The View From Israel

At Bloomberg is an opinion piece by Efraim Inbar, a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and the director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies.

This is the flip side of a post earlier today (the one that wandered off into forestry in the comments). The author takes a pessimistic view of the chances for stability with a nuclear armed Iran.

I liked the way the author follows the thread of consequences and doesn't just give us a single, guaranteed, outcome.  It brings to mind the comment of a chap who was a professor at the Army War College when I was a student there:

There is another often-repeated wrong assumption even more serious than assuming that air strikes alone can be decisive and produce a hygienic war.  That is that the attacking country can control events once war starts.  My experience, and I believe history agrees, is that once war starts, neither side can control it to the degree that they planned before hostilities.   War has a dialectic all its own, and it is dangerous and unpredictable.  Bombing nuclear plants in Iran might—I say might—set back the Iranian nuclear program, perhaps even significantly, but they will also bring a host of cascading problems, seen and unforeseen, that might even be as serious as an Iranian nuke.  I'm not saying not to bomb, but policymakers should understand that subsequent events will be unpredictable and perhaps unstoppable, just as was reaction to the assassination of an Austrian archduke almost a century ago.

There are no really good choices at this point.  But, as Winnie tells us, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war".

Regards  —  Cliff