WarSclerotic

Wake up! – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

It is likely the Iranians will not use the bomb they have. There are, however, things that cant be allowed to develop even if the chances they’ll be used is 5 percent. Because even if it is a 5 percent chance, it means 100 percent destruction.

By Udi Pridan

There is an 80 percent probability that between nine months to two years from now, the Israeli home front will absorb 1,000 to 20,000 losses. That is the result of the Iranian nuclear Catch-22 in which Israel is trapped.

There’s something of a secret internal pact in Israel that it will not permit any of its enemies to possess nuclear weapons. The reason is clear. It is likely the Iranians will not use the bomb they have. There are, however, things that cant be allowed to develop even if the chances they’ll be used is 5 percent. Because even if it is a 5 percent chance, it means 100 percent destruction. That is a chance no one will take. Just as no one will get on a flight, even for half fare, if there is a 5 percent chance the plane will crash.

	The Bushehr nuclear power plant, south of Tehran.
	Photo by: Reuters

That’s why Israel will act against the Iranian nuclear program, with or without the Americans. This is the commitment, apparently taken as an oath in some secret ceremony, of every Israeli prime minister, every army chief of staff and every Mossad chief. That is what Menachem Begin did in Iraq. According to foreign sources, that is what Ehud Olmert did in Syria, and that is what Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak will do in Iran. They will bomb.

The operation will cause losses. They will not be light, but they will be tolerable, given the importance of the matter. What will be intolerable is what will come later. Stricken Iran will respond with its remaining strength: Shihab-3, Shihab-5, Shihab-8 and a Shihab we will only discover at that time, as usual. These are missiles that can carry a payload of half a ton of explosives or chemical weapons.

In addition, Iran’s proxy will be used in the north. Hezbollah has thousands of rockets, much improved over those we experienced in the last war. The one Iron Dome weapons system deployed in the south will become useless in 24 hours.

Hundreds of missiles will fall on the home front in Israel for the first time, mostly in the center of the country. You don’t have to be a ballistics genius to understand what that means. One missile on army headquarters in Tel Aviv, and not only will the chief of staff’s pistol vanish, so will his entire office. One missile on the Akirov Towers, and the defense minister’s piano will be gone. One missile on the Azrieli mall, and the items on sale will become fair game for looters.

Thousands of dead and wounded in the metropolitan Tel Aviv area is an overwhelming number for us. With all due respect to the army’s Home Front Command, Israel does not have emergency and rescue services that can cope with such a situation. We don’t even have firefighting services at a minimal level. There’s no fire truck, no connection to water, and the driver is both cantor and midwife. If there will be thousands of dead, we will lick our wounds. Five thousand would be a national trauma. At 20,000 we will use the doomsday weapon against Iran, and then there will really be a new Middle East.

In the meantime, I can’t understand how we continue to busy ourselves with trivia. Israel in 2010 is in fetal distress, and its parents are tossing back a beer. The foolishness of the state’s behavior is on a level that even Barbara Tuchman, in her book “The March of Folly,” could not have imagined. The ship is sinking, and the captain is getting a manicure. The chief of staff, the defense minister and the army’s top brass are preoccupied with personal survival, while our survival as a state is uncertain. There are dozens of ministers and deputy ministers, and nothing moves without the prime minister. And he prefers not to move. Everything is stuck. And everything is about to explode.

Action must be taken immediately. We must pull ourselves together, stop all the foolishness, recruit the best and the brightest, join hands and together, united and smart, focus on waging the battle for our future.

Because after the commission of inquiry that will be established in 2013, the Agranat Commission will look like child’s play, and that terrible Yom Kippur like Purim.

This entry was posted on August 22, 2010 at 3:19 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.