Israel between rhetoric and reality over Iran

by Abid Mustafa
Global Research, November 27, 2006

"The recent American overtures to induct Iran in any political settlement over Iraq have immensely troubled the Israel. So perturbed has been the government in Tel Aviv that she has mounted a concerted campaign in America to keep alive the notion that Iran poses a grave danger to the US and must be thwarted at any cost.

American think tanks also joined in the foray against Iran. In an opinion editorial piece in the Los Angeles Times, Joshua Muarvchik, resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute said, “We must bomb Iran. The path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere. Our options therefore are narrowed to two: we can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a military issues think-tank, said. “They are going to bomb WMD facilities next summer. It would be a limited military action to destroy their WMD capabilities.”

The muddled signals stem from the ongoing conflict between the realists who are in ascendancy and the neoconservative who are in bitter retreat. The neoconservatives believe that America’s strategic interests in the Middle East are intertwined with Israel’s security. Therefore any of Israel’s neighbours that pose a danger to Israel’s security must be neutralised. This not only involves disarming the so called menacing country, but also dividing the country along ethnic and sectarian lines—a sort of Lebanonisation (term first used by Barnard Lewis the chief patron of the neocon movement) — where new countries curved out from the bloodshed perpetrated by the US Army pledge their allegiance to serve the American Empire. From Israel’s perspective, the Muslim populace surrounding her borders must be kept busy in perpetual conflicts manufactured by exploiting ethnic and sectarian tensions, and thereby creating new countries that are weak and incapable of threatening Israel’s security— this is commonly known as the Kivunim plan.

Without US assistance, it is very unlikely that Israel would carry out such strikes. Leaving the military capability aside, there is another major factor that makes its difficult for Israel to contemplate military action against Iran. The Iraq war, the re-occupation of Palestinian territories and Hizbollah’s stiff resistance has not made Israel any safer. On the contrary, these events supported and engineered by the neoconservatives have not only shattered the myth of Israel’s invincibility, but also exposed her population to perpetual insecurity."