
Moving across a few counties gave me a great opportunity to catch up on my Atlantic reading (thanks Nate Dog for driving). For at least an hour, I read up on Iran, Nuclear Warfare, Henry Kissinger, and the current brouhaha that is percolating over Iran’s soon-to-be nuclear capabilities. Here are some of my thoughts on this article.
There is a “50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July”, according to Jeffery Goldberg. The repercussions of such a decision give Israel and the USA no easy answers at all. Each decision (Israel bombs Iran’s nuclear reactors, Israel doesn’t bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, the US support Israel, the US doesn’t support Israel, the US seeks more negotiations, the UN continues its sanctions) could prove to be disastrous for Israel and the US and even give worldwide sympathy to Iran. The last two, negotiations and sanctions, have proven to be somewhat helpful.
Some high up leaders in Israel believe Iran is taking advantage of Obama’s tendency towards negotiations. That time has allowed for stricter UN sanctions which have cut off Iran’s connects to foreign supplies needed for nuclear bombs. As Goldberg points out, “when they [Iran] make the parts themselves, they are making parts that don’t have quality control.” (When Goldberg mentioned this comment to a senior Israeli official, he said, “We agree with this American assessment, but we also agree with Secretary Gates that Iran is one year away from crossing the nuclear threshold.”)
The move towards nuclear capability has larger-than-life implications (both literally and metaphorically). Robert D. Kaplan quotes Henry Kissinger’s 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that “by acquiring nuclear weapons, a nation becomes able, for the first time, to change the regional or global balance of power without an invasion or a declaration of war.” “Iran,” Kissinger told Kaplan, “merely by pursuing nuclear weapons, has given itself a role in the region out of proportion to its actual power, and it gains further by the psychological impact of its being able to successfully defy the United Nations Security Council.” The ability for Iran to wield control over its people two summers ago with the faulty election and now with nuclear progress places it in many Christianists apocalyptic sights. After reading Kaplan’s piece, I am left wondering what limited war would look like between multiple nuclear capable countries.
Back to Goldberg. There is skepticism on both sides (Israel and USA) whether Barack Obama would side with such measures taken up by Israel. We have to remember this is not an invasion of Iran (see Iraq and Afghanistan) but the proposed bombing of the Natanz, Qom, Esfahan, and Bushehr nuclear reactors. Add to that the probability of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran retaliating against U.S. troops or Israel (“Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel.”)
A question that kept popping up in my mind throughout this piece (and as I read a Zionist periodical at the doctors the previous day) was why is there such a stubborn sacredness over this land to the point of nuclear bombing? Before calling me an idiot or ignorant, I can see the promises from G-D to Abraham and his descendent’s that Israel would once again belong to them (possession, not ownership). The point we are at now is using nuclear bombs and a ballooning U.S. military “stipend” to protect Israel from ever being powerless again (and stopping Iran from creating the new Auschwitz). You are stuck in a messy situation anytime you have a Holocaust denier as your president (Iran) but this stubborn zeal over land by both sides has gotten quite old for me. Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” he said in April. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”