Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is providing unlimited material for speeches and declarations by Israeli politicians. Some are useless, some are senseless and some are downright harmful.
Not that nuclear weapons in the hands of the regime in Tehran would not present a danger to Israel. Ahmedinijad is not Hitler, and Iran is not Nazi Germany, but the destructive power of nuclear weapons is such that even in the hands of a Third World country, they have the potential of causing immense damage. Talk is not going to avert this danger. Whatever needs to be done is best done without publicity. But the subject is irresistible to Israeli politicians. It is grist for their mills and serves internal political purposes.
First, the specter of a major war with Iran has been held up by our politicians as an imminent danger for the past two years, and has been used as an excuse not to do anything about the daily rocket attacks on Israeli civilians in the South. Why get bogged down in Gaza, they hint, when we are likely to be engaged in a major war in the North at any moment?
Second, the Iranian threat is presented as a good excuse for offering the Golan Heights to Syria. What is more important at this time than disrupting the alliance between Iran and Syria, and the Syrians might be tempted to move away from Iran in return for the Golan Heights, some of our politicians declare. Moving 30,000 Israelis from their homes seems to them a small price to pay for such an achievement. Even in the unlikely event of a severance of the present close ties between Iran and Syria were to occur, how it would avert the nuclear danger from Iran is left to speculation.
I do not think that Iranians are so irrational that they would attack Israel with their fist ( and last ) nuclear bomb. Lets hope they don’t start anything they can’t possibly finish. Many years ago an Air Force family member (now gone to a better place ) told me that if a certain major power initiated a nuclear attack they might as well land their aicraft here in the US because there wouldn’t be a single airstrip left in their country to land on. Nuff Said!!
Whatever happened to the very rational offer of a peace process offered last year by the King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? According to my personal sources in the Mideast (many of whom term themselves ‘very conservative Republican’), it was an honest effort to broker a peace agreement. But the Bushies ignored it, so it went nowhere. Alas, whomever we elect as the next US President MUST honestly engage all, rather than choosing to ignore a vital region and its peoples’ leaders.