Financial Post
Israel’s back is against the wall. To the south it faces Iran-backed Gaza, a terrorist state dedicated to Israel’s destruction. To the north lies Iran-backed Lebanese territory, equally bent on Israel’s destruction. About 1000 kilometres to the east lies Iran, itself, which will soon have a nuclear bomb and the delivery system needed to detonate it 600 metres above Tel Aviv – the height at which an exploding nuclear bomb best incinerates a populace.
And, for the first time in a generation, Israel is no longer confident that it has a reliable ally in the U.S.
The threat that weighs on Israelis is palpable. In Iran, where some 6000 centrifuges continually churn out bomb material, the countdown to the creation of a nuclear bomb nears its end. Many Israeli analysts believe the countdown will end mere months from now; few Israeli analysts disbelieve Iran’s pledge to eradicate Israel. While those centrifuges have spun inexorably, year after year bringing Israel closer to the brink, the EU and the U.S. have urged Israel to show restraint. "Don’t take out Iran’s nuclear weapons program the way you did Saddam Hussein’s," they have urged, arguing that doing so could lead Iran to unleash terrorist attacks on Western targets and to block oil shipments to the West from the Middle East. Instead, the EU and the U.S. promised to employ tough economic sanctions against Iran to bring it to the negotiating table.
Israel has never had any illusions about the EU — the Europeans enjoy booming trade with Iran at the same time they warn of sanctions – but it did bank on the U.S. coming to its rescue, so much so that it eschewed early opportunities to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, when the task would have been relatively easy.
Now, Israeli hopes are shattered. Even before the Obama administration came to power, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates announced his opposition to any strike against Iran. With the advent of the Obama administration, Israel now finds itself cast as the bad guy and made a diplomatic target by the U.S.
If not for Israel’s intransigence in returning land to the Palestinians, the Obama Administration recently suggested, the Arab world would be pressuring Iran to abandon nuclear weapons. Leaked administration reports indicate that the U.S. will play hardball with Israel, unilaterally imposing on Israel a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Secretary Gates, whom Obama kept in his administration, remains adamantly opposed to an Israeli military strike. And to provide a foretaste of the ratcheting up of pressure to come, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, in a presentation at a U.N. meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty earlier this month, stated that the U.S. had as a fundamental objective "universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea."
This identification of Israel as a nuclear weapons state shook Israel. For one thing, following a 1969 agreement between Golda Meir and Richard Nixon, it had been U.S. policy not to press Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Neither had the U.S. since then acknowledged Israel’s nuclear program, and certainly not in the same company as North Korea and Pakistan. Perhaps most troubling of all, this change of U.S. policy toward Israel was done without consultation or even advance notice – Israel learned of it in the press.
On Monday in Washington, an Israeli prime minister will meet with a U.S. president less as the strongest of allies, as in such meetings in past decades, than as antagonists. President Obama will press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make concessions that, in Israel’s view, threaten its very existence. For his part, Netanyahu will press Obama to agree that negotiations with the Iranians need to end on a date certain, before the Iranians complete their countdown to a bomb.
A year or two ago, Israel held out hope that, if an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities proved necessary, the U.S. would spearhead the attack. Today, although the U.S. Congress and the U.S. public support Israel, the most that Israelis dare hope for is that the U.S. administration will provide passive assistance, by allowing Israeli jets to fly over Iraq for their attack on Iran. What Israelis dread the most is the possibility that the permission won’t be forthcoming and the U.S. military will shoot Israeli jets out of the skies.
Netanyahu now has few options. He knows that there is no time for negotiations with Iran to succeed, not even in theory, particularly if Obama doesn’t expect those negotiations to bear fruit until after the Israelis and Palestinians arrive at some understanding. Obama’s linkage of the two issues can only be seen as providing Obama with an explanation down the road for why engaging the Iranians failed to persuade them to abandon a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu also knows that the Obama administration’s end game – to have Israel and everyone else learn to live with a nuclear Iran – would be untenable. Iran is already the chief supplier of arms to the region’s terrorists. What would the region be like once Iran is producing nuclear weapons at its ultimate expected capacity of 25 to 30 per year? How could any of Israel’s neighbours feel secure enough then to dare make peace with Israel?
Finally, Netanyahu knows that the Iranian bomb will almost surely be completed on Obama’s watch, offering no prospect that a sympathetic U.S. president might help Israel stop Iran’s countdown – virtually all Israeli estimates show Iran having the bomb sometime between 2009 and 2012.
The upshot: Netanyahu has nothing to gain by delaying an attack. With delay off the table, Netanyahu has but two military choices.
He can attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, a high-risk venture likely to achieve only limited success, and at high cost to Israel’s air force. Or he can destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, a low-risk military operation that would, in effect, impose the harsh sanctions on Iran that the West has long promised.
Either way, the West is likely to face Iranian retaliation and the major disruption to world oil supplies that it has long dreaded.
Lawrence Solomon is a columnist with Financial Post. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Energy Probe 