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Sunday, April 30, 2006

Should Israel Live with the Iranian Bomb?

At IsraelInsider.com, Edward Bernard Glick argues that Israel cannot wait for Iran to go nuclear, and that as soon as it becomes clear that non-military options will not help, Israel must act and act decisively. Here's an excerpt; the end will be entertaining to those of you who already know that the Arabs speak in one language in public and in another language in private (recall the comments about Lebanon in last night's post about that country).
Since world public opinion will blame the Israelis for whatever they do preemptively to save themselves, they might as well do what's needed and what works. As soon as it is clear that further nonmilitary pressures upon Iran are useless. Israel must, with or without American help, strike first and strike successfully. It must take out not only Iran's nuclear weaponry, but its delivery systems and command and control centers as well, because it is always better for Jews to be alive and condemned, than dead and eulogized.

An Israeli attack upon Iran will be condemned by the Arabs, the Muslims, the anti-Semites, the anti-Zionists, the anti-Americans, the appeasers. the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Pope, the Quakers, and the "war-can-never-be-an-option-in-the-twenty-first-century" postmodernists in academia and elsewhere.

Much of the criticism will be phony, however. In 1981, when Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's French-built Osirak reactor, located 18 miles south of Baghdad, the Saudi students in my Middle East politics class at Temple University condemned Israel roundly. But the next day, they all came to my office and asked me to tell my secretary to leave. They then insisted that I close the door. Only when he was assured of complete privacy, did the leader of the group, whose English was impeccable, say to me: "Thank God that the Israelis bombed Iraq yesterday. For only God knows when that crazy Iraqi would have used a nuclear bomb against Saudi Arabia, with which he contests the leadership of the Arab world?"

When I asked him why he and his compatriots didn't say so in class, he answered: "We were afraid to. At the least, our fellowships from ARAMCO (the Arab-American Oil Company) would have been revoked. And at the most, we would have been ordered home to be imprisoned or killed."
Somehow, many Israelis (and most American Jews) still don't understand this. But the Arabs get it. But the Arabs do. For example, in this article from the Kuwait Times:

Kuwaiti parliament speaker Jassem Al-Khorafi tried to play down the worries in the Gulf over Iran's nuclear facilities, including a reactor being built with Russian help in Bushehr across the Gulf, and its standoff with the West. "I am personally not worried because I believe it's for peaceful purposes," Khorafi told reporters after meeting Rafsanjani. "I see nothing that should make us afraid." Shiite cleric and lawmaker Hussein Al-Qallaf told reporters Gulf countries are seeking safety and don't want to be part of any struggle in the area. "If there is anything to fear, we should fear Israel," he said. "(Iran) is an Islamic state which we don't fear." [Note that the politician spouts the nonsense that Iran's program is 'peaceful.' He'd have to be blind to actually believe that. The 'Shiite cleric' blames it on Israel. CiJ]

...

Kuwait's Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sabah said last week that Iran's nuclear activities must remain under the close watch of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). [If they're really not worried, why would they want the IAEA involved? CiJ] US-ally Kuwait and other Sunni-ruled Gulf Arab states are concerned about the possibility that the current standoff may develop into a full-scale military confrontation and fear a possible environmental catastrophe if the Bushehr plant is targeted. [That's the real truth. CiJ] The region has witnessed three major conflicts in the last quarter century - the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf war to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Read the whole thing.

1 Comments:

At 12:37 PM, Blogger Carl in Jerusalem said...

There's a big difference between having the bomb in the hands of a democratic regime that has never threatened its neighbors and a facist regime that has threatened to wipe its neighbors off the face of the earth.

 

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