Start Worrying: The Iranian Threat Is Here

The major conclusion from the analysis of the documents uncovered in “WikiLeaks” is: The U.S. has made peace with nuclear Iran. The Israeli leadership must come to terms with this situation.

The hysteria befalling the American administration in the hour that the State Department’s classified documents were being unearthed is not accidental. The harm to be caused by such notoriety is not just immediate. This is about future damage to the Americans’ efforts to obtain high-quality, credible information both in their war on global terror and in their ability to conduct an effective foreign policy. However, it is mainly the State of Israel that should be disturbed by the disclosure of the documents — not because of what had been said about Netanyahu or any other piquant detail, but mostly because the exposure of the papers makes it clear that the United States has reconciled with nuclear Iran.

The document bombshell at the WikiLeaks site this week has revealed that the pivotal countries in the Arab world, headed by Saudi Arabia, have expressed their desire to the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And we’re not talking about utterances of some petty officials in those states, but rather the chieftains, like King Abdullah and the higher-ups in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Emirates. And despite this, U.S. Defense Minister Robert Gates has declared about two weeks ago that a military solution is not an absolute for stopping the Iranian nuke. It should be said right away: The tactics of economic sanctions are the greatest farce of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Never in the world has Washington managed to bring about a policy change of an extremist regime or an overthrow of such a one by means of economic sanctions (see Cuba, for example) and certainly will not have success regarding Iran either.

The Chance of Attack Is Zero

We must understand: Expressions of Arab leaders against another Arab or Muslim countries do not come out of nowhere and surely are not thrown around as small talk. The leadership of the Arab countries have conveyed toward the United States their true and deep concern about Iran going nuclear — a concern so deep that it has moved King Abdullah to send communiqués on his own, while taking upon himself the risk that the thing is likely to go public. And only for the sake of erudition: In the Arab world, when the highest person in the country is the one to deliver the message, the intent is to point at its decisiveness.

The public responses of the American administration on the Iranian subject in the last year have not even tapped what was going on behind the scenes. If in the second Gulf War the Americans needed diplomatic acrobatics in order to create a coalition to attack Saddam Hussein’s regime and even attacked without a wall-to-wall consensus, then today it turns out that almost all of the significant Arab countries have been united in the opinion that Iran should be attacked. It looks like the hysterics overwhelming the Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia — displaying itself as well in massive arms purchases from Uncle Sam — at the end of the day serves the White House.

The obvious conclusion is that the chance that the United States will attack or support the attack on Iran is amounting to zero, and this assumption should cause us all worry. The decision-makers in the State of Israel must understand the report of this situation and arrive at decisions based on realistic options and rely less upon the hope that America will be part of the solution against Iran.