Before bombing Iran, Netanyahu should think twice

A popular new slogan making the rounds among government ministers in  Jerusalem is that in dealing with Iran, Israel faces a decision between “bombing  or the bomb.” In other words, if Israel doesn’t attack, Iran will eventually  obtain nuclear weapons.This stark choice sums up the mood among top officials of  the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: It’s clear that Israel’s  military option is still very much on the table, despite the success of economic  sanctions in forcing Iran into negotiations.

“It’s not a bluff, they’re serious about it,” says Efraim Halevy, a former  head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. A half-dozen other experts  and officials made the same point in interviews last week: The world shouldn’t  relax and assume that a showdown with Iran has been postponed until next year.  Here, the alarm light is still flashing red.

Israeli leaders have been warning President Barack Obama’s administration  that the heat isn’t off for 2012. When an Israeli politician visited Washington  recently and was advised that the mood was calmer than in the spring, the  Israeli cautioned that the Netanyahu government hadn’t changed its position “one  iota.”

The negotiations with Iran by the “P5+1,” group rather than easing Israel’s  anxieties, may actually have deepened them. That’s not just because Netanyahu  thinks the Iranians are stalling. He fears that even if negotiators won their  demand that Iran stop enriching uranium to 20 percent, and export its stockpile  of fuel already enriched to that level, this would still leave more than 6,000  kilograms of low-enriched uranium that, within a year or less, could be  augmented to bomb-grade material.

Netanyahu wants to turn back the Iranian nuclear clock by shipping out all  the enriched uranium. And if negotiations can’t achieve this, he may be ready to  try by military means.

For Obama, the trigger for military action would be a “breakout” decision by  Iran’s supreme leader to go for a bomb. For Netanyahu, the red line is  preventing Iran from reaching “threshold” capability where it could contemplate  a breakout. He isn’t comfortable with letting Tehran have the enrichment  capability that could be used to make a bomb even under a nominally peaceful  program.

Netanyahu sees his country’s very existence at stake, and he’s prepared for  Israel to go it alone because he’s unwilling to entrust the survival of the  Jewish state to others. But some Israeli experts, including several key  supporters of his government, don’t like this “existential” rhetoric warning of  another Holocaust, arguing that it nullifies Israel’s defense capabilities.

Though most members of Netanyahu’s government would probably support him,  there are some subtle nuances of opinion. U.S. officials say Defense Minister  Ehud Barak’s focus is stopping Iran before it enters a “zone of immunity” when  it begins full operation of centrifuges buried under a mountain near Qom. Iran  probably will enter this zone sometime later this year. As Israeli officials  have put it, the deadline for action “is not a matter of weeks, but it’s not a  matter of years, either.”

American officials think Barak may also be more willing than Netanyahu to  accept a deal in which Iran retains some modest enrichment capability but can’t  accumulate enough material to make a bomb. Some Israeli experts are skeptical  about the “zone of immunity” timeline. They believe that no facility, even the  hardened site at Qom, is invulnerable to a clever attack: Iran will have  immunity only with an actual nuclear-weapons umbrella.

While I understand Netanyahu’s concerns, I think an Israeli attack could be  counterproductive. It would shatter the international coalition against Iran,  collapse the sanctions program when it is starting to bite, and trigger  consequences that cannot be predicted, especially during a time of sweeping  change in the region.

Before he rolls the dice, Netanyahu should recall the shattering experience  of Menachem Begin, a prime minister no less devoted to Israel, who was haunted  in his final days in office by the sense that his invasion of Lebanon in 1982,  intended to protect Israel’s security, had been a mistake. The potential costs  and benefits of an attack on Iran are unknowable, but it would be, as Halevy  says, “an event that would affect the course of this  century.”