WASHINGTON - Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's article in The Atlantic magazine [1] was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless Washington takes a much more menacing line toward Iran's nuclear program.
But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran as an "existential threat" is unnecessary and self-defeating.
Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran
in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of US direct involvement in the war with Iran.
Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their US counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israelis would explain that they had "no choice", he writes, because "a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since [Adolf] Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people".
He claims the "consensus" among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel "will launch a strike by next July", based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.
Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neo-conservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al-Qaeda.
Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead, he argues that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would be able to "fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella".
But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence - against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Coppied by http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LH17Ak02.html
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