Don't you get the feeling that, as we obsess about Herman Cain's sexual harassment and Justin Bieber's paternity test, the world could be headed soon for a new depression, as Europe implodes, and world war, as the Israel-Iran conflict explodes? Shmuel Rosner thinks two factors will influence Israel's decision to attack: the perceived risk of a nuclear Iran and the feasibility of a strike. Walter Russell Mead sees a change in Israeli attitudes on the latter front. Paul Mutter examines the impact of a "super Stuxnet" on Israeli thinking. Marc Tracy does a cost-benefit analysis:
The negative consequences of an Israeli attack—massive war with Hamas and Hezbollah, maybe rockets from Iran itself, God knows what worse forms of retaliation—are essentially known and all but guaranteed. By contrast, the negative consequences of not launching a strike range vastly and unknowably, and if they go all the way up to Armageddon in the Middle East, they also go all the way down to Iran’s never making weapons. I know this is scary, but it’s the way life is lived: you can believe that the worst-case scenario for not striking Iran is worse than the worst-case scenario for striking Iran, and, because of the odds and the contingencies, still oppose striking Iran.
Judah Grunstein is skeptical about both this calculus and the arguments in favor of a strike. Robert Farley sees the idea of war with Iran as flat-out insane. The real question is: for whom? Insanity is relative.
For Israel, you can see how Netanyahu, born and bred into profound but often justifiable paranoia, sees himself as Churchill. You can see how the Jewish people live perpetually in fear of Amalek. But Churchill confronted an enemy equal in military force, greater in industrial strength, and explicitly territorially expansionary. Netanyahu faces an enemy with no record of territorial aggression (unlike Israel), a faltering economy, a divided leadership, massive domestic opposition, and a much inferior military operation. Israel itself is deeply divided over whether risking global war to defeat this country's acquisition of a handful of nuclear weapons (while Israel has well over a hundred), makes sense. I can see why some Israelis and Jews do not consider this literally insane. I cannot see how a rational American can come to the same conclusion.
But for the US, it seems pretty obvious to me that an Israel-prompted regional war in the Middle East would be a disaster, wiping out many of the gains Obama has made in taming and targeting Islamist terror, devastating the Middle East, unleashing terror attacks across the globe, probably pushing Pakistan into open hostility, and pushing an already fragile global economy into the Second Great Depression.
This must be at the center of our foreign policy debate. Are we the instruments of Israel's understandable, if misguided, foreign policy or the masters of our own? Are we governed by our reason or others' panic?