"The Iranians are signaling us that the nuclear project is vulnerable.
Whoever spends several billion dollars just for anti-aircraft systems around
nuclear sites is saying that those sites are vulnerable. There would be no
need to invest those sums if their bunkers were deep enough [to avoid an air
strike]."
Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee

ISRAEL'S WORST NIGHTMARE.Contra Iran
by Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren
Post date: 01.26.07
Issue date: 02.05.07
The New Republic
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20070205&s=halevioren020507

The first reports from military intelligence about an Iranian nuclear
program reached the desk of Yitzhak Rabin shortly after he became prime
minister in May 1992. Rabin's conclusion was unequivocal: Only a nuclear
Iran, he told aides, could pose an existential threat to which Israel would
have no credible response. But, when he tried to warn the Clinton
administration, he met with incredulity. The CIA's assessment--which
wouldn't change until 1998--was that Iran's nuclear program was civilian,
not military. Israeli security officials felt that the CIA's judgment was
influenced by internal U.S. politics and privately referred to the agency as
the "cpia"--"P" for "politicized."

The indifference in Washington helped persuade Rabin that Israel needed to
begin preparing for an eventual preemptive strike, so he ordered the
purchase of long-range bombers capable of reaching Iran. And he made a
fateful political decision: He reversed his ambivalence toward negotiating
with the PLO and endorsed unofficial talks being conducted between Israeli
left-wingers and PLO officials. Rabin's justification for this about-face
was that Israel needed to neutralize what he defined as its "inner circle of
threat"--the enemies along its borders--in order to focus on the coming
confrontation with Iran, the far more dangerous "outer circle of threat."
Rabin's strategy, then, was the exact opposite of the approach recently
recommended by the Iraq Study Group: Where James Baker and Lee Hamilton want
to engage Iran--even at the cost of downplaying its nuclear ambitions--in
order to solve crises in the Arab world, Rabin wanted to make peace with the
Arab world in order to prevent, at all costs, a nuclear Iran.

Now, more than a decade later, the worst-case scenario envisioned by Rabin
is rapidly approaching. According to Israeli intelligence, Iran will be able
to produce a nuclear bomb as soon as 2009. In Washington, fear is growing
that either Israel or the Bush administration plans to order strikes against
Iran. In Israel, however, there is fear of a different kind. Israelis worry
not that the West will act rashly, but that it will fail to act at all. And,
while strategists here differ over the relative efficacy of sanctions or a
military strike, nearly everyone agrees on this point: Israel cannot live
with a nuclear Iran.

For over two decades, since the era of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin,
the Holocaust was rarely invoked, except on the extremes, in Israeli
politics. In recent months, though, the Iranian threat has returned the
Final Solution to the heart of Israeli discourse. Senior army commanders,
who likely once regarded Holocaust analogies with the Middle East conflict
as an affront to Zionist empowerment, now routinely speak of a "second
Holocaust." Op-eds, written by left-wing as well as right-wing commentators,
compare these times to the 1930s. Israelis recall how the international
community reacted with indifference as a massively armed nation declared war
against the Jewish people--and they sense a similar pattern today. Even
though the United States and Europe have finally awakened to the Iranian
nuclear threat, Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel tend to be
dismissed as mere rhetoric by the Western news media. Yet, here in Israel,
those pronouncements have reinforced Rabin's urgency in placing the Iran
situation at the top of the strategic agenda.

One of the men most responsible for doing precisely that is Labor Party
parliamentarian and current Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, whom Rabin
entrusted with his government's "Iran file." Like most in the defense
establishment, Sneh doesn't believe Iran would immediately launch a nuclear
attack against Israel. But, he adds, it won't have to actually use the bomb
to cripple Israel. "They would be able to destroy the Zionist dream without
pressing the button," he says.

