Benny Morris, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, predicts an Israeli airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities within four to seven months in the New York Times today.
He hopes for the complete destruction of Iran's nuclear capabilities, and barring that, he predicts a nuclear war in the Middle East. His views are based on the assumptions that the intelligence agencies of the world are correct in saying that Iran will have the capacity to produce nuclear bombs within a few years, and that diplomacy, or even a nuclear standoff with the "fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran" would be impossible. Not that the leaders of Israel share any of the same faults as the mullahs, eh?
Morris' editorial is interesting in that it assumes what has been unspoken - that Israel has nuclear weapons, and is ready to use them. And that the US should be the power to make the pre-emptive strike, but probably won't because of a public fed up with a war which began with a pre-emptive strike.
Morris' doomsday scenario should be the kind of insider warning that alerts the world, and particularly the US, that diplomacy is the first answer, war the last.
1 comment:
My comment on the Benny Morris' article in nytimes is as follows:
There is nothing more dangerous than a paranoid country with nuclear weapons but this is what the world is facing in Israel today. While plotting the best way of attacking another country that may, possibly, maybe, sometime, if nothing changes, one day attack them, they are displaying the logic that fully justifies the poll, conducted in 2004, that placed Israel as the country most dangerous to the world peace in the eyes of Europeans. There is something spectacular in the theocratic country, that firmly believes that it has divine right to exist, while annexing, colonizing and sequestrating the land of its neighbours using the argument that another country is uniquely dangerous by virtue of being theocratic, even if it didn't annex, colonize, or sequestrate anybody's land in the last 200 years or so. Never has the inner working of Israeli psyche been so openly displayed for leisurely perusal. We have been attacked as a race, so we will be attacked as a race, so we will attack first, whatever the consequences because other people may be more paranoid than us and will attack because everybody attacks us deus ex machina, amen. And to think that with a single person with those symptoms one can get couple of orderlies and solve the problem with massive dose of haloperidol, but with the paranoid country one need to wait for the nuclear dust to bring non-racially motivated equality into the middle east.
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