the true history gives an opposite lesson to the one Yadlin proposed to us. In the Iraqi case, preventive strike reinforced Iraq’s interest in obtaining a deterrence force and pushed Iraq to pursue it through ways that were difficult to discover and prevent. That is what in all probability Iran is going to do if Israel or the U.S. is foolish enough to attack it. American intelligence is still certain that Iran has not made a decision about the armament, and ironically, an attack waged by Israel or the U.S. is the step that will probably push Iranians to take such a decision.

Some Israelis only wish that the U.S. took it upon itself to attack Iran even under false and distorted pretexts in the same way Bush junior’s administration led the U.S. into the swamp of the Iraqi war. But The New York Times publishers have to insist that the op-eds, whatever position they present, should meet minimum standards of historical accuracy. They should look to the academic literature and follow what they already publish themselves.

To make a long story short, if Americans let themselves be deluded by this historically inaccurate analysis, the blame in the first place should be put on them and on Israel, which wants to isolate itself using the component of force in the region. Instead of giving guarantees that a preventive war will be waged, it is necessary to remember that the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, does not think that Iran poses an existential threat and that the former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, referred to the attack on Iran as “the stupidest thing [he had] ever heard.” The U.S. keeps warning Netanyahu and his Minister of Foreign Affairs about the hasty attack. So there is an ambiguity in this matter. It requires thinking through and searching for its reasons. Perhaps the dramatic changes sweeping through the Arab world are the reason.