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In an op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick explicitly calls for Israel to launch an air attack on Iranian nuclear installations. Glick is very knowledgeable about military and strategic matters, and has friends in high places, so we should take her seriously. I’ve summarized her argument as follows:

1. New evidence indicates that Iran can build a bomb in a matter of months. Iran already has missiles that can reach Israel.
2. International diplomatic efforts under way are far too little and too late to constrain Iran’s progress.
3. Iran is committed to war with its enemies and Israel is first on the list.
4. Iran’s nuclear capability is likely to be used in such a war.
5. The US will not act to prevent an Iranian attack on Israel.
6. Israel has the capability to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, even if the US opposes an attack.
7. The Israeli public is prepared to accept the consequences — diplomatic and possibly military — of such an attack.
8. Therefore Israel should attack  Iranian nuclear installations.

I agree with all of the premises of her argument with the exception of no. 4. In order to assert this, one has to assume that Iran is prepared to accept  certain Israeli nuclear retaliation, which Anthony Cordesman has estimated might take 30,000,000 Iranian lives. While some analysts think that Iranian leaders are sufficiently irrational to take this decision, it’s by no means a given.

This is not to say that possession of a nuclear weapon would not provide Iran with a ‘nuclear umbrella’ for aggression by Hezbollah and Syria, whose conventional and chemical/biological missile forces may well present as big a threat as (at least for the near future) a nuclear option.

In any case, I think the question facing Israeli strategic planners is not so much ‘what to do about the Iranian nukes’ but rather the broader one of how to deter, preempt or (worst case) respond to an Iranian attack — either direct, by means of its proxies, or combined — which will most likely be a non-nuclear missile attack.

My evaluation is that today, deterrence is holding. If the Iranian perception of the balance changes — as it might with possession of a nuclear bomb — then the option of preemption is indicated. But such a preemptive attack would have to target much more than just the nuclear facilities in Iran. The threats from Hezbollah and Syria would need to be neutralized as well.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, nuclear war

Legion of Honor (Enderlin's is slightly less fancy; he is only a 'chevalier' and this is an 'officer').

Thanks to Barry Rubin for bringing this to my attention.

Charles Enderlin has received the Legion of Honor. Enderlin is the Jerusalem correspondent of the France 2 TV network who narrated the footage shot by a Palestinian cameraman which supposedly showed 12-year old Mohammad al-Dura shot to death by Israeli soldiers.

The film, shown all over the world, inflamed sentiment against Israel at the beginning of the second Intifada, and the event was used to ‘justify’ several murders, including the Ramallah lynching of two Israeli reservists and the beheading of Daniel Pearl.

Various investigations showed that it was impossible for al-Dura to have been hit by Israeli bullets, and pointed strongly to the conclusion that he had not been shot at all.

French media critic Philippe Karsenty called the film “a hoax”. Enderlin sued Karsenty for libel and won his initial suit primarily on the basis of a character reference from then-President Jacques Chirac. Karsenty appealed, and the verdict was overthrown:

On May 21, 2008, in a stunning reversal of the lower court’s verdict, the appeals decision was handed down. It cited “the contradictory answers given by Charles Enderlin to the questions relating to the editing of the film,” the “inexplicable inconsistencies of the viewable images,” and the “contradictory answers of [cameraman Talal Abu Rahma] on the issue of the sequence of the scenes and the conditions under which they were filmed.” It also noted “France 2’s persistent reluctance to allow the viewing of its cameraman’s rushes,” and Enderlin’s “imprudent claim that he edited out the images of the child’s agony.”

While the court could not say that Karsenty had definitively proven the broadcast to be a hoax, it did find that there was a “sufficient factual base” for the charges he had made.

But apparently, rather than damaging his career, the incident made him a hero.

Vive la France!

Technorati Tags: al-Dura, Karsenty, Enderlin, Israel, France, Legion of Honor

JTA reports:

In an open letter in response to a protest by dozens of celebrities protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to showcase the city of Tel Aviv, festival co-director Cameron Bailey wrote that spotlighting Tel Aviv was “not a simple choice and that the city remains contested ground. We continue to learn more about the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.”

If  the city, which was founded on sand dunes by Jews in 1909, is “contested ground” then everything is. And in truth the existence of every last Jew in Israel is “contested”. This is not a big surprise to anyone who pays attention to what Palestinian Arab leaders of any faction say whenever they are not speaking specifically for Western consumption.

I am sure that Bailey, who does not appear to be particularly political, is “learn[ing] more” about the morally inverted ‘movement’ to isolate Israel. Naomi Klein, one of the leaders of the protest, describes her motivation thus:

Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade.

