WarSclerotic

Israel, JFK and the Bomb – Westport – Minuteman News Center.

By Vincent Giandurco

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu met with President Obama in Washington on Monday. The men are both working hard to find a way to avoid conflict with Iran. From the American perspective, for a variety of reasons, the paramount goal is the avoidance of war, which of course would be best for us and the Middle East region. The President vowed our unwavering support for Israel, which is crucial at this moment and must be our policy.

Netanyahu put on a unified front. But Bibi added that Israel must always remain the master of its own fate, including its national security, which is equally incontestable. It seems to me that in order to evaluate Israel’s options clearly and completely, one has to look at it not from the perspective of America, but from that of Israel and the Israelis.

Iranian President Ahmadinajad has vowed to eliminate Israel’s regime, which has been translated in some media as “wipe Israel off the map.” No matter who’s translating, the hostility is clear. Given Iran’s history since the Ayatollah coup in 1979, his statement is a credible representation of a widely held acrimony. Furthermore, Iran’s foreign policy approach over the past three decades can be characterized as a loose cannon with a short fuse, so the threat is not merely rhetorical and cannot be taken lightly.

Israel has been repeatedly attacked from practically the very first day of the nation’s establishment, and indeed experiences incursions and bombardments almost on a weekly basis even during peacetime. With the constant threat of terrorism or outright attack, peace in Israel is and has always been a fragile concept.

Into this frame comes intelligence that Iran is very near to creating a nuclear weapon, and has also successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. I am not here to play the blame game, so we will not spend time investigating how this dangerous regime was allowed to proceed this far with this technology. That fact is, they may soon have it.

If Israeli intelligence learned that Syria had acquired 100 new fighter jets, we know from experience that Israel would not raise a fuss. They would turn to us and purchase more and better fighters, and thus maintain the balance of power and a semblance of peace. Now, however, one of its most hostile adversaries is close to creating a deliverable nuclear weapon. This is not a manageable national security issue, it is an existential threat, and a potential Armegeddon.

When JFK learned that the USSR was insinuating nuclear warheads into Cuba, he didn’t turn to the British for advice on how to handle the threat, nor did he ask the Canadians to defend the USA. He employed a variety of aggressive and forceful tactics, threatening surveillance, blockade, incursion, even war. The threat was too close and too real, and had to be eliminated in short order. Seen from the Israeli perspective, the Iranian nuclear issue is not dissimilar to what we faced in October 1962, and looking back, few historians would quibble with the notion that Kennedy’s first concern had to be not the avoidance of conflict, but the removal of the threat.

Clearly, our country has many reasons to shun a conflict. First, we just ended one war and are still in another. Second, Egypt, Syria and Libya make the Middle East uncertain already. More instability is toxic. Third, the Iran threat has already driven oil and gas painfully high, regular hitting $4 just this week locally. From DC to Main Street, no one wants to see it go still higher. These are all legitimate issues, which have stimulated the admirable and understandable policy goal of conflict avoidance.

Yet a close study of Israel’s predicament makes it clear that it will be difficult for our ally, responsible for its own security and “fate,’ to not take some form of action to disable the nascent Iranian nuclear capability. They almost can’t not do it.

Vincent Giandurco is a political analyst who lives in Fairfield. Twitter @VGiandurco

This entry was posted on March 7, 2012 at 6:13 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.