Warning Iran or Stalling Israel? by Richard Bulliet

Warning Iran or Stalling Israel?
by Richard Bulliet Released: 24 Jul 2007
Is it possible that Dick Cheney is being useful for a change? It depends on who's listening to the Bush administration's latest hints about attacking Iran.

The Iranians aren't listening. President Ahmadinejad openly scoffs, and the American people enjoy greater popularity in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East.

The American public isn't listening. A July 22 poll finds that “a majority of Americans are ready to accept a deal allowing Iran to engage in limited [uranium] enrichment if it also agrees to give UN inspectors full access to ensure Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.”

The only serious listeners are the Israelis.

According to recent reports, Vice President Cheney’s neocons have rescued the Iran attack scenarios from the shredder bin where Secretary of State Rice tossed them more than a year ago. Word is that the military option is back on the table. Thus the tired saber clanks from its scabbard one more time.

High school drama clubs have revived “Oklahoma” less often than Bush spokesmen and leakers have revived the “Axis of Evil” act. But no American analyst -- Air Force brass excepted -- believes that “shock and awe” will be more decisive over Tehran than it was over Baghdad. Or make America any safer.

The view from Tel Aviv is different: Politicians of a certain ilk declare portentously that if nobody has the guts to defang Iran, a second Holocaust is just around the corner. The question for them is whether to go it alone -- militarily a tough and uncertain job -- or to rely on American protection.

Here’s the problem. When asked recently how Iran would regard an Israeli attack, a high-ranking Iranian official answered unequivocally: No Israeli attack is conceivable without American permission and support. Hence, an attack by Israel would be seen by Iranians as an attack by the United States.

Israel going it alone is a worst-case scenario for the Bush administration. While Hizbullah and Hamas might heat up Israel’s borders in retaliation, Iraq geographically buffers Israel against direct counterattack from Iran. But the plausible Iranian assumption that Israeli bombers and missiles cannot penetrate Iranian airspace without American knowledge, approval, and back-up would lay the American forces in Iraq open to all manner of counterstrikes.

Suppose Israel really did take both Iran and the United States by surprise. American soldiers would suffer the consequences. And the American public would ask why our ally did not warn us in advance. On the other hand, if Israel did give advance warning, then the Iranians would be justified in retaliating against the United States. In either case, Israel would have a shot at achieving its goal, but the United States would end up paying the price.

Alternatively, the United States, as per Cheney’s war talk, could preempt the Israelis by launching its own strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Once again, the American forces in Iraq would pay the price. Israelis might feel relieved, but Bush’s dream of “victory” in Iraq would recede even farther into Never-Never Land.

The better alternative, or at least the one that lends a glimmer of rationality to Cheney’s bluster, is to warn that Bush will not leave office without grievously harming Iran first… and hope that the threats are convincing enough to persuade the Israelis to hold their fire until the next administration.

Even by Israeli estimates, the lead-time for the development of any possible first Iranian nuclear bomb is far more than the seventeen months remaining in Bush’s presidential term. Bush can do nothing and still be certain that Iran won’t go nuclear on his watch the way North Korea did. Yet this administration still makes threats, even though every day that passes makes them more improbable.

Not even Bush would begin a war between the time of his successor’s November election and January inauguration. That narrows the attack window to fifteen months. Nor could anything short of a major Iranian provocation justify attacking during the party conventions or the ensuing presidential campaign. So that makes it thirteen months. How about the primaries? A Bush attack during primary season would turn every vote into a war referendum, with the Republican Party painfully trying to explain the aggression. That moves the calendar back to the Iowa caucuses in January, leaving the administration only five more months to pull the trigger.

But this assumes that the administration will bypass Congress. In 2002, it took weeks and the delusional specter of mushroom clouds over American cities to get authorization. With Iran’s mushroom-makers still a glimmer in Ahmadinejad’s eye, war will be a harder sell. A Congress whose majority party understood the 2006 election as a popular plea to bring the troops home will not sanction a new war based on a hypothetical future danger. So that pretty much closes the president’s window of opportunity.

So why another round of threats? The peril to the United States today lies not in Iran, but in the possibility of a solo Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites. So if Cheney’s beating of the war drum can keep the Israeli tail from setting the American dog awaggle, his neocon zealotry may for once serve a useful purpose.


Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Islam: The View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

Copyright © 2007 Richard Bulliet / Agence Global
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Released: 24 July 2007
Word Count: 857 words
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