Ricochet reader Duane Oyen was kind enough to call my attention to a very interesting interview with Martin Kramer conducted by Michael Totten on Pajamas Media. In it, Kramer speculates on the degree to which Jeffrey Goldberg, whose recent piece in the Atlantic placed the odds of an Israeli strike on Iran by next summer at about 50:50, was spun by the people he was interviewing (a possibility Goldberg himself acknowledged). As Kramer says, "The whole purpose of spinning Jeffrey Goldberg—assuming that’s what happened—was to prod the United States into taking a more forward position. Americans are taking a forward position already, but the idea here would be to multiply the effect." His own assessment is quite refreshingly honest, in that it reflects the total inability of anyone outside Israel's inner security circle to speculate:
...I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to all the people Jeffrey talked to, and there are a lot of variables that we don’t know yet. The timeline is open to question. The intelligence is also being debated. So while I wouldn’t put a percentage on it, plans are definitely on the table. If the United States doesn’t act, the moment will come when a decision will have to be made. We don’t know what the arguments will be or in which ways the calculations will shift between now and then. Israel has the option, though, and it’s on the table. I wouldn’t say the odds are greater than fifty percent, but it’s a credible option.
Kramer makes many points worth reading. He posits, for example, that even bonkers Iranian mullahs and cheerful sociopaths like Ahmadinejad would hesitate before vaporizing the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, which together make Jerusalem the third-holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. This suggests that it's in Israel's interests to "concentrate every strategic asset it can right next to [Jerusalem]:"
The Israeli leadership has built a duplicate command center in Jerusalem exactly like the one it has in Tel Aviv in the Ministry of Defense. So why stop at the top brass and the political leadership if you know that over the long term we’ll face a hostile nuclear adversary? It makes sense to load up Jerusalem with strategic assets which would themselves serve as a deterrent to a future exchange. And it’s a lot easier to do than position submarines in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean.
So the long term effect would be to make Jerusalem central to Israel not only for political and cultural reasons, but also for strategic reasons.
This, then, would have obvious implications for "land-for-peace" negotiations with the Palestinians:
If there’s a shift of Israel’s assets from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the struggle over real estate up here becomes even more acute. There will be less leeway for Israeli concessions. Concessions are difficult to make in any case. Local security issues can be, in one way or another, finessed, but once they play out in this mega arena of confrontation between nuclear states, flexibility diminishes quickly. It would create tremendous pressure on Israel to maintain its right to decide the future of different pieces of turf close to the city.
He also makes a point I've been yelling into the wind for a long time, this time with regard to gaining Arab popular support for containing Iran ahead of solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem:
Is it that important to have the so-called Arab street? It’s extremely difficult to turn the Arab street into a strategic asset. Nasser tried to do it. Saddam Hussein tried to do it. Ahmadinejad is trying to do it. Erdogan is trying to do it. It’s flattering, I suppose, to have your poster on walls here and there, but nobody has found a way to turn that into something they can use, and I don’t think the United States has much prospect of doing so either. It’s an intangible.
A nuclear Iran, on the other hand, would be tangible. So I think linkage, in fact, runs the other way.
Regarding the American calculus on whether to step up or let Israel handle Iran:
The Gulf is a zone of American dominance, and the only way to assert that is to do what Carter did with the Carter Doctrine, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. He said there should be no outside power or local power that is allowed to challenge the United States in the Gulf. And a nuclear Iran clearly crosses that line.
If even Jimmy Carter was compelled to issue a doctrinal statement in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan about the Persian Gulf, one would think that Barack Obama would see the need to do something similar. Obama should especially feel compelled to do so because there’s a question mark there. He should declare the Persian Gulf a nuclear-free zone. It’s too much to talk about the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone at this time, but the Persian Gulf is nuclear-free now, and it’s time for the United States to come out and say it should remain nuclear-free...
It would be an astonishing lapse if a man who promised to roll back nuclear proliferation watched proliferation develop in one of the least stable parts of the world, a place where the United States has only been able to maintain even a modicum of stability by a massive projection of its own forces. The region is of prime interest to the entire world for its energy resources. If it becomes nuclearized, it will be the one thing for which Barack Obama would always be remembered by history, and he would be remembered by history as a failure.
Another piece I highly recommend is Daniel Gordis's article "The Other Existential Threat" in Commentary. Gordis makes the essential point that a nuclear Iran has the potential to fundamentally alter the psychology of the Israeli soldier -- which is to say, the psychology of most Israelis:
...Many people are put off by the Israeli national affect, which they take to be a mix of arrogance and bravado. This is a misperception of an attitude that is born, in truth, out of collective relief: We Jews no longer live—and die—at the whim of others. That sense of security would evaporate the minute Iran had the weapon it seeks. Even if Israel does possess a second-strike capability, and even if the U.S. could be counted on to punish a nuclear attack on the Jewish state, the existential condition of the Jews would still have reverted to that experienced in pre-state Europe. It would mean that Jews by the tens of thousands could die because someone else determined that it was time for them to do so. No action that Israel could take in response would change that fundamental reality.
Gordis personalizes the matter in a way that really hit home for me:
Periodically, as my 21-year-old son heads back to the army at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning after a weekend at home, I’ll kid with him as he’s walking out the door with all his gear, mimicking conversations we might have had when he was a teenager. I’ll ask, in a falsely harsh tone, “Just where do you think you’re going at this time of the day?” To which he’ll smile and say, “To defend the homeland.”
It has become ritualized family banter, but only because the first time my son responded that way, he did so without thinking, without humor, and without irony. It was, in point of fact, exactly where he was headed. He was going to defend the homeland. The thousands upon thousands of young Israelis who serve their country this way, some of whom volunteer for roles more daunting than could possibly be described, do what they do, day after day and year after year, because they believe themselves capable of defending the homeland. On land, in the air, and at sea, they have proved decade after decade, war after war, that periodic failings notwithstanding, they can keep the country safe. They leave their homes behind, and risk life and limb to ensure the safety of their parents, their grandparents, their siblings, and often their children.
And all this—these national rituals and this still pervasive willingness to serve—would lose all meaning were Jews returned to the status of European victims-in-waiting. Which is precisely what an Iranian nuclear weapon would do.
He explains the potential consequences of that psychological shift:
[T]he first commitment of Zionism has been to provide safety to Jews. So far, it has more or less succeeded. But the minute that Iran possesses its long-sought nuclear weapon, Zion becomes not a haven for the Jews but a potential deathtrap. Six million Jews (an ironic number if there ever was one) will again be in the crosshairs. And if that happens, Israel will have lost its purpose.
Without purpose, Israelis will not remain in Israel. The allures of Boston and Silicon Valley, where intellectual and financial opportunity await without the burdens of war and the shadow of extinction, will be too difficult to resist. Those who now stay in Israel do so, in large measure, because they sense they are part of a historic transformation of the Jewish condition. Absent that awareness, however, the most mobile of Israel’s citizens—who also happen to be those whom the state most desperately needs—will be the ones who abandon it.
In this way, Iran could end the Jewish state without ever pressing the button.
Have a look at both pieces; they're well worth your time.