Much of our friends’ apparently anti-Israeli behavior is provoked by Israeli vacillation. It’s not only the problem that everyone detests perpetually vacillating people. Encouraging a vacillating nation creates a hazard for oneself.
The Israeli government tries to shift the burden of decision-making regarding Iran onto the US Administration. But why would the Americans approve of a strike? Certainly, Iran won’t nuke the US. Nor, realistically, would Iran deliver nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda or its ilk to do so. Unlike Israel, America has reacted with some strength to various provocations, using ballistic missiles against Libya and Sudan for terrorist acts which they only possibly might have sponsored. Iran won’t dare to use its nuclear weapons against the United States.
So Israel wants the US to approve a strike on Iran against American interests. By doing so, the Administration would take responsibility for the likely spike in oil prices, Iranian retaliatory terrorism around the world, international destabilization, and the righteous outcry of international leftists. There is just no reason for the US to do so.
If Israel pictures the Iranian nuclear threat in Holocaust terms, it makes sense to ask what lesson the world learned from the catastrophe. The lesson is this: it is okay to slaughter Jews. Two years after the Holocaust, Germany was back in the community of nations, and now is a fully integrated and respected member. Ukraine, whose population slaughtered 200,000 Jews in the early twentieth century, and later enthusiastically joined hands with Nazis, is an important US ally; never mind that a Jew in tzitzit and kipa should better not go out in the streets of Kiev or Donetsk. If that was acceptable for Germany, why not for Iran? After the Allies liberated the death camps, they hardly improved the treatment of the survivors: they still lived in horrible conditions, with scarce food, amid diseases, and thousands of them died after seeing the victory. During his disgusting tour of Yad Vashem, the American president asked Rice why the US didn’t bomb the train tracks which led to the death camps; don’t presume too much Holocaust education. The fifteen-century-old Christian anti-Semitism is alive and thriving.
Historically, US Administrations opposed every preemptive attack by Israel: in the 1956 war (post factum), 1967 (unsuccessfully), 1973 (“successfully”), and Osiraq. Why ask? Suppose we go and attack Iran, what can Bush do? The US Army won’t raise its planes in Iraq to intercept Israeli aircraft on the way to Natanz, if only because their president would be sleeping at that time, and they will have no time to react. Moreover, Bush won’t risk public exposure as the one who stopped a potentially successful Israeli raid against Holocaust facilities. Thanks to Russia, the US cannot sanction Israel or stop the weapons supplies: at a time of renewed confrontation, America won’t risk losing its major ally in the Middle East. And Israel can always apply to Russia or France for weapons. We can even produce weapons in cooperation with China: our design, cheap Chinese manufacturing, and to hell with the new world order.