In clipped tones that reveal his long military background, he outlines three
repercussions of an Iranian bomb. To begin with, he notes, the era of peace
negotiations will come to an end: "No Arab partner will be able to make
concessions with a nuclear Iran standing over them." What's more, Israel
will find its military options severely limited. An emboldened Iran could
provide Hezbollah and Hamas with longer-range and deadlier rockets than
their current stock of Katyushas and Qassams; yet, threatened with a nuclear
response, Israel would have little defense against intensifying rocket fire
on its northern and southern periphery, whose residents would have to be
evacuated to the center. Israel already experienced a foretaste of mass
uprooting in the Lebanon war last summer, when hundreds of thousands of
Galilee residents were turned into temporary refugees. Finally, says Sneh,
foreign investors will flee the country, and many Israelis will, too. In one
recent poll, 27 percent of Israelis said they would consider leaving if Iran
went nuclear. "Who will leave? Those with opportunities abroad--the elite,"
Sneh notes. The promise of Zionism to create a Jewish refuge will have
failed, and, instead, Jews will see the diaspora as a more trustworthy
option for both personal and collective survival. During the Lebanon war,
Israeli television's preeminent satirical comedy, "O What a Wonderful Land,"
interviewed an Israeli claiming that "this" is the safest place for Jews--as
the camera pulled back to reveal that "this" was London.

Even without the bomb, Iran's threat to Israel is growing. Working through
Shia Hezbollah, Alawite Damascus, and Sunni Hamas, Tehran has extended its
influence into Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories. As a result
of Hezbollah's perceived victory in the Lebanon war and Hamas's ability to
continue firing rockets at Israeli towns despite repeated army incursions
into Gaza, Iran has proved it can attack Israel with near-impunity. Iranian
newspapers are replete with stories gloating over the supposed erosion of
Israel's will to fight and the imminent collapse of its "postmodern" army,
as one recent article put it. Iran's self-confidence has been bolstered by
Israel's failure to extract a price from Tehran for instigating the Lebanon
war and for funding terrorist operations as far back as the early '90s, when
Iran masterminded the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and,
two years later, that city's Jewish community headquarters. Nor has
Israel--to say nothing of the U.N. peacekeeping forces--managed to prevent
Hezbollah from rearming. And, if Iran manages to overcome U.S. threats and
U.N. sanctions and achieve nuclear capability, it will be seen throughout
the Muslim world as unstoppable.

A nuclear Iran will have devastating consequences for Sunni Arab states,
too. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and, most recently, Jordan have declared
their interest in acquiring nuclear power; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
has stated explicitly that Egypt may feel the need to protect itself against
Iran's nuclear threat. Other Sunni nations could follow--including Libya,
whose enmity toward the Saudis may draw it back into the nuclear race if
Riyadh tries to acquire a bomb. A nuclear free-for-all, then, is likely to
seize the Middle East. In this crisis-ridden region, any flashpoint will
become a potential nuclear flashpoint.

The reverberations of a nuclear Iran will reach far beyond the Middle East.
Tehran could dictate the price of oil and even control much of its supply
through the Straits of Hermuz. And Iran will be able to conduct terrorist
operations through its proxies with greater immunity. Even without the
nuclear threat, Iran succeeded in intimidating the Saudis into releasing
Iranian suspects in the 1997 Khobar Towers bombing. Moreover, if Tehran goes
nuclear, the pretense of an international community capable of enforcing
world order would quickly unravel: After all, if a regime that has
perpetrated terrorist attacks from Argentina to the Persian Gulf can flout
sanctions and acquire nuclear weapons, how can the United Nations credibly
stop anyone else from doing the same?

And these terrifying scenarios exclude the most terrifying scenario of all:
Iran uses its bomb. In a poll, 66 percent of Israelis said they believed
Iran would drop a nuclear weapon on the Jewish state. Though defense experts
are divided over the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear attack, every
strategist we spoke with for this article considered the scenario plausible.
"No one knows if Iran would use the bomb or not," says Sneh. "But I can't
take the chance."

The threat of a theologically motivated nuclear assault against Israel tends
to be downplayed in the West; not so here. The former head of Israel's
National Security Council, Giora Eiland, has warned that an apocalyptically
driven Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be willing to sacrifice half his country's
population to obliterate the Jewish state. Military men suddenly sound like
theologians when explaining the Iranian threat. Ahmadinejad, they argue,
represents a new "activist" strain of Shiism, which holds that the faithful
can hasten the return of the Hidden Imam, the Shia messiah, by destroying
evil. Hebrew University Iranian scholar Eldad Pardo goes further, arguing
that the ideology founded by Ayatollah Khomeini represents nothing less than
a "new religion," combining Shia, Sunni, and Marxist beliefs and resembling
Western messianic cults that have advocated mass suicide. And so
Ahmadinejad's pronouncements about the imminent return of the Hidden Imam
and the imminent destruction of Israel aren't regarded as merely calculated
for domestic consumption; they are seen as glimpses into an apocalyptic game
plan.

