Mr. Netanyahu Prepares to Attack Iran with U.S. Bombs

With the election of Benjamin Netanyahu to a new term as prime minister of Israel, the outcome of a close election held March 18, war with Iran, his goal since at least 2012, is on schedule.

He panicked as the recent vote neared, with polls not favoring his re-election, and told voters that Arab-Israeli citizens going to the polls “in droves” to vote for his opponent were part of foreign-funded leftist conspiracy against Israel’s security. Indeed, he said they were being brought to the polls “by the busload,” but…observers for Israeli newspapers reported that there were no buses. He also reversed a long-standing commitment by himself (and one made by previous Israeli prime ministers) to seek a “two-state solution” that would give millions of Palestinians, driven out by Israel when it declared independence in 1948, their own (albeit much reduced) nation. More than half a million still live in eight recognized refugee camps in Gaza in the most crowded living conditions in the world.

A day after his election, Mr. Netanyahu said he never reversed his commitment to a two-state solution.

In a sense, all the campaign rhetoric was noise. A day after his election, Mr. Netanyahu said he never reversed his commitment to a “two-state solution” and supporters worldwide got busy saying that the media had distorted his words. It was just bluster, but it accomplished its purpose. It drowned out one crucial message that Mr. Netanyahu’s words and actions should have conveyed to voters: he is actively, and imminently preparing to take Israel into war with one of the Middle East’s largest, most populous nations, Iran. Is it because Iran, now, is on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon, and this is the last moment for Israel is act?  Not really.

Exactly three years ago this month, on March 8, 2012—long before current negotiations with Iran and updated calculations of Iran’s supposed progress toward the bomb–one of Israel’s leading newspapers, Haaretz, ran this headline: “U.S. Denies Obama Promised Bunker Busters to Netanyahu.” The subhead explained that Israeli media were claiming that U.S. President Obama had agreed to give Israel 5,000-pound Guided Bomb Unit (GBU) bombs. The significance of this is that Iran, which is enriching uranium to fuel nuclear power plants (it repeatedly denies claims that it is making bomb fuel), is painfully aware that Israel bombed into oblivion Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility 10 miles from Baghdad in1981. That attack, which killed 10 Iraqi soldiers and one French engineer, was unanimously condemned by the U.N. Security Council, including the United States. In the wake of the bombing, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), responsible for inspections of nuclear research reactors, condemned the bombing and stated that Iraq was in compliance with all safeguards under nuclear weapons nonproliferation agreements.

Tellingly, the Israeli premier who ordered the attacks, Menachem Begin, had decades earlier formed and headed a terrorist organization, Irgun, to drive out British forces assigned to keep the peace between Jews and Palestinians in the lead up to the 1948 War of Independence. The British historian Paul Johnson, a supporter of Israel who wrote the classic, “History of the Jews,” states that Irgun and the Stern Gang, Jewish terrorist groups, introduced political terrorism into the Middle East.

Mr. Netanyahu believes that Iranian facilities are enriching uranium in order to make an atomic bomb, that Israel’s existence is at stake, and that the only solution is to bomb those facilities out of existence.  Current estimates and arguments about whether or not Iran is creating nuclear fuel, or how advanced that supposed process may be, mean nothing to Mr. Netanyahu. He has been certain for at least three years that Israel must attack Iran.

Iran has built its facilities in diverse locations, deep beneath layers of earth and rock. A bombing attack on those facilities by Israel, to have any chance of success, would require the use of U.S. “bunker buster” bombs.

But Iran has built its facilities in diverse locations, deep beneath layers of earth and rock. A bombing attack on those facilities by Israel, to have any chance of success, would require the use of U.S. “bunker buster” bombs—although many military experts claim the Iranian facilities are so dispersed and so deep in the earth that only a full-scale ground invasion of Iran could discover and destroy them. (You know, the way we invaded Iraq to destroy its “weapons of mass destruction.”)

The same story, three years ago this month, reported that Mr. Netanyahu requested from the United States refueling planes that could make possible the long round-trip flight of Israeli bombers to strike at the heart of Iran. Again, ironically, Israel faced the same problem in the bombing of Iraq, but in that case it was solved by an agreement with Iran (then at war with Iraq), to allow Israeli war planes to land in Iran. It was Iran, too, that photographed the Iraqi nuclear facility to provide Israel with precise bombing targets.

Strangely, the only point of contention in this story was a White House claim that President Obama had not had such discussions with Mr. Netanyahu, but, instead, that the U.S. Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, had the discussions—and that Mr. Obama had instructed Mr. Panetta to begin immediately to work on the request. The emphasis of the story, oddly, was simply that Mr. Netanyahu’s request was not to the President directly.

