Strategic issues are always complex and uncertain. This situation is no different. I hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) The Iranians are working to build nuclear weapons. Assertions that their program is peaceful are laughable.
2) Their threats to destroy Israel with these weapons must be taken seriously. No other country with nuclear weapons has threatened to use them other than defensively since WWII. We didn’t trust the Soviets not to attack, but they never said they were out to kill us, come what may.
3) The idea that Iran could survive a nuclear exchange with Israel but Israel could not is plausible. That it might involve 10 million or more Iranian dead makes it insane, but doable. They have many millions more. They likely would survive and Israel likely would not.
4) Iran does not have this apocalyptic policy towards any other country and is not likely to in the future. Their Jew-hatred is special. Conventional deterrence and diplomacy will work to control Iran’s nuclear weapons for all the rest of us.
Therefore there is a great asymetry here. Israel faces a unique threat. For all other countries, there is no good case for attacking Iran to stop their nuclear development. For Israel, there is a Hobson’s choice. If they attack Iran, they set off all kinds of destabilization and violence in the world and become pariahs for doing it. If they don’t, they risk extermination.
A few years back Ariel Sharon got his hand slapped for saying Israel was not Czechoslovakia. That is, he was accusing the West of possibly abandoning Israel to appease the Arabs as they had abandoned the Czechs in 1938 to appease Hitler. Sharon was warning the West that Israel will not commit suicide for the convenience of other powers as the Czechs did.
That’s where we are now. If we want to avoid open conflict between Israel and Iran we have to deal with Israel’s justified fear and convince them that they can be protected in some other way. That is not easy. We could not convince France that we would protect them and they felt it necessary to build their own nuclear deterrent. We did convince South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
We don’t have a good option. Either we
1) Get involved directly as Israel’s protector in a new way and head off this war even though this will drag us deeper into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Explore ideas like an explicit guarantee of massive nuclear retaliation that not even Iran could imagine surviving, or a formal alliance with the Navy stationed nearby as we do for Taiwan.
2) Attack Iran ourselves which will destablize the world in serious and unpredictable ways and may end up forcing us into option #1 above anyway down the road
3) Do nothing and let Israel and Iran go at it, supporting Israel later against the worst of the world’s reaction, knowing it will probably spill over onto us at home and in Iraq
4) Restrain Israel and wager their extermination against our needs for oil and stability
5) If Israel can’t be restrained, turn on her, join the world in condemnation, sanctions, and the eventual destruction of the Jewish state. Blame all opposition in the US on the Jewish lobby and spin it as “You’re either for America or for Israel.” It would be very popular overseas, in the short run at least.
My crystal ball tells me that Bush or McCain will go for #2 or #3 and Obama will go for #4 or even #5 if circumstances turn really ugly. My own inclination is to explore #1, which is very complex I admit, but I see no evidence that anyone in power is thinking along those lines.
