By John Aloysius Farrell
John McCain and Barack Obama won’t immediately be starting joint town hall appearances, it seems. But when and if they do, here is a question they should be required to answer, definitively: If Israel launches a surprise attack on Iran, is the United States obliged to participate?
The answer is: Absolutely not.
In fact, we should do all we can to prevent such a catastrophe.
The Israelis have a nuclear arsenal and the region’s best military forces. They are in no immediate existential danger and their perceived threat – that a Muslim regime or terrorist organization will attack them with weapons of mass destruction – will only grow more dire if they launch a Pearl Harbor-style attack on Tehran.
The New York Times editorial today, suggesting that Israel might go to war to boost the ruling party’s political fortunes, was chilling.
“The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who is bedeviled by a corruption scandal that could drive him from office, led the charge. “The Iranian threat must be stopped by all possible means,” he said in Washington, a day before meeting President Bush at the White House.
“Then Israel’s transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, who is jockeying to replace Mr. Olmert as head of the ruling Kadima Party if the prime minister is forced to resign, declared that an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks “unavoidable.”
“We don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors in Washington — or what Mr. Olmert heard from Mr. Bush. But saber-rattling is not a strategy. And an attack on Iran by either country would be disastrous.
“Unlike in 1981, when Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, there is no single target. A sustained bombing campaign would end up killing many civilians and still might not cripple Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran also has many frightening ways to retaliate. And even Arab states who fear Iran shudder at the thought of America, or its ally Israel, bombing another Muslim country and the backlash that that could provoke.
“Mr. Olmert may be trying to divert attention from his political troubles.”
Well said, Times.
Left unsaid was this. A great power like the United States needs to know its limits: what realities it cannot change. And no amount of American military might is going to change the fact that the future of the Middle East rests now, to a huge extent, in the hands of the Iranian people. Their choices, in the next ten or twenty years, may well determine the world’s fate.
There is a tantalizing hope that an engaged, responsible, democratic Iran will emerge as its revolutionary fires run their course. That would be an incredibly positive development for America, for Europe, and for the rest of the planet. As long as that hope is viable, we would be fools to thwart it, and should do everything we can to nourish it.
So here are the central questions for U.S. strategists: How would a joint Israeli-U.S. bombing campaign, or an Israeli surprise attack enabled by American support, affect that opportunity? Will it spur the Iranians to dump their silly and belligerent leader or cause them (as we would if we were attacked) to rally around the ruling government?
Here at home, Americans need to understand. The Israelis have been very fortunate, when launching air attacks upon Iraq and Syria, that the leaders of these two relatively backward nations rushed ahead with crude weapons programs that could be targeted with a single surgical strike. Iran is a different story.
Is hope too risky?
We Americans invented nuclear weapons; used them, and had a brief atomic monopoly. There was a time, in the late 1940s, when we could have attacked the USSR before the Soviets got the bomb, as some of our military leaders suggested. But U.S. presidents recognized that, with or without our atomic arsenal, we would ultimately, inevitably lose that war. Napoleon and Hitler proved that the Russians are just too big and tough and proud a people to enslave. And even if, for a time, we succeeded, we would not recognize the America we had become.
So we adopted a policy of deterrence, put faith in our ideals, and waited the Soviets out. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, we talked and talked and talked with our foes, and let freedom speak for itself. And, yes, for much of that time Americans lived under an existential threat. We do today.
But in the end, guess what: freedom won.
We need to have confidence in what we do best, and in a proven strategy that enabled great victories. We share many of Israel’s moral and strategic interests. We are not required to share its blunders.