That is cold comfort for those, today, view an Israeli war with Iran, using weapons and planes supplied by the United States, as opening a vast new front in the Middle East and almost certain to draw the United States into war with Iran as it strikes back in various ways at both Israel and the United States.

An alternative, constantly in the headlines, is an agreement among Iran, on the one hand, and the United States, permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Germany, on the other. That is supposed to be negotiated and agreed by the end of this March, and for good reason is the highest-priority foreign initiative of the Obama administration. But last week, Mr. Netanyahu, at the invitation of Congressional Republicans, and against protests of the Obama Administration, came to speak to the U.S. Congress to argue that it should oppose the President in any peace agreement he might conclude with Iran. He argued passionately that today’s assessment of Iran’s progress toward creating bomb fuel is flawed. But we see that he never has cared about any assessment of progress. He requested the weapons needed to attack Iran three years ago.

If the agreement, reportedly well-advanced, is not reached by the end of March, or if Congress torpedoes it, Mr. Netanyahu expects Israel and the United States to be on countdown to war with Iran. What is the likely timetable, as Mr. Netanyahu sees it? That is difficult to say. The same 2012 story in Haaretz reported Mr. Netanyahu as stating that a strike on Iran is “not a matter of days, weeks, but not a matter of years.”

Well, coming three years ago, we might interpret that as meaning that Mr. Netanyahu is not serious in his calls for urgent action. But can’t we also conclude that Mr. Netanyahu’s determination to bomb Iran has nothing to do with timelines; his view is that any Middle East country with any nuclear facility, whatever its purpose, must be bombed by Israel?  As Israel demonstrated in its attack on Iraq?

As he routinely does, Mr. Netanyahu cast the danger into the context of Israel’s continued existence, projecting another and final Holocaust. He said that if he didn’t make “the right call” for attacking Iran, “Who will I explain to? The next generation? The ones that will not come?”

Israel is by far the best-armed and militarily powerful nation in the Middle East; it has kept its nuclear bombs (some hundred or so) secret, or never admitted, albeit now an open secret. Those who believe that Iran is working to produce a nuclear weapon (Israeli and U.S. intelligence chiefs say evidence doesn’t support that claim), say it might have its first one in a year or even less. Would Iran, which in modern times has never started a war with a neighbor, and repelled the invasion by Iraq with an estimated loss of one million young Iranian lives, then attack Israel? An atomic bomb, if Iran could deliver it, could devastate an Israeli city. Then, Iran would sit back and await Israel’s instant nuclear retaliatory strike, which, indeed, might leave no next generation of Iranians to tell the tale?

The record shows that Mr. Netanyahu has long had the world on a course toward war between two of the Middle East’s most powerful countries, Israel and Iran, with the United States–as always–supplying critical weapons to Israel and backing Israel militarily up to and including the final step of going to war to protect Israel. Mr. Netanyahu’s unfortunate re-election has simply kept the clock ticking.

The United States should state that, if Israel goes to war, this time, it goes on its own. The alternative is the one against which Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1801 inaugural address, “entangling alliances” that outsource our decision to go to war to other leaders, in other nations, leaving us hostage to alien calculations of national interest.

Israel is a critical ally of the United States, whose founding principles in many ways reflect our own, and whose advanced, dynamic economy makes it an American asset in a crucial but chaotic part of the world. It is not too much to say that Israel is a Western sentinel on the march from the Islamic world to the West.

But Israel now is led by a government too infected with the very religious fundamentalism, and vicious tribal rivalries, that have made the Middle East so dangerous. This came out clearly and dramatically in Mr. Netanyahu’s panicky election-eve broadcast warning that too many Arab Israeli citizens were voting and would distort the true intentions of Israeli voters. His statements have been condemned around the world as a desperate racist (tribalist) appeal to Jewish voters.

Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election, his statements as discussed here, and his recent lunge to seize the controls of America’s Middle-East foreign policy (in cahoots with the Republicans), underline how Israel’s direction has changed.

America’s commitment to guarantee Israel’s military success, whatever adventures it may undertake, is now unacceptable to a great nation that for so long has sacrificed so much, with such paltry long-term benefits, as a consequence of its “entangling alliances.”

Whatever you think of Mr. Obama’s political outlook, support him against Mr. Netanyahu to find an alternative to yet another war in the Middle East.

 
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*An earlier version of this story failed to make clear that the story in “Haaretz” about Mr. Netanyahu’s request for weapons to attack Iran, and his time table for attack on Iran, appeared three years ago. We apologize for the confusion.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here