Netanyahu's War Warning

Binyamin Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC is a rebuttal of the positions President Obama has urged upon him. The essence of Obama's position is that Israel should wait and not attack Iran because:

1. An attack by Israel alone is not likely to succeed.
2. Sanctions represent the best strategy for forcing Iran to give up its nuclear program permanently.
3. If necessary, the United States will attack Iran's nuclear program rather than let Iran create and deploy a bomb.

Netanyahu's response deserves close reading. If you weren't there (I was not) or haven't read it, here is the link to the official text.

Netanyahu directly addressed Obama's second point. He made polite mention of Obama's—really Congress'—latest round of sanctions, but then went on to express profound skepticism of sanctions:

For the last decade the international community has tied diplomacy. It hasn't worked. For six years the international community has applied sanctions. That hasn't worked either . . . [Israel has] waited for diplomacy to work. We've waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait for much longer.

The bottom line is that Netanyahu doesn't expect sanctions to work, certainly not in time to prevent Iran from getting a bomb.

Netanyahu then addressed Obama's other points more indirectly:

Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb. They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway; that it would be ineffective; that it would provoke an even more vindictive response by Iran.

Now, "some commentators" might refer to lily-livered European liberals whose comments are addressed to both Israel and the United States. But in fact nobody is arguing that American military action against Iran is likely to be ineffective. American military action against Iran is likely to be very effective. These arguments are being made primarily by the Obama administration as well as Netanyahu's domestic critics against unilateral Israeli action.

Netanyahu's rhetorical retort was devastating. He cited a letter by the American government to the World Jewish Congress in 1944, justifying the United States' abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust. Having praised Obama's commitment to use force against Iran if necessary earlier in his speech, he implied that, in fact, if it became necessary for the United States to use force against the Iranian bomb then this administration was actually likely to leave the Jewish state in the lurch, just as the Roosevelt administration left European Jews in the lurch.

If this is an accurate reading of Netanyahu's meaning, it implies rejection of the Administration's first point as well. If the United States' commitment to bomb Iran cannot be relied on, that leaves Israeli action as the only alternative. As Netanyahu said, "As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never let my people live in the shadow of annihilation."

Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC comes across to me as a war warning, as explicit as Netanyahu can allow himself to be. I cannot know for sure, of course, that Netanyahu has dismissed as unreliable Obama's commitment to bomb Iran if necessary. But I think the chances of an Israeli attack on Iran have crossed the 50% threshold.

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I want to revise an opinion I wrote in yesterday's blog; and rather than revising the blog and pretending I didn't correct anything, I want to make my change of opinion explicit. I expressed entirely too much confidence ("probably true") that harsh sanctions can force Iran to forego nuclear weapons. I think it is possible that they may do so. It might be worthwhile to see what sanctions can do, provided that Obama's commitment to prevent by force the actual assembly of an Iranian bomb is ironclad. And it seems that Netanyahu rates Obama's credibility as pretty low.