Don’t Bomb Iran

Martin Indyck, Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and generally regarded as a very well connected pro-Israel warhawk, was  interviewed on Australian national television on 9/3/2006:

INTERVIEWER TONY JONES: The complications (of a strike on Iran) are incredible. You said it yourself, there’s the number of the facilities, there’s the placement of the facilities, there’s the fact that they are underground. We saw a piece about Israel considering a military option against Iran itself. That’s not feasible, though, is it? They don’t have the capability. It would have to be the Americans.

MARTIN INDYK: The Israelis see this as an existential threat. They have been preparing for the possibility that Iran will have nuclear weapons for the last 20 years, so to say that they don’t have a military option is, I think, an illusion. They have, I think, already built a military option.

TONY JONES: You mean the technical military ability to destroy bunkered facilities?

MARTIN INDYK: To attempt to destroy bunkered facilities. But, will they succeed? Will they get them all? Do they know where all of them are? These are very big question marks and, of course, they would much prefer that the United States do it because the United States has a much greater capability than Israel has. But to imagine that the Jewish state, whose leaders have sworn that the Jewish Commonwealth will never be destroyed again, will sit back and hope that somebody else will take care of an existential threat is simply not facing the reality of their situation.
INTERVIEWER TONY JONES : Does that put the United States in a position where, at some point, they could literally be blackmailed into taking strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities? We are now talking perhaps more than a year, two years down the track. If Israel told them, “We have the capacity, we will do it, but imagine the consequences if we do. You must do it,” would they do that?

MARTIN INDYK: No, it’s the other way around. It’s that the United States will wink and nod and say, “Well, maybe it’s better that you go and do it than we go and do it”. In some ways you could interpret the statement of Vice President Cheney as already suggesting that. When he was asked what to do about it, he said, “Well, the Israelis won’t stand by and let this happen”. It was almost as if he was signalling to them that it would be OK.