December 15, 2008
Obama tries selling Israel the Brooklyn Bridge
How stupid do Israelis have to be to buy into Obama's proposal to include them under America's nuclear deterrent? How 'bout dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
According to Haaretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper:
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's administration will offer Israel a "nuclear umbrella" against the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, a well-placed American source said earlier this week. The source, who is close to the new administration, said the U.S. will declare that an attack on Israel by Tehran would result in a devastating U.S. nuclear response against Iran.
The article notes that the predicate for this plan is accepting a nuclear-armed Iran as an inevitable development, rather than one that might be prevented through the use of arms. More troubling still, it makes a couple of assumptions that I'd suggest aren't supported by -- hmm, what's the word? -- reality.
The first is the idea that Iran is a rational player, likely to buy in to the promise of MAD Doctrine. Mutually Assured Destruction, derided by pie-in-the-sky pacifists as an immoral policy of death, actually provided for the longest period of peace in Europe in modern history. The Soviet Union, for all its willingness to fund proxy wars in third-world locales, and its dreams of world dominance notwithstanding, suffered so badly at the hands of the Nazis that the Kremlin leadership was unwilling to pull the trigger on a global nuclear holocaust.
To win the world-wide struggle of communism against capitalism required that the Soviet Union -- and its future Western provinces -- remain intact, filled with resources and capital (Das Kapital?) to exploit. Smoking piles of radioactive rubble and incinerated flesh didn't fit into their master plan, and thus the gimlet-eyed, vodka-swilling Party leaders made sure that, while ready to answer the U.S. in kind if ever the Americans tried a sneak attack, the Commies also, rationally, had no interest in initiating a first strike of their own, one that would ensure their own destruction.
MAD worked, because both sides had a vested interest in not dying.
Not so the Iranians. There's a strong cult of Messianism in the current Mullah-ocracy running Iran, one that talks of end times, and ascent into heaven for those who die killing non-Muslims -- and especially Jews.
The Iranians might very well be willing to accept large numbers of casualties in exchange for being known forever as the Muslim Land that excised the Jewish cancer from the home of Islam.
But I haven't even mentioned the far more risible assumption underlying the nuclear umbrella proposal: That the U.S. would ever go Nuke on behalf of Israel.
Apparently I'm not alone. Also from the Haaretz article:
A senior Bush administration source said that the proposal for an American nuclear umbrella for Israel was ridiculous and lacked credibility. "Who will convince the citizen in Kansas that the U.S. needs to get mixed up in a nuclear war because Haifa was bombed? And what is the point of an American response, after Israel's cities are destroyed in an Iranian nuclear strike?"
I don't for a minute believe the case could be made by the Obama administration for a retaliatory nuclear strike on a nation that had hit an Israeli city -- nor do I believe that the Obama administration would even try to make the case. Nor do I think a retaliatory strike on Iran after Israel is nuked from Haifa to the Negev Desert is a price too high for the Mullahs.
I suspect that the Mullahs don't even worry about paying that butcher's bill; they too know with nearly metaphysical certainty that there's not even the slightest possibility that America will unleash nuclear weapons -- for the first time in more than 60 years -- against a nation that has not directly harmed an American city.
So, how stupid do the Israelis have to be to buy into this proposal? How suicidal do they have to be to hand over their nation's safety to a feckless and untrustworthy group of American politicians, hostile to Isreal's right to exist as a Jewish state?
Dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Trust me, the Israelis may be many things -- argumentative, pushy, obnoxious -- but they aren't stupid. Or suicidal.
This will go nowhere.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 15, 2008 06:51 AM
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