The Enlightened Despot

Few things in this life are less likely to deliver on their promise than an article entitled ‘The Rational Argument for an Israeli Attack on Iran’. And sure enough, the article in question does not contain any rational arguments for an Isreali attack on Iran, for roughly the same reason that it contains no round squares. But while the author, David Samuels, is wrong about a lot of things, this is the most worthwhile piece I’ve seen written about the Middle-East in quite a while, and I highly recommend it.

That said, there is no shortage of patent nonsense:

The idea of a mass public outcry [in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities] against Israel in the Muslim world is probably also a fiction—given the public backing of the Gulf states and Egypt for Israel’s wars against Hezbollah and Hamas. As the only army in the region able to take on Iran and its clients, Israel has effectively become the hired army of the Sunni Arab states tasked by Washington with the job of protecting America’s favorite Middle Eastern tipple—oil.

This is a non sequitur. Whatever private joy Arab leaders might derive from an Israeli bombing campaign, the fact remains that nothing unites Sunni and Shia like the Jewish state. Pleasing other governments is useless if there is no mechanism forcing them to show their gratitude, especially if domestic politics require that they continue to demonstrate that they hate you.

On the other hand, Samuels makes a number of points that, while not particularly profound, are greatly underappreciated in discussion of the Middle-East:

Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America’s support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel “since 1948,” when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel’s rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel’s surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt’s rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets—not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973—25 years after the founding of the state.

If anything, this understates how far apart Israeli and American interests were pre-1967. In 1954, Israel’s military intelligence outfit launched terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in Egypt, which is generally not the way close allies interact. Over the past few decades, Israel and America have had broadly similar interests in the region, but they certainly haven’t become identical, and it is foolish to rule out a priori the possibility that they might be in direct opposition in particular instances. Samuels is right to point out that the threat of a nuclear Iran means very different things for the two allies:

Many perfectly reasonable people chalk up the rhetorical excesses of both parties to the hot desert sun and assume that nothing particularly awful will happen whether Iran becomes a nuclear power or not. From a U.S. point of view, at least, there is little reason to doubt the analysis that a nuclear Iran with a few dozen bombs can be contained at relatively limited cost using the same strategies that successfully constrained an aggressive Soviet Empire armed with nearly 45,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War.

What the nuclear optimists miss is that it is not the United States that is directly threatened by the Iranian nuclear program but Israel—and the calculations that drive our Middle Eastern client state are very different from those that guide the behavior of its superpower patron.

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The parallels between Israel’s rise to superpower client status after 1967 and Iran’s recent rise offer another strong reason for Israel to act—and act fast. The current bidding for Iran’s favor is alarming to Israel not only because of the unfriendly proclamations of Iranian leaders but because of what an American rapprochement with Iran signals for the future of Israel’s status as an American client. While America would probably benefit by playing Israel and Iran against each other for a while to extract the maximum benefit from both relationships, it is hard to see how America would manage to please both clients simultaneously and quite easy to imagine a world in which Iran—with its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, its control over Hezbollah and Hamas, and easy access to leading members of al-Qaida—would be the partner worth pleasing.

Samuels is wrong, I think, to conclude that a strike would serve Israel’s interests (and just plain crazy to think that it will provide political cover for a solution to the Palestinian problem in a grand bargain that will make everyone but Iran happy). But these are very good points about the different calculations the two allies face in dealing with Iran. Obviously, a nuclear Iran is much worse news for Israel than for the United States. But more important - and less-widely discussed - is his second point: as important as it is for America to improve its relationship with Iran, it is far more important for Israel that those efforts fail.

If nothing is done to stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons, that will be very bad for Israel. If they bomb Iran, that will be even worse for Israel. And if they bomb Iran to American condemnation, that will be an absolute disaster for Israel. This is a very tough spot even for a country that is always in several tough spots at once, and I honestly don’t know what I would advocate if I were in their position. But America’s situation, fortunately, is much clearer. We should do what we can short of military action to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, understanding that we will probably fail, while doing everything we can, as publicly as possible, to restrain Israel. There’s nothing pleasant about this situation, but we’re in a different - and better - position than are the Israelis.

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.

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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.

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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.