Bad News for Israel? Yesterday Iran elected, by a landslide, an ultraconservative as its new president. Says the Associated Press:

He is expected to be a tough negotiating partner in Iran's talks with Europe over its nuclear program. Iran says the program is to produce energy but the United States contends nuclear weapons are the goal.

[Newly elected president] Ahmadinejad has criticized Iran's current negotiators as making too many concessions to Europe — particularly in freezing the uranium enrichment program — and he was expected to put Iran's nuclear program into the hands of some avowed anti-Western [and, presumably, anti-Zionist] clerics.

The pragmatic Rafsanjani [(the defeated reformist candidate) had] appeared more willing to negotiate on the nuclear program. But a Foreign Ministry spokesman Friday underlined that the suspension is temporary and that enrichment will eventually be restarted no matter who wins the election.

The analyses I have seen of Iran's nuclear program of course believe that it is intended to create nuclear weapons. Iran is the world's fourth largest oil exporter. It also exports large quantities of natural gas. It does not need nuclear power.
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Moreover, many observers believe that offensive use of nuclear weapons, rather than holding them in reserve in a strictly defensive capacity, is the ultimate intent, if not for a missile attack upon Israel, then perhaps to employ enriched uranium in "dirty bombs" or other terrorist attacks against Israel and its one ally on Earth, the United States.
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Israel would love to knock out Iran's nuclear program as easily as it thinks it did Iraq's nuclear-weapons program many years ago. Israelis believe that a single attack on a single reactor, Osirak, near Baghdad, in June 1981 ended any aspirations Iraq may have had to develop nuclear weapons. Whether Iraq had any such intense desire before the Osirak attack, however, has never been established, and the Osirak reactor was built with assistance from the French, which suggests that it was not designed for the creation of nuclear weapons. Some observers believe that, exactly contrary to the Israeli version of events, the Osirak attack not only did not stop Saddam's nuclear program but actually accelerated it and caused Saddam to disperse it so it would be less subject to attack, and hide it from inspectors. According to such analysts, only the U.S. attacks of the first Gulf War ended Saddam's nuclear aspirations.
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Israel cannot reach Iran directly, since there is no common border. It would have to overfly some Moslem country, and none is likely to give permission. Even if it could ignore Jordanian objections — and Israel has never cared one bit about Jordan's sensibilities — it would still have to overfly Iraq to get to Iran.
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The supposedly sovereign government of Iraq would be most unlikely to grant permission for such an overflite, even tho Iran has long been perceived by many Iraqis as an enemy of Iraq. Tho Israel would surely be contemptuous of the Iraqi government, which probably could not shoot down any significant number of Israeli planes if Israel defied an Iraqi ban, it has a real military problem with Iraq's occupier and overlord, the United States.
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If the United States gives permission for such an attack, it would be held fully accountable for Israel's behavior, which would be catastrophic to U.S. interests. One could expect a worldwide condemnation of U.S. "aggression", an uprising against the U.S. occupation by Iraq's Shiite majority (who have heretofore been cooperative), even a demand by Iraq's Shia-dominated government that the U.S. get the f**k out of Iraq, immediately!
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If the U.S. ignored such a demand, it would expose the Iraq occupation as a Zionist crime against Iraqis, not an attempt to help Iraqis to enjoy "freedom" and "democracy" — since Bush would have to void the direct order of a democratically elected Iraqi government. If you think Iraq is a hotspot for U.S. soldiers today, quadruple or quintuple the trouble after the U.S. co-conspires with Israel in an attack upon a "fellow Muslim nation"!
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If the U.S. warns Israel in advance that it will neither actively consent to an Israeli overflite of Iraq nor turn a blind eye to such an attack and pretend it didn't know about it before or even as it was happening — which no one on Earth is stupid enuf to believe — Israel would have two choices: (1) call off the attack or (2) defy the United States and "do whatever we have to do for our defense".
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In that event, the U.S. has three choices: (1) consent to the Israeli overflite of Iraq and see the entire region explode in anti-American violence, undoing all the careful work of decades to promote U.S. interests in that vital area; (2) intercept Israeli warplanes and try to turn them back or force them to land in Iraq without shooting them down; or (3) do everything in our power to stop them from reaching Iran, meaning almost certainly shooting them down, via missiles, dogfites, or whatever else we might have on hand. At that point, all bets are off.
