The right book to read vis-à-vis US-Iran tension
Shadow
Strike is immensely readable and although much of the info had percolated down
to the general public during these last 12 years, it well describes the
politics of the Bush administration’s reluctance to bomb the reactor themselves.
It
shows how ignorant some members of the Bush administration were about Israel’s
predicament and that is especially true of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Vice
President Dick Cheney seems to have been the most supportive of Israel, but he
could not convince President Bush to attack the reactor himself. John Bolton comes out as the only one who sensed
that Syria was interested in nuclear weapons. We should remind everyone how
wrong Joe Biden had been in attacking Bolton on this issue.
The
book also demonstrates how obsessed both the American and Israeli side were with
the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process – the desire to construct the political perpetuum
mobile without them first doing
their homework on Islam as both a religion and an ideology. Not that much has
changed in this regard since.
I
detect a certain positive bias towards the main protagonists Olmert, Barak,
Peretz, Livni, Dagan, Ashkenazi, Yadlin and Halevy while the gibe is against
Netanyahu for having two weeks after the strike congratulated Olmert on the
successful strike and disclosed that Israel had done it. In addition, Katz seems to take Meir Dagan and
Gabi Ashkenazi’s side when they blocked Netanyahu and Barak’s order of placing
the IDF on high alert and ready for the imminent attack on Iranian nuclear
sites, a decision the consequences of which are
still felt today with Secretary of State Pompeo cancelling his visit to
Greenland and the cover of The Economist showing a photo of USS Abraham Lincoln
and the headline “Collision course”
I
learned about the balagan Israel is
capable of.
“On
the plane [from Pyongyang], Halevy was surprised to run into Eytan Bentsur, the
director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry who had just wrapped his own
visit to Pyongyang for talks with the North Koreans on a similar topic .
It
was a classic case of uncoordinated Israeli bureaucracy”
And
what about Iran?
Yaakov
Katz writes: “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, for example, has a significant
nuclear arsenal but Israel does not consider the possibility of launching an
attack there. Why?
Meridor,
one of the participants in the fateful 2010 Security Cabinet meeting, told me
that for Israel to consider preemptive action against another country’s nuclear
program, two criteria have to be met: the country has to be one of Israel’s
enemies and also have the potential to
one day consider using a nuclear weapon against it . Syria fit both. Pakistan
does not.”
Iran
fits both too. Perhaps Meridor should be reminded what Bernard Lewis said:
“In this context, the deterrent that worked so
well during the Cold War, namely M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction), would
have no meaning. At the End of Time, there will be general
destruction anyway. What will matter is the final destination of the
dead-- hell for the infidels, and the delights of heaven for the believers. For
people with this mindset, M.A.D. is not a constraint; it is an inducement...”
