[BRIGADE] PJB: Tell Israel: Cool the Jets
Published: Fri, 07/31/09
by Patrick J. Buchanan
July 31, 2009
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet
of "Bibi" Netanyahu, warns that if Iran's nuclear program is not
aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it.
Defense Secretary Gates' mission to Israel this week, says Bolton,
to relay Obama's red light, was listened to attentively, but will
not be decisive.
Israel will decide.
One trusts Gates got into the face of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
For an Israeli strike on Iran, which Joe Biden foolishly said was
Israel's call, would drag this country into a third war in the
Middle East and destroy a policy that is visibly succeeding.
The Iranian regime is still reeling from the June 12 election,
widely perceived in Iran and worldwide as stolen, and its
tumultuous aftermath. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets
to protest the election, and then attack the legitimacy itself of
the Islamic regime.
The government is gripped by its worst crisis since the revolution
of 1979. Members of Iran's establishment with unimpeachable
revolutionary credentials have declared the election a fraud.
Ahmadinejad's selection as first vice president of Esfandiar Rahim
Mashaie, whose son is married to his daughter, and who has said
some kind words about Israel, outraged conservatives.
Ahmadinejad was ordered by Ayatollah Khamenei to rescind the
Mashaie appointment. For days he balked, then sent a curt note
saying he would comply. Ahmadinejad further affronted the ayatollah
by naming Mashaie his chief of staff.
Teheran is now ablaze over reports that scores of street protesters
arrested in June may have been beaten to death in prison.
There is talk in Teheran, even before he has been sworn in for a
second term, that Ahmadinejad may be impeached or ousted long
before he can complete it.
America's policy of patience is working.
And as Ahmadinejad is Israel's bete noire, who Netanyahu cites as
the religious fanatic who wants to "wipe Israel off the map" and
will launch a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv as soon as he gets it, why
would Israel strike now, and reunite Iranians behind this regime?
Why does Israel insist that America has only five months to halt
Iran's nuclear program, or Israel must attack?
Says Bolton: "(W)ith each passing day, Iran's nuclear and ballistic
laboratories, production facilities, and military bases are all
churning. Israel is focused on these facts, not the illusion of
'tough' diplomacy."
Now, Iran's nuclear "production facilities" may be "churning" out
the low-enriched uranium of which it has produced enough for one
test bomb. But IAEA inspectors still have their eyes on this pile.
None of the LEU has been diverted anywhere.
There is no evidence Iran has built the cascade to raise LEU to
highly enriched weapons-grade uranium, or that the facilities even
exist to do this. The Iranian regime has declared it has no
intention of building nuclear weapons, indeed, that their
possession would be a violation of Koranic law.
And the United States has not rescinded its own National
Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran, in 2003, abandoned its
weapons program.
Israel has been saying for years an Iranian bomb is months away.
Where is the proof? Where is the evidence to justify a new U.S. war
in the Middle East to destroy weapons of mass destruction that may
not exist in Iran, as they did not exist in Iraq?
Iran may wish to have a nuclear deterrent, considering what
happened to neighbor Iraq, which did not. But the idea that the
regime, having built a nuclear weapon, would launch it on Tel Aviv
and bring massive retaliation by scores of Israeli nukes on Teheran
and other cities, killing millions of Iranians and all the leaders
and their families of all factions of this disputatious people,
seems like total madness.
For Israel to launch a war on such reasoning would seem to meet
Bismarck's definition of preemptive war as "committing suicide out
of fear of death."
America lived for decades under a threat of nuclear annihilation.
We relied on a policy of containment and deterrence, outlasted the
Soviet regime in a 40-year Cold War, and are now at peace with
Russia.
Ahmadinejad is not so tough a customer as Stalin, Khrushchev or
Mao, who talked of accepting 300 million dead in a nuclear
exchange. Moreover, Ahmadinejad has no nukes, no authority to take
Iran to war, and is looking like a very lame duck before his second
term has begun.
And when one looks to U.S. and Iranian interests, they coincide as
much as they conflict. Iran detested the Taliban before we took
them down, and no more wants them back than do we. Iran is even
more pleased with the Shia regime we brought to power in Baghdad
than we are.
Iran needs technology to restore its depleted oil and gas fields,
and an end to sanctions to restore an economy whose disintegration
helped put the regime in crisis and lose it the support of its
young.
Obama should tell the Israelis, "Cool the jets!" literally.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/