Ahmadinejad has reportedly told his Cabinet that the Hidden Imam will
reappear in 2009--precisely the date when Israel estimates Iran will go
nuclear. In a recent meeting with outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, the Iranian president predicted that, while the United States and
Great Britain won the last world war, Iran will win the next one. And, two
weeks ago, an Iranian government website declared that the Hidden Imam would
defeat his archenemy in a final battle in Jerusalem. Notes one former
top-ranking Israeli defense official: "We may not yet have located a clear
theological line connecting the dots, but there are a great many dots." At
least one ayatollah, though, has made that theology explicit: In 2005,
Hussein Nuri Hamdani declared that "the Jews should be fought against and
forced to surrender to prepare the way for the coming of the Hidden Imam."

Defense experts readily acknowledge that Ahmadinejad is hardly all-powerful
and must yield to the Council of Guardians. In recent elections, almost all
the clerics allied with Ahmadinejad lost; and, in an unprecedented move, 150
Iranian parliamentarians signed a letter blaming the president for growing
inflation and unemployment. But none of this reassures Israelis. That's
because Ahmadinejad is hardly alone in conjuring doomsday scenarios. In
February 2006, clerics in Qom issued a fatwa permitting nuclear war. And
former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaking at a 2001
"Jerusalem Day" rally, declared: "If, one day, the Islamic world is also
equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the
imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill, because the use of even one
nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only
harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an
eventuality."

Given these nightmarish scenarios, one would expect to find a mood of
near-despair within the Israeli defense establishment. Yet senior officials
believe that events are actually working in Israel's favor and that, one way
or another, Iran's nuclear program can still be stopped. Partly, that is
because Israel's assessments of Iran's intention to acquire nuclear weapons
have finally been accepted not only by Washington but even by the Europeans.
After years of isolation on the Iranian issue, Israelis are basking in a
rare moment of international credibility.

As a result, some in the defense establishment are convinced that the
military option can still be forestalled, even at this late date, by
aggressive economic sanctions, forcing the Iranian regime to choose between
its nuclear program and domestic stability. To be sure, even the most
optimistic Israelis believe that the recent U.N. decision to impose minimal
sanctions on Iran will prove ineffective. Indeed, those sanctions--intended
to prevent nuclear materials and know-how from reaching Iran and to stop its
nuclear program from becoming self-sufficient--are uniformly dismissed as
coming at least two years too late, since Iran is rapidly approaching
nuclear self-sufficiency and, some here believe, may have already reached
that point.

But sanctions advocates do believe that, by formally placing Iran in the
category of "threat to international peace," the United Nations has tacitly
empowered the United States and its allies to pursue more aggressive
sanctions that could trigger Iranian instability--such as the Bush
administration's quiet efforts over the last year to force foreign banks out
of Tehran. Combined with Iran's preexisting social and economic
problems--massive hidden unemployment, widespread corruption, and growing
drug addiction and prostitution--and hatred for the regime among students
and the middle class, aggressive sanctions could, some Israelis believe,
hasten regime change in Tehran by forcing the Iranian people to pay the
price for their leaders' provocations. And, with regime change, of course,
the threat posed by an Iranian bomb would ease: After all, the problem isn't
the nuclearization of Iran but the nuclearization of this Iran. The very
threat of additional sanctions has already led to drastic increases in food
and housing prices in Tehran--and may have emboldened those parliamentarians
who signed the recent protest letter to Ahmadinejad. "The Iranians are a
very proud people," says one Israeli official with years of experience
inside Iran. "They won't be able to bear being turned into pariahs, and that
will increase their resentment toward the regime."

Along with sanctions, some Israeli officials call for a robust but
nonviolent U.S. intervention in internal Iranian politics--funding the
Iranian opposition, transforming U.S. broadcasts in Farsi into "Radio Free
Iran," reaching Farsi audiences through the Internet, and more aggressively
challenging the Iranian government on its human rights abuses. Israeli
advocates of regime change have been pressing Washington to adopt these
policies for years and can't understand why even the Bush administration has
demurred. "No one is saying not to plan for military action," says the
official with experience in Iran. "But, given the devastating consequences
of a military strike, why aren't we giving this a chance?"

