Israel's Choices

How will they affect the long term?

Naftali Bennett, who some believe is the most qualified individual to be Israel’s Prime Minister, writes,

The US administration is telling us: “This is a victory, you’ve already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action.” No, it’s NOT a victory. Yes, it’s a remarkable success of Israel’s air defense systems, but it’s not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you’ve NOT won. You don’t win wars just by intercepting your enemy’s hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.

Unless Prime Minister Netanyahu is as dense as his detractors believe, he must be thinking along similar lines.

Bennett concludes,

We’re not asking anyone to fight for us. We’ll do the job. But we do expect our allies to have our back, especially when it’s tough—and now it’s tough. Be on the right side and help us defeat these horrible and savage regimes.

If Israel chooses to sit back and do nothing, it gains the approval of the “international community.” The question is how much that is worth. The “international community” has been willing to tolerate Iran undertaking a campaign against Israel that any sovereign state would regard as intolerable. It tolerates Israel constantly being attacked by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in the North, depriving Israel of some of its territory and requiring Israel to keep many men out of the economy and in the army. The American Administration and its allies are making Israel pay a huge price for “ironclad” support. Iran is paying no price at all.

Iran has been at war with Israel for years. In the past, Iran used proxies, and it may revert to doing that. But in any case, Israel should not aim for mere retaliation. It should aim to decisively push back the Iranian threat.

As of this writing, Israel has not launched a military response. One option that it has is to ask the “international community” to undertake meaningful diplomatic action. For example, if the U.S. and its friends could force Hezbollah to abide by UN resolutions and withdraw from the border region, that would be a real achievement.

If Israel chooses military options, I do not think that a “one-off” is the way to go. Instead, it should treat this conflict as the war that it is. That means relentless attacks that serve to weaken Iran’s regime. Above all, this would mean attempting to destroy the regime’s most loyal military and security forces.

One of the softest targets in Iran would be its infrastructure for pumping and exporting oil. That would indirectly be an attack on President Biden, because higher gas prices would hurt his reelection chances. So one way to tell how Israel’s government really feels about President Biden’s “ironclad” support is to see whether or not Israel attacks the oil infrastructure.

I suspect that only a “proportionate” or “symbolic” response would fail to have a deterrent effect. It would end up putting Israel in a worse position in the long run. Iran’s regime would survive, and the “international community” would revert to criticizing Israel for trying to win a war.

What should the United States seek for an outcome? I think that the Administration would like the region to remain as quiet as possible. How to achieve that?

It seems to me that the Obama-Biden approach was to try to work with the Iranian regime and to attempt to change Israel’s regime. Perhaps that is the opposite of what they should have been thinking.

I think that the American people, if not their leaders, are tired of playing Whack-a-Mole with radical Islamists. We defeat the Taliban, and they come back. We defeat ISIS, and it comes back. My guess is that we are afraid that we cannot permanently dislodge the Mullahs from Iran. But Iranian culture is not as hopeless as that in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan. And after almost 50 years of theocracy, the Iranian people probably would prefer something else.