Turning Back From the Point of No Return

Implications of the Threat to Bomb Iran

The message from the Western media was clear: Yes, we know Ahmadinejad didn’t really threaten to “wipe Israel off the map”, but we’re going to continue to report that he did, anyway. The crucial – but omitted – context makes it clear that, even if these exact words had actually been used, this was not a military threat. The USSR was not wiped off the map because it was militarily overthrown, but collapsed from within. The Shah’s regime collapsed due to an internal revolution. And nobody interprets Ahmadinejad’s similar words with regard to Saddam Hussein’s regime as meaning that he wished that Iraq had been nuked in order to wipe that oppressive regime off the face of the Earth.

Goldberg does not rely on the myth of Ahmadinejad’s “threat” to Israel alone. He also writes that “The Iranian leadership’s own view of nuclear dangers is perhaps best exemplified by a comment made in 2001 by the former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who entertained the idea that Israel’s demise could be brought about in a relatively pain-free manner for the Muslim world. ‘The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely while [a nuclear attack] against the Islamic countries would only cause damages,’ Rafsanjani said.”

We are thus supposed to believe this constituted an Iranian threat of nuclear attack against Israel. Again, the actual context of Rafsanjani’s remarks is not irrelevant. The words come from a speech in which he criticized Zionist crimes against the Palestinians, and U.S. support for those crimes. He emphasized that the struggle was not against the Jewish people, but the ideology of Zionism: “There are many Jews who don’t believe in Zionism. There are many Jewish scholars in America who have been active against these events.” He also observed that many Zionists are not Jewish. Discussing how Israel came into being, he said that the West supported the Zionist project to further its own colonialist and imperialist goals. “They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel”, he said, including nuclear weapons. He then suggested that the Islamic nations might themselves seek nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Western imperialism and Zionist aggression: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Suggesting he was referring to nations other than Iran when referring to “the Islamic world”, he added, “Now, even if that does not happen, they can still inflict greater costs on the imperialists” (emphasis added). He referred to the then recent terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and explained: “We cannot encourage that sort of thing either” (emphasis added). In other words, he was not encouraging terrorism against the West or nuclear proliferation: “I am only talking about the natural course of developments. The natural course of developments is such that such things may happen.” Additionally, Rafsanjani noted the U.S. role in supporting Israeli violence against Palestinians, and said that the 9/11 attacks “can be a lesson for the Americans, particularly today, when, due to their aggressive moves and their mistakes, they have paved the way and made it possible for some groups to be armed with non-conventional weapons”. He added, “I would like to admonish the Westerners not allow to matters to go this far” [sic], that “They should not allow a situation of confrontation and antagonism”.[14]

Thus, Rafsanjani was explicitly arguing against a situation wherein “the Islamic world” also possessed a nuclear weapon; he was merely making the point that if the West persists in its complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people that this could very well come to be. It would be unfortunate if it came to that, in Rafsanjani’s view. But this does not stop Goldberg from quoting Rafsanjani out of context in order to imply, falsely, that he was making an explicit threat of nuclear attack against Israel.

The premise of an Iranian threat of nuclear attack on Israel having been established by such means, Goldberg proceeds to attempt to bolster the further premise that bombing Iran, although sure to have a number of negative consequences, would nevertheless achieve its stated aim. To do so, Goldberg cites a precedent: “In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions”.

Goldberg is correct on one point here: Israel did indeed bomb Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. The rest is a historical fabrication. The truth is that the IAEA had been monitoring Iraq’s program and that there was no evidence at that time of any weapons program. The attack upon Iraq by the only nation in the Middle East that actually possessed nuclear weapons (a situation that remains today) was condemned by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 487, which noted that “Iraq has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [NPT] since it came into force in 1970, that in accordance with that Treaty Iraq has accepted IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear activities, and that the Agency has testified that these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date”. Far from making the world  safer from the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the international community, in strongly condemning Israel’s attack as a “clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct”, found that Israel’s attack constituted “a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime which is the foundation of the non-proliferation Treaty”.[15]

While there’s no evidence Israel’s attack prevented Iraq from acquiring a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. intelligence, it was likely an important factor that played into Saddam Hussein’s subsequent decision to move his nuclear program underground and seek to develop an Iraqi nuclear deterrent to further Israeli aggression. An interagency intelligence assessment on the consequences of Israel’s attack stated that it “could be a watershed event in the Middle East” by adding “new strains” to “US-Arab relations” and sparking an “arms race” in which “Arab leaders will intensify their search for alternative ways to boost their security and protect their interests” (much the same observation that Rafsanjani made in 2001). Israel’s own possession of nuclear weapons made its actions all the more destabilizing. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had “dispelled the ambiguity that surrounded Israel’s nuclear program by acknowledging Israel’s capability to produce nuclear weapons, and the raid on Iraq has laid Tel Aviv’s challenge before the Arab world in clear terms.” Saddam Hussein responded “by suggesting that world governments provide the Arabs with a nuclear deterrent to Israel’s formidable nuclear capabilities. His message to other Arabs is that they can have no security as long as Israel alone commands the nuclear threat.” In line with the view of the international community as reflected in the U.N. resolution, the assessment stated that Israel’s attack seriously damaged international efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. “A related consequence of the raid is damage to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to the IAEA safeguards system”, which would “probably have a detrimental impact”. Contrary to Israeli assertions “that the IAEA safeguards system is a sham”, the assessment made a similar observation as the U.N. resolution that “The Iraqis have had the support of most IAEA members because of general acceptance that international and bilateral safeguards over Iraq’s program were sufficient to guard against the diversion of fissile material for a nuclear device.”[16]

Far from “halting—forever” Saddam Hussein’s aspirations to acquire the bomb, Iraq’s subsequent pursuit of a nuclear weapon (which ended with the Gulf War and subsequent IAEA dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program) was in no small part a direct consequence of Israel’s attack. Any number of obvious corollaries may be drawn, with the precedent having enormous implications for the potential consequences of any attack on Iran, such as the possibility it might cause Iran to withdraw from the NPT in order to actually begin pursuing a nuclear weapons capability (if it isn’t now, which may very well be the case, given the lack of evidence to the contrary) as a deterrent to Israeli aggression. But Goldberg rewrites history in order to lead his readers to an opposite an erroneous conclusion that were Israel to bomb Iran, it would further the stated goal of preventing nuclear proliferation. Goldberg himself hints at his own fallacy by writing that “Benjamin Netanyahu feels … an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, successful or not, may cause Iran to redouble its efforts—this time with a measure of international sympathy—to create a nuclear arsenal. And it could cause chaos for America in the Middle East.” That may be a lesson Netanyahu learned from the Osirak bombing. But the view of the Israeli Prime Minister that an Israeli attack could actually produce the opposite result of its stated aim is mentioned only in passing, and quickly lost among the comparisons of Iran to Nazi Germany, assumptions of an Iranian intent to produce a nuclear weapon and destroy Israel, and arguments about the necessity to bomb Iran to prevent this from happening (e.g., Goldberg’s own assertion that “It is fair to say” that the only reason “that the Iranian nuclear program is not the equivalent of Auschwitz” is because Israel itself possesses nuclear weapons and has a powerful air force).