Ban the bombing

Much talk in international circles regarding Iran’s nuclear programme is if and when Israel launches a strike to disable, if not destroy, Iranian fission facilities and impair future development.  The unabashed right-winger Dr Azriel Bermant said in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph that Israeli opinion coalesces around the belief that a military attack on Iran is inevitable.  He cites the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 in that the consequences were politically and diplomatically fraught but as the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union no more, there would be little disgruntlement outside the borders of Iran were it stymied in developing plants that could lead to nuclear weaponry.  As a supplementary case, Dr Bermant throws in the obliteration of a proto nuclear complex in Syria in 2007.

It doesn’t surprise me that Dr Bermant is an Assistant Editor of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation as such analysis reflects the doddery-ness of Baroness Thatcher than the steel of Prime Minister Thatcher.  It is initially a seductive argument until one takes a closer look at the intricacies, not least through the lens of the foreign policy dictum ‘everything is local’.  Let’s take Osirak or rather Operation Babylon, as the Israeli Self-Defence Force termed it.  In 1981, Saddam Hussein was involved in a bitter, attritional war of his own making with the ayatollahs in Tehran and the last thing he needed was a two-front war, especially as Israel was not engaged in active hostilities at the time.  Iraq may not have had a contiguous border with the Jewish State but to try and launch missiles at Israel would have wrought a terrible reply from nuclear-armed Tel-Aviv, as well as forfeiting all the western help it was covertly receiving in its battle over the Shatt el-Arab waterway.  Moreover, this was not a declaration of war by Israel because Baghdad had never signed a cease-fire, let alone a peace treaty.  Further, many are convinced that Israel could not have achieved such a precise hit with the munitions of the time and that the air overfly was cover for Israeli-sponsored saboteurs on the ground.  Is Israel’s hesitancy now that it does not yet have such penetration of the Iranian research team?

Flash forward to 2007, the surge in Iraq is very much working and neo-cons haven’t given up hope of invading Syria before George W Bush leaves office.  Damascus knows that it can’t win a war against Israel and would have feared US intervention had it tried its luck.  Syria therefore chalks the event up to experience and razes the site completely.

Dr Bermant ascribes Mrs Thatcher’s indignant reaction over Operation Babylon to the fear of communism becoming more pervasive in the Middle East and the Soviet Union wielding more influence among the Arab states.  But even Francis Fukuyama no longer agrees that we are living in an End of History times.  To replace communism as the foreign bogeyman, the neo-cons used Islamism and an Israeli strike would fire up the Arab street (why else did the US force restraint on Tel-Aviv in the 1991 Gulf war).  Al-Qaeda, on its knees currently, would get an adrenalin shot in the arm.  Then there are logistics – in 1981, Israel only had to fly over western-friendly Jordan.  This time it would have to go over Iranian proxy Iraq as well.  Tehran would long know that the fighter-bombers were coming.  And this would be a declaration of war as Israel has never been in conflict with Iran for the need for a peace treaty.

For Iran, Iraq did not have nuclear weapons and the regime was toppled, North Korea did and the regime is still in power.  Unnerving as it was, North Korea’s Nuclear Club membership has not prompted Japan or South Korea to follow suit.  Might not Arabs also do the same?  An Iranian nuclear warhead would be a bad thing but this may be deployed as defence than aggression.