Jeffrey Goldberg, an analyst with exceptionally good connections in Israel, has written an article that predicts that Israel will attack Iran within the next 6 months. apparently, the Netanyahu government has decided that a carefully targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will not necessarily trigger a fierce Iranian counterattack. There are plenty of very good reasons to believe that Iran would not wish to widen a war, particularly if the counterattack brought an American response. But the subject and the predicate do not mesh: if Iran is crazy enough to want to obliterate Israel, why then would one make an assumption of a carefully calibrated response to a pre-emptive attack? I suspect that Israel does not actually fear a nuclear attack from Iran; rather it fears that a nuclear-armed Iran would limit its ability to use force with impunity in the region.
The assumption that the Iranians would not respond with vigor is not borne out by the war games the US has mapped out to predict what would happen if Israel attacked Iran. The discrepancy on outcomes between Israel and the US is deeply troubling.
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