Skeptics of sanctions note that the time frame is too narrow and the stakes
too high for Israel to place its hopes on long-term regime change. They
insist that the international community is incapable of mounting effective
sanctions, which would almost certainly be violated by Russia and China.
Yes, they acknowledge, the ayatollahs' regime is in trouble and will
eventually fall--but not soon enough. Indeed, optimists have been predicting
imminent regime change for over a decade; and, when failed reformer Mohammed
Khatami became president in 1997, some in the West declared that regime
change had already begun. But Iran's leaders know how to defend themselves
against opponents: When bus drivers organized a wildcat strike last year,
the leader was arrested and his tongue was cut off.

For those Israelis who are skeptical of sanctions, there is the option of
last resort: a military strike. Experts readily acknowledge the complexity
of an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, since they are scattered
over dozens of sites, many heavily fortified and deep underground. But an
attack on three key sites--especially the uranium-enrichment facility at
Natanz--would set back Iranian plans by several years. It would not be
necessary, the former top-ranking defense official says, to destroy Iran's
nuclear facilities: By repeatedly hitting their entrances, the sites could
be rendered inaccessible. At the same time, Israel would probably bomb key
government installations, like Revolutionary Guard bases, to weaken the
regime's ability to recover. While the Iranian people are likely to
initially rally around the government, the combined effect of a military
attack and economic sanctions could trigger an eventual uprising, suggests
the former defense official. Periodic air strikes, he adds, would impede
attempts to rebuild the nuclear sites.

Defense experts downplay the possibility of secret facilities unknown to
Western intelligence agencies. "If we can locate a suicide bomber as he
moves from place to place, then we know how to locate static targets, even
deep underground," says the former defense official. Nor are those
facilities as impenetrable as some foreign news reports suggest. Noted Yuval
Steinitz, former chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee: "The Iranians are signaling us that the nuclear project is
vulnerable. Whoever spends several billion dollars just for anti-aircraft
systems around nuclear sites is saying that those sites are vulnerable.
There would be no need to invest those sums if their bunkers were deep
enough [to avoid an air strike]."

The Israeli air force has been actively preparing for an attack since 1993,
enhancing the range of its bombers and acquiring the requisite
bunker-busting ordnance. "Technically, we have the ability" to strike key
facilities, a former commander of the air force told us. While the army's
reputation was battered during the Lebanon war, the air force, by contrast,
performed well, routinely destroying Hezbollah's long-range missile sites
within less than five minutes following a launch.

Despite a recent report in the London Sunday Times that Israel is planning a
tactical nuclear attack on Iran's nuclear sites, Israel will almost
certainly not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East battlefield.
The story, likely planted and then promptly denied, was probably part of an
ongoing Israeli attempt to accomplish two objectives: to warn the
international community that, if it fails to stop Iran through sanctions,
then "crazy Israel" will be unleashed; and to prevent the Iranian crisis
from turning into an Israeli issue alone.

An Israeli assault could only delay Iran's nuclear program, not eliminate
it. That's because Israel cannot sustain an air campaign against such remote
targets for days on end. This can only be accomplished by the United States,
perhaps together with nato allies, by mounting an ongoing series of air
strikes similar to the "shock and awe" campaign conducted against Iraq at
the beginning of the war. Israelis, though, are divided over the likelihood
of U.S. military action. Some experts believe President Bush will attack, if
only to prevent being recorded by history as a leader who fought the wrong
war while failing to fight the right one. Others speculate that a
politically devastated Bush will leave the resolution of the Iranian crisis
to his successor.

If Israel is forced, by default, to strike, it is likely to happen within
the next 18 months. An attack needs to take place before the nuclear
facilities become radioactive; waiting too long could result in massive
civilian casualties. Still, Israel will almost certainly wait until it
becomes clear that sanctions have failed and that the United States or nato
won't strike. The toughest decision, then, will be timing: determining that
delicate moment when it becomes clear that the international community has
failed but before the facilities turn lethal.

Israel will alert Washington before a strike: "We won't surprise the
Americans, given the likelihood of Iranian reprisals against American troops
in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East," says an analyst close to the
intelligence community. U.S. permission will be needed if Israel chooses to
send its planes over Iraqi air space--and the expectation here is that
permission would be granted. (Israel has two other possible attack routes,
both problematic: over Turkish air space and along the Saudi-Iraqi border to
the Persian Gulf.) Still, according to the former air force commander, if
Israel decides to act, "We will act alone, not as emissaries of anyone
else."

