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Saturday, March 16, 2019

Deterring Hamas vs. deterring a nuclear Iran



While Gantz has a point regarding Israel losing deterrence to Hamas, should we not be discussing whether Gantz understands that Israel’s nuclear deterrence would not work with a nuclear Iran? 

The main story should not be whether Iran hacked into Gantz’s phone, but whether Gantz understands that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine is most probably dead when Iran is concerned. As former CIA Director James Woolsey put it: “We were, in a way, lucky with our opponent in the Cold War because they were thugs with a cover story.  They were not, on the whole, sociopaths. Unfortunately, the Castro model, the Hitler model, the model of the sociopath is one we may well need to deal with in Iran.  And it should not provide any kind of relief to hear from either the former head of Israeli intelligence, or anybody else, that they are rational. They may well be quite tactically quite shrewd and rational. The Persians invented chess, they are quite good at it. But rational in that sense doesn’t mean that you are not a sociopath, after the model of Castro and others.”


Scholars Bernard Lewis, Raphael Israeli and Mathias Kuntzel, along with former CIA director James Woolsey and former Pentagon official Harold Rhode all believe that a nuclear Iran cannot be deterred. Unless our political leadership, including Gantz, find out the truth for themselves, they will, to quote Churchill, ‘have committed an act of abdication of duty without parallel.’