Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the September Atlantic, in which he argues that Israel almost inevitably will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before next summer unless the United States does so first, has attracted excessive attention. Devoid of new information and lacking in any kind of serious military analysis, it’s a far cry from meeting the Atlantic Monthly’s normal journalistic standards. The most alarming thing about the article is not its message, in fact, but the decision by the Atlantic to publish such a weak piece of work that has such a poorly hidden agenda.
To give Goldberg a little credit for sanity, he does concede in his article that any benefits from a military raid against Iran would be uncertain and temporary at best, while immediate adverse consequences would inevitably be dire. Despite that, he says that Israel will make the crazy decision to raid Iran anyway, and that to forestall that, the United States should instead make the nutty decision itself.
This is such a dumb argument it requires no further comment, in my view. But if readers nevertheless wish for comment, I refer them to Tony Karon’s take— with a warning not to fall into the trap of down-playing the Iran nuclear problem or attaching too much significance to when exactly Iran will be in a position to build a bomb. For reasons explained here in previous posts, it must be assumed that Iran will build nuclear weapons at first opportunity, and given the character of the current leadership, its use of nuclear weapons cannot be excluded.
The case against raiding Iran’s nuclear facilities has little or nothing to do with its capabilities and intentions. The case rests on the difficulty of effectively taking out Iran’s hardened and buried facilities, the virtual certainty that a raid would strengthen hardliners and weaken the opposition, the possibility a raid might actually accelerate Iran’s nuclear program and inflame sentiment in favor of striking directly at Israel, and the negative diplomatic ramifications that inevitably would result from a raid, both regionally and globally.
Will Israel or the United States try to mount surgical strikes against Iran’s facilities, despite all the compelling arguments against doing so? Former intelligence officer Ray McGovern has published an alarmist view of Israeli and U.S. intentions that is more substantial in terms of military analysis than anything Goldberg has to offer. My guess, however, is that McGovern too is much too alarmist.
Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, but I feel sure that President Obama will keep his cool, disregard the kind of pseudo-reasoning that got us into the Iraq quagmire, and hold steady in his insistence that an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is the only path to regional peace. He will not raid Iran, and he will not let Israel do so either. And in time, with luck, Israelis will broadly recognize that only a comprehensive regional settlement will save their country from ultimately facing two more nuclear-armed neighbors.