Regardless of whether Israeli or other Western forces carry out the strike,
Iran will almost certainly retaliate against the Jewish state. Experts
disagree, though, about the extent of the Iranian onslaught and Israel's
ability to withstand it. Some say that, though Iranian missiles will strike
Israeli cities and Hezbollah Katyushas and Hamas Qassams will fall in
massive numbers, Israel's anti-ballistic and civil defense systems, combined
with its retaliatory capability, will suffice to contain the threat.

Optimists also downplay Iran's ability to mount terrorist attacks in the
West: September 11 has produced an unprecedented level of cooperation among
Western intelligence services, and they are monitoring sleeper cells as well
as Iranian diplomats, who are believed to have used their privileged access
to smuggle explosives.

The pessimists' scenario, though, is daunting. Not only could Iranian
missiles--perhaps carrying chemical warheads--devastate Israeli cities, but,
if the Syrians join in, then thousands of additional long-range missiles
will fall, too. And, if Israel retaliates by bombing Damascus, that could
trigger public demands in other Arab countries to join the war against
Israel. The result could be a conventional threat to Israel's existence.

That scenario leads some in the security establishment to call for renewed
peace talks with Syria, aimed at removing it from the pro-Iranian front. The
growing debate over Syria positions the Mossad--which says it's no longer
possible to separate Damascus from Tehran--against military intelligence,
which believes that President Bashar Assad wants negotiations with Israel,
if only to divert the threat of sanctions against Damascus for its alleged
role in murdering Lebanese leaders.

There is no debate among Israelis, however, about the wisdom of negotiations
between the West and Iran. That, defense officials agree, would be the worst
of all options. Negotiations that took place now would be happening at a
time when Iran feels ascendant: The time to have negotiated with Iran, some
say, was immediately after the initial U.S. triumph in Iraq, not now, when
the United States is losing the war. Under these circumstances, negotiations
would only buy the regime time to continue its nuclear program. Talks would
create baseless hope, undermining the urgency of sanctions. And resuming
negotiations with the Iranian regime--despite its repeated bad faith in
previous talks over its nuclear program--would send the wrong message to the
Iranian people: that the regime has international legitimacy and that
resisting it is futile.

Hovering over Israeli discourse about a nuclear Iran is the recent
Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran--and what Israelis regard as the
scandalously inadequate international response. While the conference was
condemned in the West, Israelis expected the international community to
treat it as something more than a bizarre sideshow. Indeed, for Israelis,
the conference offered the clearest warning yet on the true nature of the
Iranian threat to the Jewish state.

In denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad aims to undermine what he believes to
be the sole justification for Israel's existence. In the years before World
War II, Nazi propagandists prepared Europe for the Final Solution by
dehumanizing the Jews; now, Ahmadinejad is preparing the Muslim world for
the destruction of the Jewish state by delegitimizing its history. And not
just the Muslim world: Holocaust denial is also aimed at the West, which
many Muslims believe supports Israel only because of Holocaust guilt. Strip
away that guilt, and Israel is defenseless. "The resolution of the Holocaust
issue will end in the destruction of Israel," commented Mohammad Ali Ramin,
head of a new Iranian government institute devoted to Holocaust denial.

The French philosopher Andre Glucksmann has noted that, by threatening to
destroy Israel and by attaining the means to do so, Iran violates the twin
taboos on which the post-World War II order was built: never again
Auschwitz; never again Hiroshima. The international community now has an
opportunity to uphold that order. If it fails, then Israel will have no
choice but to uphold its role as refuge of the Jewish people. A Jewish state
that allows itself to be threatened with nuclear weapons--by a country that
denies the genocide against Europe's six million Jews while threatening
Israel's six million Jews--will forfeit its right to speak in the name of
Jewish history. Fortunately, even the government of Ehud Olmert, widely
criticized as incompetent and corrupt, seems to understand that, on this
issue at least, it cannot fail.

-------------
Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor to The New Republic and a senior
fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Michael B. Oren is a contributing
editor to The New Republic and a senior fellow of the Shalem Center in
Jerusalem. He is the author most recently of Power, Faith, and Fantasy:
America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.