Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic says that he is not engaging in a thought exercise or a one-man war game when he discusses the plausibility and potential consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran:
Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.
I have been exploring the possibility that such a strike will eventually occur for more than seven years, since my first visit to Tehran, where I attempted to understand both the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East, and especially since March of 2009, when I had an extended discussion about the Iranian nuclear program with Benjamin Netanyahu, hours before he was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister. In the months since then, I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials.
In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance that Israel will attack the Iranian nuclear program in the near future? Not everyone would answer this question, but a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.
(Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Obama administration. But I tested the consensus by speaking to multiple sources both in and out of government, and of different political parties. Citing the extraordinary sensitivity of the subject, most spoke only reluctantly, and on condition of anonymity. They were not part of some public-relations campaign.)
The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so). The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state.
Genius, as he calls himself, adds that Iran can bring Israel to its knees without a single explosion:
They will mobilize for war against us, we’ll have to mobilize in response, and our entire country will grind to a halt. Then they’ll demobilize, mobilize again, demobilize, mobilize again, etc., which they can do forever because — as crap as their economy is — they have oil and we don’t have it. An Iranian mobilization could also last for weeks — what do the mullahs care? — but a full Israeli mobilization for war means that our crops rot in the fields, our buses don’t get driven and the simple, day-to-day business of life doesn’t get done. A single full mobilization for war every year could wipe us off the map, let alone having to mobilize the whole military on a monthly or weekly basis.
And if that alone doesn’t change the rules of the game, almost all of Israel is now in range of Hezballah’s missiles. In the era of the Mullahs’ Bomb, Hezballah can begin to strike at Israel with relative impunity. Any response will mean another Iranian mobilization, triggering what we know we don’t want. Does anyone doubt that Tel Aviv will be hit by missiles from Lebanon in the next war? I fully expect to see the inside of a bomb shelter in the not-too-distant future.
(Hat tip to Aretae.)