Dealing With Irrational Iran
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
How is one to think about Iranian nuclear weapons and Israel? Two things should be clear, even if all the rest is arguable:
1. The current regime in Iran would happily carry out its threats to destroy Israel if it believed that, once it acquired nuclear weapons, it could get away with it.
2. Israel would therefore be entirely justified, morally and legally, in attacking and destroying Iranian nuclear installations if it believed it could get away with it.
The rest, as I say, including what “getting away with it” might mean, is subject to debate.
For the Iranians, whose Shihab missiles have the range and ability to hit Israel even today (less sophisticated and shorter-ranged Iraqi Scuds already hit Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War), and who could effectively annihilate the geographically tiny and highly urban Jewish state by delivering a small number of atomic bombs to three or four of its major cities, this would presumably involve, apart from the willingness to risk severe international repercussions, the assumption that (a) Israeli anti-missile defenses could be penetrated, and (b) Iranians would not have too much of their own geographically huge and highly rural country destroyed in return.
Assumption (a) might be questionable, given the existence of Israel’s Arrow anti-missile missile, which has already been tested successfully against Scuds and will undoubtedly be far more advanced by the time – which is at least quite a few years away – that Iran would be ready to launch a nuclear strike.
Assumption (b) would depend on what “too much” was in Iranian eyes. Iran is a country with 70,000,000 inhabitants, of which approximately one-third live in its 25 largest cities. Supposing that an Israeli counter-strike were to decimate every one of these cities and badly pollute the rest of the country with radioactivity, bringing widespread illness and economic havoc: Would not this be “too much” even for an Iranian who thought, as does his country’s prime minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Israel deserves to be “wiped from the map”?
From Israel’s point of view, “getting away with it” – once more, disregarding the international reaction – would also involve two assumptions. The first would be that it could indeed destroy or effectively damage installations that are two thousand kilometers or more from its own air bases and are said to be widely scattered, buried underground, and heavily defended. The second would be that Iran could not then strike back with missiles bearing conventional warheads whose havoc to Israeli civilians would again be “too much.” Although one would have to be privy to secret intelligence information to assess either of these assumptions in an informed manner, they too would appear to be highly iffy.
From a purely rational point of view, therefore, it is difficult to conceive of even the most rabidly anti-Israel government in Iran ever actually ordering an atomic strike – and difficult too, therefore, to conceive of Israel taking the chances it would have to take in order to forestall such a remote danger. If Israeli politicians and generals have nevertheless taken to speaking out publicly about the possible need for an attack on Iran, this is most likely a deliberate policy aimed at scaring a reluctant world into doing something more than simply bewailing the Iranian nuclear program. “If you don’t act,” the message is, “we will have to.”
In fact, however, Israel would be highly unlikely to hit Iranian nuclear installations without at least tacit American approval, not only because of its overall dependence on the United States, but also because its attacking F-16 fighter-bombers would either have to fly either across Iraq on their way to their targets, or else across Saudi Arabia, in which there are American airbases.
Moreover, if America is prepared to give Israel the green light, it would make far more sense for it to do the job itself. Its airbases would be closer and its planes could carry bigger bomb loads and avoid midair refueling – and if any were shot down, it would be far easier to mount rescue missions for their pilots.
Indeed, if the United States should ever come to the decision that Iran’s nuclear facilities need to be destroyed, it would be manipulative and hypocritical in the worst way for it to ask Israel to do it in its place. The only reason for acting in such a manner would be to disclaim American responsibility by making Israel take the rap in the international arena and be the country to pay the price for having made the world a safer place for everyone.
But of course, if the world were not so craven, there would be no need even to contemplate military action against Iran, since sufficient other means exist to make the Iranians scuttle their nuclear weapon program. Concerted economic and diplomatic pressure could do the job – yet they would also mean the loss of many fat business contracts for both European and American companies and a steep rise in the price of oil, which no one on either side of the Atlantic is interested in.
Why should the world not, then, simply resign itself to a nuclear Iran, which can be expected to act rationally and refrain from using its atomic weapons out of the same calculations of mutual deterrence that have kept other countries from using theirs? There are many reasons, of which the most persuasive perhaps is that when the man next door is standing in the middle of the street and threatening to burn down your house, you cannot, alas, count on him being rational.
And an Israel that, knowing something about the irrationality of modern political anti-Semitism, cannot count on the rationality of an anti-Semitic Iranian government is an Israel that cannot ultimately be counted on to be rational itself.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.