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Israeli pilots would fite back, attacking U.S. missile emplacements and shooting down, or trying to shoot down, U.S. fighters, killing Americans. Israelis believe that they are the world's supreme fighting force, and can easily defeat even the U.S. military, because Israel's pilots are better than American pilots and their technology is better than our technology.
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Everything could escalate out of control, to an active U.S. attack on the airfields in Israel from which the attacks were launched, so the planes would have nowhere to return to; even to a full-scale U.S. "shock and awe" campaign against Israel to destroy its offensive capability, including all its nuclear installations.
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Were the U.S. to turn against Israel even for a limited strike on Israel's home territory, there is no telling what the Israeli lunatics who brought this on might do. They might even decide that it's all over, and they are going to kill as many Americans as they can if Israel dies, so launch nuclear weapons against U.S. forces in Iraq, and even against the U.S. homeland!
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Israel has a space program. It can launch missiles into orbit, then bring them raining down upon Washington, the U.S. heartland, any part of this country. The U.S. would, upon detecting an Israeli launch of long-range ballistic missiles, have no choice but to retaliate with a full-scale nuclear attack upon Israel, ending the mad Zionist experiment in undoing history once and for all.
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But even if things didn't go completely nuts, as to produce full-scale war between the United States and Israel, as soon as Israel defies the U.S. to try to overfly Iraq, U.S. public opinion will turn violently anti-Zionist. Not only will loud voices be heard from almost all parts of the U.S. political spectrum, making it impossible for even the staunchest Radical Zionist voices in the U.S. to stand with Israel, but we could see some very ugly reactions against Jews in general, all across the Nation, including the firebombing of synagogs and yeshivas, beatings of individual Jews, and a demand that Zionist Jews be rounded up and thrown into internment camps. We do, after all, know who they are. They have made no secret of their affiliations with pro-Israel organizations.
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At the very least, all U.S. aid to Israel, in any form, public and private, would be cut off. Israel cannot survive without U.S. governmental or private aid.
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One would hope that Israelis are not completely insane, so would never launch an attack upon Iran, since the consequences of such an attack are utterly unpredictable. What, then, short of their own attack, can they do about Iran's nuclear program?
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They can try to persuade the U.S. to do what we have been doing for years: fite Israel's wars for it. But an air attack on Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities would not work. A ground war would be required. And the time for a U.S. ground war against Iran, if it ever existed, has passed.
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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going so badly that the American people won't stand for another war in the region, this time against a vastly more powerful enemy than Iraq and Afghanistan put together. Already even some Republicans have started to rebel against an open-ended occupation of Iraq, and a majority of public opinion now holds that the war was a bad idea from the beginning and we should get out as soon as feasible.
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Trial balloons for an attack even on Syria, a feeble foe by contrast with Iran, have fallen flat. And in lite of our experience with the lies we were told about Saddam's "Weapons of Mass Destruction", extravagant claims that "intelligence" shows Iran an "imminent threat to U.S. security" would be met with extreme skepticism and disbelief. How, then, is the U.S. to do Israel's dirty work?
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If Israelis really believe (a) that Iran is intent on creating nuclear weapons and (b) that it will use those weapons to attack Israel, they have one question to ask themselves: "Do I want to die, along with my entire family, for Israel?"
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Given Jews' pride in Masada, where hundreds of ancient Judean rebels committed suicide rather than submit to Roman conquest, no one can know how many Jews will decide to replicate Masada on a gargantuan scale.
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If the answer to the do-I-want-to-die-for-Israel question is "No", or "What would be the point of that? One nuclear blast in Tel-Aviv and Israel is over. Anyone who survives will leave as fast as they can get a plane, boat, or inner-tube raft going", they had better start making plans for the evacuation of their families — now. But don't plan on coming here. We have quite enuf Jews as it is, thank you.
