After three days of tough talk on Iran at the annual AIPAC conference and a meeting on the subject Wednesday between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Bush, Israelis are again envisioning scenarios of U.S. attack against the Islamic Republic and its assumed nuclear weapons program.
On Tuesday, Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Horovitz told me he thinks such a scenario is possible in the sunset of Bush’s presidency, partly due to an impression he got when he and a few of other Israeli journalists interviewed Bush in the Oval Office a few weeks ago. On Thursday, Ari Shavit imagined such a scenario is his column in Ha’aretz:
Contemplate, if you will, this wild scenario: In November, after Senator Barack Obama becomes president-elect of the United States, outgoing president George W. Bush inflicts a severe blow on Iran. That could take the form of a naval siege, the flexing of American military muscle, or even an all-out air strike targeting Iran’s nuclear program.
Under ordinary circumstances, people would reject out of hand such a wild scenario. The American public does not support the idea of opening a second front in the Middle East, and America’s political, military and intelligence establishments are fearful. A military move, even a semi-military one, carried out by an outgoing president would be unprecedented and illegitimate; it would be perceived as the final insane trumpet call of a thoroughly off-the-wall administration with a committed religious outlook.
But these are not ordinary times, and the protagonists involved are not ordinary people.
Is this wishful thinking?
Maybe the Israelis are encouraged by the hawkish talk at AIPAC about Iran by the presumptive major-party presidential nominees. But sounding the right applause lines for a pro-Israel confab in the lead-up to a U.S. presidential election isn’t the same as dispatching fighter planes over the skies of Iran in an attack that likely would spark a regional conflagration and a massive retaliatory attack on Israel by Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.
An attack on Iran by a lame-duck president is just not a realistic scenario. The United States lacks the political will, military resources and international consensus for such an act. The sooner Iran’s primary target accepts this, the better off Israel will be to figure how to proceed.
