The “What if?” question has been quietly reformulating itself as the “When?” question, while politicians, diplomats, and the news-absorbing public have been trying hard to look another way.
Revolutionary Iran is, by general consensus, now on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. The West, generally, cannot abide that. Israel, in particular, cannot abide that, and the question refers to the likelihood that Israel will do something about it.
There are a few more than six million Jews in Israel, the annihilation of whom is an unconcealed, and frequently restated, object of Iranian public policy. There are incidentally nearly six million Muslims in Israel, Gaza, and West Bank, who stand to be incinerated in the “collateral” of any Iranian nuclear strike: a poignant illustration of the old adage, “be careful what you wish for.”
The question here is not, “Should Israel hit Iran?” Not even Washington has the power to constrain Israeli action, when the issue involves, for Israel, the prospect of another Holocaust. Moral posturing is, in this case, a waste of precious time.
The great pacifist, Bertrand Russell, once gave his views on Russia acquiring nuclear weapons. This was an issue in 1948. There is controversy over the nuances of his lordship’s argument, reported in the contemporary Daily Worker under the headline, “Earl Russell calls for atom war.” He did not say that the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. He only said, that would be the unanswerable humanitarian argument.
For all I happen to despise “Bertie” and most of what he stood for, he was a solid logician. He sketched out three possibilities, in what he considered to be the descending order of desirability. 1. West attacks a USSR still without nuclear arms, and wins easily. 2. West and USSR wait to have war until both have nuclear weapons, and West wins, after horrific destruction on both sides. 3. West lets USSR get and accumulate nuclear weapons, then submits ignominiously to Soviet-dictated peace.
As usual in human circumstances, some utterly unlikely fourth possibility emerged, via “containment.” But we cannot know the future, and Russell was, commendably, confronting what we then knew.
The Soviet Union presented a leadership of barbarously evil, but worldly men. They were infected with an extreme form of a socialist ideology that gave them “false consciousness,” but when it came to material threats, their calculations were sane. They backed off promptly from any contest that could involve their own annihilation: e.g. the Cuban missile crisis.
Many of Iran’s calculations have been arguably sane power plays, given their ideological commitment to planetary Islamist tyranny. But this is where the jaw should drop. Their ideology – a twisted, heretical version of Shia Islam – anticipates angelic intervention in a world apocalypse triggered by their own violent actions.
An Iran with nuclear weapons is thus not necessarily an Iran unlikely to use them, in the first instance. But even if it does not use them in a surprise attack, it will use them as leverage for demands so extortionate as to lead inexorably to the same result: nuclear war.
This is the inevitable Israeli reasoning. The “window of opportunity” for a strike on Iran’s nuclear installations is naturally disputed. But the dispute is now over months, not years. As the U.S. secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, recently noted, the Israelis now calculate, “March, April, maybe May.”
That he was not joking is indicated by current western efforts to make large-scale evacuation arrangements for their citizens in Israel and vicinity.
As the Israelis know perfectly well, taking out selected Iranian targets will not be easy. Even picking the targets requires faith in intelligence sources that may be corrupted, or simply wrong; and getting to them over unfriendly territory will be a logistical challenge on a scale beyond anything the Israeli Air Force has done before.
Yet they also know it’s not as simple as that. Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are in a position to make Israel’s domestic security arrangements very dodgy, during and after such a strike. This in addition to any retaliatory long-range Iranian missile strikes.
Finally we come to the wild card. The U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been cruising back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz, and many other American, British, and French warships currently patrol the Persian Gulf.
This is not as heartening as might seem. Iran has been accumulating advanced “conventional” weapons systems, including highly manoeuvrable cruise missiles of Russian and Chinese design. These can’t hit Israel, but could conceivably do serious damage to the allied fleet at short range, bottled up in that Gulf. It is not entirely inconceivable that the U.S. Navy could lose its first aircraft carrier in quite a while.
In short, a key test of the ayatollahs’ sanity: for if they do that, their regime is over. But also, the powder keg is hit, and they get the apocalypse their theologians have descried.
David Warren’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
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