The Enlightened Despot

Netanyahu’s government takes over in Israel today, and they aren’t wasting any time bringing the crazy. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Bibi warned Obama to shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program within months, or else:

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

…

Betanyahu offered Iran’s behavior during its eight-year war with Iraq as proof of Tehran’s penchant for irrational behavior. Iran “wasted over a million lives without batting an eyelash … It didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind.”

He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.

Some of his advisers are even worse, and not just Lieberman:

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

…

Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff who is slated to serve as Netanyahu’s minister for strategic threats, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, telling me that “jihadists” interpret compromise as weakness. He cited the reaction to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza four years ago. “The mistake of disengagement from Gaza was that we thought like Westerners, that compromise would defuse a problem—but it just encouraged the problem,” he said. “The jihadists saw withdrawal as a defeat of the West … Now, what do you signal to them if you are ready to divide Jerusalem, or if you’re ready to withdraw to the 1967 lines? In this kind of conflict, your ability to stand and be determined is more important than your firepower.”

This will be the first disaster Obama owns lock, stock, and barrel, having inherited the economic crisis and both wars. I don’t see any good outcome here. The most important showdown here, though, is not the one between the U.S. and Iran, or between Israel and Iran, but between Obama and Netanyahu. It would be a disaster for us to launch any sort of strike against Iran. But a strike from Israel will also be a disaster for us if we don’t do everything we possibly can to distance ourselves from it. Obama needs to publicly oppose a preemptive strike on Israel’s part, and denounce one if it comes.

The domestic politics of this are obviously not great, but I don’t think they’re quite as terrible as they might seem. The AIPAC crowd dismiss the “Israel, Right or Wrong” portrayal of their views as a straw man, and in a way, I think they’re right. Unwavering support for Israel has been popular not because Americans support the Israelis even when they are doing things we disapprove of, but because so many people are convinced that whatever they are doing must be right. A more accurate slogan would be “Israel: Right”.

War with Iran, however, is not something for which Americans have any stomach right now. So I think it should be possible for the administration to oppose it in stark terms. Hopefully, that will convince Netanyahu to back down. But at the very least, it will help us to wash our hands of the attack if it comes.

Tags: Iran, Israel, President Obama, terrifying news, war

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 7:01 pm and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.