Nuclear Iran?

Earlier this week I attended worship services on the Jewish High Holy Day called Yom Kippur.  Falling on the tenth day of the month that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur is the culmination of ten days of penitence and reflection and is called the Day of Atonement.  For me it is always a day of deep thinking - about the year past and the year just begun and what I must do to become a better person.  But this is also a time of more general reflection.

Often on Yom Kippur I remember how I felt in October, 1973, when a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria launched a war against Israel on this holiest day of the year.  It was a mere six years after the Arabs had been routed by the Israelis in June, 1967.  It was the second major event of the Arab-Israeli conflict to occur in my lifetime, and I was just a teenager.

This conflict is a subject that has fascinated me at least as much as any other in history.  It goes back to the late 19th century, to the rise of Jewish Zionism and Arab nationalism, the quest to create a Jewish homeland in biblical Israel conflicting with Islamic beliefs about their own religious and historical claims upon the land.

The early Zionists recognized that the Arabs would fiercely resist the creation of a Jewish state in biblical Israel.  They believed they must build a military power that would be capable of crushing every Arab effort to thwart the goal of a Jewish homeland.  They believed that with such an "iron fist" approach - with each new attempt to destroy their dream beaten back more decisively than the last - they could ultimately convince the Arabs that there must be a lasting, peaceful coexistence.

The wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 did not seem to create much progress on the path toward Arab recognition that Israel as a Jewish state was there to stay.  Then, in the late '70s, the signal foreign policy accomplishment of the Carter Administration, the Camp David Accords, brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and Jordan soon followed.

During the three-plus decades since, however, there has been little peace.  The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza has waxed and waned.  Arab terrorist attacks launched against Israel from Lebanon and Syria, with strong state support from Iran, have been met by Israeli counter-attacks.  Ever-lengthening periods of intense bloodshed have been broken up by ever-shortening and increasingly tenuous ceasefires.

Peace has been most elusive.  Efforts by the United States and other Western powers to encourage negotiations have met with repeated failure.  No American president since Jimmy Carter has had so much as a glimmer of success in advancing the cause of peace.  The Israelis face an existential threat from an Arab world that mostly refuses to recognize the Jewish state's right to exist.

Militant Islamic fundamentalists have been especially intransigent on this point. On the flip side of Carter's success at Camp David was the change of regimes in Iran that took place during the late '70s, when the pro-Western ruler Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown, after nearly four decades in power, and replaced by an Islamic Republic led by Muslim clerics.

Historians will surely long debate whether Carter deserves significant blame for the rise of the movement to establish Islamic religious law in Iran and throughout the region.  Surely the Shah himself deserves most of the blame.  The oppressive nature of his regime, the growing chasm between rich and poor, and the way in which he approached the modernization and secularization of Iran were all important factors.  But the end result was that the success of Camp David was historically paired with events that would prove an ill portent for peace in the region.

It now involved not only the Israelis and the Palestinians and the terrorist movements inflamed by the Palestinian cause.  The Iran-Iraq War consumed the 1980s with violence that cost at least half a million lives.  But the conflict between Israel and the Arabs continued, with the Intifadas of the late '80s and early '90s, and the first half of the first decade of this century.  There have been many battles between Israel and terrorist groups in southern Lebanon.  Iran and its surrogate Syria have fueled the incessant war with money and supplies for the terrorists.

Israel has long understood it is in a constant state of war over its very right to be as an independent Jewish homeland.  In June 1981 the Israelis launched an air raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak.  The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the raid.  The United States voted in favor of that resolution.  The irony of our participation in that condemnation when, a decade later, we launched the First Gulf War, was rich indeed.  President George H.W. Bush said Iraq's invasion of its neighbor Kuwait "shall not stand."  Would he have been able to say that with any confidence - if at all - had Iraq developed nuclear weapons by then?  And would that not certainly have been the case had Israel not destroyed the reactor at Osirak?

It is now Iran that represents the most serious existential threat to Israel.  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. He has denied any biblical claim the Jews may have to the land they "occupy." He also denies that the Nazi Holocaust - perhaps the most obvious and tangible reason for the creation and security of a Jewish Homeland - ever occurred.

Now it is Iran that is fervently working to develop nuclear weapons, enriching uranium in an ever-growing number of accelerators.  Economic sanctions have proven to be no deterrent.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appeared before the United Nations to urge the entire "international community" to draw a "red line" that Iran must not be allowed to cross.

The United States has drawn no red line.  The United Nations will draw no red line.  Some in the United States seem to believe that it is none of our business if Iran wishes to acquire nuclear weapons.  Others say it will be regrettable, but that a nuclear Iran can be "contained" the way we contained the Soviet Union.  But can a doctrine of mutually assured destruction be effective in dealing with an enemy that is surely willing to trade many Iranian lives for success in (literally) wiping Israel off the map of the planet, when there are hundreds of millions more Muslims around the globe?

So it appears that only Israel will draw a red line.  When - not if, but when - Iran crosses that line, will Israel have to act alone to prevent the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran from becoming a reality?  And if that happens, will the United Nations Security Council pass another resolution condemning Israel?  Will that resolution have U.S. support?  Will we ever learn anything history has to teach us?