Klein lives in an alternate universe, where Israel did not (in 2005) dismantle 21 settlements in Gaza and 4 in the West Bank, and evict more than 8,000 Jews (and some Bedouins whom the Palestinian Arabs view as ‘collaborators’).  In Klein’s universe, Hezbollah apparently did not invade Israel, killing seven soldiers and firing missiles into Israel, and Hamas did not fire eight thousand Qassam and Katyusha rockets against Sderot and vicinity. This is undoubtedly the version of reality that Bailey is busy ‘learning’.

Meanwhile, one of the celebrities protesting is this one:

'Hanoi' Jane Fonda on North Vietnamese gun in 1972

Fonda later said that climbing on that gun for propaganda photos in a nation that was at war with the US — by 1972, 50,000 Americans had died in Vietnam — was “the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine“.

It’s obvious that her judgment hasn’t improved much since then.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Toronto Film Festival, Cameron Bailey, Tel Aviv, Jane Fonda

The winner of this week’s Jerusalem Post op-ed writers’ contest, Hershel Tsvi Yehuda, argues persuasively that “Settlements were never the problem“. He asserts that

History shows that the conflict here in Israel is not over land, but has to do with the inability of our Arabs/Muslim neighbors to recognize that Jews and Christians have any claim, religious or historical, to the land of Israel

and then he demonstrates the truth of this statement with simple historical examples.

Mr. Yehuda is not a professional writer in English (he consistently writes “it’s” instead of “its”; I don’t know why the Post’s editors couldn’t fix this), but he gets directly to the heart of the issue without getting bogged down in discussions of who did what to whom in what order in 1948. As I said, it’s very persuasive, and I recommend it highly.

It seems to me that if there is a problem to solve and we know what the root cause of the problem is, we should attack the root, not the symptoms. Yehuda’s essay shows that the fact that Jewish settlements bother the Arabs so much is actually a symptom of a deeper problem.

If the problem that President Obama wants to solve is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then pressuring Israel to freeze settlement construction does not go to the root of it. Rather, he should pressure the Arabs to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and admit that Jews and Christians have as much right to be in the Land of Israel as Muslims.

If he were successful in this, then peace would be a possibility. Freezing settlements does nothing except invite additional demands from Arabs who simply don’t want any Jewish state in the land.

It really is that simple.

Of course, maybe Obama is trying to solve a different problem, like the fact that Arabs and other Muslims dislike the US. His approach won’t fix this either, but that’s another story.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, settlements, Obama

News item:

Mohamed ElBaradei, outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has called the Iranian threat “hyped,” saying there is no proof the Islamic republic will soon have nuclear weapons.

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped,” ElBaradei told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in an interview released Tuesday.

“Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and international community,” he told the Chicago-based magazine. “But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.”

No, there’s no absolute proof that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons. But if the hypothetical weapons are aimed at you, then you are very concerned about the probability that Iran will have them at a given point in the future.

Iran’s intermediate-term goal seems to be to extend its sphere of influence over the whole Middle East. A nuclear capability would provide an umbrella to keep the US, Israel and Europe from interfering with Iran’s exercising a free hand in the region. Their problem is how to get there without triggering a preemptive response.

The only real threat to Tehran’s going nuclear is Israel. The US administration believes that it has too much to lose and too little to gain from a military operation against Iran. It won’t happen. Effective economic sanctions are impossible because Iran’s trading partners in Europe and Asia won’t allow them. Only Israel, with its back to the wall and convinced that its survival is at stake, might intervene.

So if you were an Iranian leader, what you do?

One thing is to try to determine what Israel’s red lines are and stay behind them. If possession of a deliverable weapon is a red line, then don’t possess one. Just make sure there is enough enriched uranium or plutonium available, and that all the associated technologies are far enough along so that a bomb could be put together quickly. Keep up the missile development.

Another thing is to temporize. Keep promising to talk to the Americans, and when it’s not enough to just promise, then talk. And talk. As long as this is going on the Americans will be motivated to restrain Israel (they are pretty well motivated in this direction already).

Finally, keep up the pressure on Israel from Hamas, from Hezbollah, from Syria.

And what should Israel do?

Do not be diverted. Continue to develop a plan to attack the Iranian installations if it becomes necessary. Assume that the US will be hostile to the idea, so an attack will need to reach a point of no return before the US finds out about it. This is one of numerous tough problems, like refueling, penetrating underground bunkers, target intelligence, forestalling retaliation from Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, etc.

Iran will know that these preparations are ongoing. That might deter them from actually assembling a weapon, although parallel development will occur.

Talk about carrying heavy responsibilities! How would you like to be Israel’s PM, Defense Minister or Chief of Staff? I wouldn’t.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iranian nuclear weapons