Military action against Iran would backfire on Israel, report warns
A new report by Chatham House warns that while it is "widely assumed" that preparations are "well under way" by both Israel and the US to attack Iran in order to prevent her becoming a nuclear power, that any such action would backfire against Israel and would have "dire and far-reaching" consequences.
The report examines the many ways in which Iran might respond to such an attack, including possible ballistic missile attacks on Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv or Haifa, resulting in "substantial loss of life".
The report also states that Israel's relations with moderate Arab states would be harmed as they would see this as offensive to the Muslim world and a way of fuelling Islamic extremism.
This is one of the gravest consequences of Bush's actions towards Iraq, where the notion of international consent, as required by the UN Charter, has been thrown aside as an irrelevance. This is Bush's real legacy. And it is a disgraceful one."An Israeli military operation against Iran would hurt Israel's long-term interests. It would be detrimental to Israel's overall security and the political and economic consequences would be dire and far-reaching," the report warns.
Israel says the issue of curbing Iran's suspected nuclear weapons programme is a problem for the international community. But it has been made clear by the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, that if the international community failed to prevent Iran from obtaining a weapon, Israel would take the steps to do so.
While the report describes such a possibility as remote, it says that if diplomatic efforts fail, "the US and Israel would feel that force is justified and might act militarily either together or separately, regardless of international consent. This could have disastrous consequences."
Now, we all know that Israel is long used to operating "regardless of international consent" as the attack on Osirak and many other well documented Israeli actions can attest to. However, the report warns that any Israeli action would fail to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and would only delay such a programme "for a while" and that such an attack could provoke fallout against US forces in Iraq.
It is astonishing that, at a time when Israel and the US are discussing whether or not to attack Iran, that the US are having talks in which the Iranians are involved and yet the nuclear topic is not allowed to be raised. This is the backward way that Bush and the neo-cons approach foreign policy.
They throw around notions as dangerous as this one, they have meetings with country's that they are proposing attacking, but the reasons for the possible attack - and, by inference the ways of avoiding conflict - are excluded from the discussion.
Even when organisations as august as Chatham House are warning that any such move would be disastrous, not for Iran, but for America's greatest ally; Israel.
The war in Iraq has taught the neo-cons nothing, because they are so determined to live within the confines of their own reality that they have refused to learn any of it's lessons. They continue to believe that military supremacy will allow them to dictate how other nations should behave, and they continue to believe that they do not require the consent of the international community before they embark on such suicidal stratagems.
Faced with defeat in Iraq Bush's instinct has told him to double down the bet, which we are now witnessing with his "surge and accelerate" policy in that country. Worse than that, there is every indication that this is merely a precursor for a widening of the war to include Iran, despite all the warnings of the chaos that will result from such an act of insanity.
It's simply astounding to me that, despite being proven wrong in every prediction he and his neo-con colleagues made before the Iraq war, and despite the fact that almost every prediction made by his opponents turned out to be prescient, that Bush still believes that he should follow his "gut" and ignore all who oppose him.
His "gut" has led us to the present precipice. And, if he continues to be guided by it, there is every chance that it will take us over it.
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