Decision

Decision Time

The leadership of Israel is about to make a momentous decision. Should they decide to attack the Iranian nuclear facility or not?

There is compelling evidence that on June 2 the Israeli Air Force flew up to 100 of its jet fighters, F15’s and F16’s, some 900 miles towards Greece in a full dress rehearsal for flying a similar distance to Iran. The BBC and New York Times report that this was to test and rehearse Israel’s capacity to take a full fleet of fighters, refueling tankers, and helicopter rescue teams.

The Israeli exercise was seemingly designed to send a clear message to Tehran that Israel has the power and will to attack Iran.

Warnings against any such action were immediately announced by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Viktorovich Lavrovand and were echoed by the head of the UN atomic energy commission, the nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei. I am confident that this lawyer who became a career United Nations diplomat, and who was born and educated in Cairo, and who worked (1964-80) in the Egyptian diplomatic service, becoming special assistant to the foreign minister (1974-78) is a total neutral when it concerns Israel.

Iran continues to insist its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but Israel sees Iran's development of the technology as a serious threat.

The Iranians are continuing to defy a UN demand to stop their uranium enrichment program and the Security Council approved a third round of sanctions against Iran over the issue in March 2008.

No one knows if any of what has been said and done means an attack on Iran is imminent as previous talk of such action dissipated after a US intelligence report at the end of 2007 indicated their belief that Iran had, at that time, given up its nuclear weapons programme.

Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the UN's watchdog, said an attack would put Iran on a "crash course" to building nuclear weapons.

"A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible - it would turn the region into a fireball," he told the television station, Al Arabiya. "It would make me unable to continue my work," he said. Too bad if we lose this undoubtedly good man’s efforts but we’d live without him, but could Israel live with the consequences of an Iranian nuclear strike if he was wrong?

The international diplomatic community is insistent that Israel must give diplomacy more of a chance to succeed. I usually subscribe to the Winston Churchill motto that “Jaw, jaw is better than war war,” but we all need to remember that the Iranian leadership, led by the mad Iranian President has a direct correlation with Churchill’s nemesis, Adolf Hitler. Both these despots contain at the core of their belief system, a total hate for the Jewish people. Hitler perpetrated the holocaust and the Iranian President; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the world’s leading holocaust denier. He simply insists it didn’t happen. Iran's president called for Israel to be moved to Europe. "If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II... why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranian television.” Germany and Austria can provide the... regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved." Clearly we are talking about a lunatic who is capable of doing exactly what he threatens, just like Hitler.

Let’s weigh up the risks. In one scenario Israel attacks and fails, perhaps unable to reach or destroy the targets. The ramifications would be very bad for Israel and the men and women she might lose but not a problem for anyone else. A second scenario is Israel succeeds in its attack and eliminates the Iranian capacity to develop its nuclear bombs. The possibility thereafter is that Iran or its surrogates, mainly Hamas and Hezbollah, launch a series of asymmetric counter strikes against Israel. The consequences would be awful but not unbearable.

The last option for Israel is that it does nothing and just hopes that the threat goes away. The probability is that this would be a fatal mistake on Israel’s behalf, one from which there is no possibility of recovery. Remember the Iranian President has announced, on several occasions that Israel will cease to exist and be wiped from the face of the earth.

If your enemy has repeatedly sworn to wipe you out, do you wait or get your revenge in first? In circumstance such as these it isn’t madness to attack, it’s lunacy to wait.