At least three years behind schedule, the Obama administration is contemplating bold moves against Iran. At least 11 years behind schedule, the European Union is beginning to acknowledge the threat from Iran. By acknowledge, we mean act on that knowledge. For eight years, the second Bush administration acknowledged the Iranian threat in theory. But it did nothing of note.
The change? The difference? Now, Israel is putting out a credible threat of a military strike against Iran.
Israel was hindered in doing so earlier by the tepid, timid, unrealistic, indeed pusillanimous response to the brazen Iranian nuclear pursuit by a range of actors by President Obama, who naively thought Iran could be reasoned with; by the UN, which unrealistically thought its nuclear supervisory agency would be respected by Iran; by the EU, which, ostrich-like, thought it was immune from Iranian attack; and by George W. Bush, who initiated the myth that sanctions would change Irans behavior.
Even at this late date, the dangerous truth is, neither Obama nor the UN nor the EU is fully facing the truth about Iran, namely, that Irans leaders could not care less about the breadth or intensity of economic or diplomatic sanctions imposed on it.
Rational actors think their opponents are rational actors. Big mistake; this is not always so. Iran wants, at a minimum, hegemony in the Middle East and hegemony over the Arab world. Sanctions will not stop these dreams.
Suddenly, the Obama administration moves to act against Irans Central Bank, and assures us that this is the major, the critical, sanction, and it will work. No more than two weeks pass and suddenly the Obama administration implicitly acknowledges that this sanction is insufficient; it is now necessary to contemplate the eviction of Iran from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), which facilitates all international bank transactions.
Clearly, all of these moves could have been tried years ago. Their painfully slow unfolding under Bush and Obama has vitiated whatever effect they might have had, had they been tried all at once, early on.
The longer the delay in acting against Iran, the greater the price to be paid for ultimately confronting it.
That delay, that ever rising price, is the result of pretending that Iran is a rational actor.
Item: Iran sees itself as the vanguard of the messiah, the ultimate rule of Shiite Islam over the entire world.
Item: Iran regularly threatens Israel with extinction.
In other words, Irans ultimate values are not calculated on a risk vs. benefit basis, economically, politically, militarily or socially. That is why:
Iran turns its guns on its own people.
Iran sponsors terrorism worldwide.
Iran lies about the military purposes of its nuclear program, hiding it underground, something that a strictly civilian program would have no need for.
Iran thumbs its nose at nuclear inspectors.
That is why it is a beguiling illusion to think that if sanctions do cause Iran to return to the negotiating table, this will be a victory.
Quite the contrary. This will merely guarantee Iran another period of months or years to complete its construction of nuclear weapons, with impunity.
Draconian sanctions against Iran today feed the illusion in the West that Iran is a rational actor.
We would love to be proven wrong in this analysis. But we fear that a military strike against Iran is the only way to save the world from nuclear arms in the hands of irrational, messianic actors. As we say, the more a military strike is put off, the higher the price eventually to be paid.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