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Much of the U.S. has historically been at best tolerant of and at worst actively hostile to Jews. The evangelicals of the Bible Belt, now so large a part of U.S. political support for Israel, do not love Jews in the United States. They love them in Israel, because they believe that Israeli behavior will bring on Armageddon and thus the Second Coming of Christ, a thousand years of peace under his rule on Earth, and the Last Judgment, at which the "elect" will be raised into Heaven and the wicked cast into Hell.
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Mainline Christians may not understand this whole "Last Days" thing. I've done some reading.
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The "Last Days" people believe that events going on right now are plain evidence that we are in "End Times". They want to believe that the world is about to end (in nuclear Armageddon?). Rather than being horrified by the thought, they look forward to such an event because they won't be harmed but gathered into Christ's arms and raised up to Heaven. To them, Israel is a very good thing because (1) its establishment constitutes one of the necessary preconditions for the Last Judgment and (2) its rash behavior is going to produce Armageddon in our lifetime, and thus a thousand years of heaven on Earth — thru all of which each of the True Believers will live; yup, each of them will live 1,000 years under Christ's divine rule — followed by the admission of "the elect" into Heaven.
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(One must wonder "What's the rush? What do you care when the world ends if you and your loved ones are pious, so individually enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and meet Jesus there rather than on Earth?" One mustn't ask such questions.)
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"Last Days" Christians believe fervently that the behavior of Israel will surely bring about Armageddon and thus the end of this wicked world that they so devoutly pray for. In the End Times, the Jews will finally accept Jesus as their Savior!
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But (a) if the gathering of all Jews into one place is a necessary predicate to the Rapture, then American Jews (well, at least religious Jews, if not also secular Jews) must leave the United States! and (b) if Jews leave Israel and disperse themselves around the world once more, the Rapture can't happen anytime soon!
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If instead of converting to Christianity, as they are supposed to in the End Times, Jews become adamant refusers of the Divine Word of Jesus Christ, stubbornly 'persisting in error', despite all the efforts of all the preachers over all the centuries to bring them to The Revealed Truth, and flee to the U.S., pre-empt Armageddon, and continue to deny Christ, then they become enemies of Christ — here, among us! Evangelical Christians don't want that.
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How soon might Armageddon arrive? Well, one commonly hears the assertion that there must first arise an "Antichrist", who rises to power by posing as a good and decent man, then leads people astray, away from Christ, and rules for seven years before Jesus destroys him in the final battle between good and evil. George W. Bush has now been in office for almost 4½ years, and it's not hard for End-Timers to see Dubya as the Antichrist. He won office by talking about restoring national virtue, then launched us upon a course of undeclared wars for the sake of Zionism, that is, ultimately for Jews, the unrepentant refusers of Christ. If he is the Antichrist, and Armageddon arrives 7 years after his rise to power, the Second Coming of Christ should happen in about 2½ years! That comports very nicely with the schedule by which Iran might develop nuclear weapons and the capacity to launch them against Israel. To End-Timers, then, all systems are go!
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But for Armageddon to arrive, Israelis must remain in Israel. Indeed, American Jews have to leave for Israel, along with all other Jews from all other countries. Conversely, however, if the Jews leave Israel, Armageddon is off! End-Timers certainly won't welcome emigrants from Israel here.
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So Israelis had better explore other options.
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Canada is an immigration society and might take some, but Canada feels no special connection with the Jews, and French Canadian culture is traditional anti-Jewish. Germany might take some, in atonement for Nazi-era guilts. But would Jews really find Germany congenial? France is famously anti-Jewish. Europe more generally is historically cool to Jews — or worse. Australia is too small a society and economy to absorb more than a few hundred thousand in the next few years. Moslem countries are out of the question. Most Christian countries in Latin America surely don't want a horde of Jews descending upon them. Sub-Saharan Africa is terribly poor and violent. It couldn't absorb many immigrants, and Jews accustomed to First World conditions would probably rule out emigration to Africa.
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What does that leave? India, China, and other Asian countries, pretty much, who might welcome well-educated immigrants who bring needed skills and their own money into the country, and use their international connections to promote their exports. But India and China are crowded. Would they really want to take in the Jews of Israel?
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That's not my problem. But finding someplace to go if Iran succeeds in creating nuclear weapons may well become a very serious problem for Israelis. Good. Just don't try to make it our problem.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,737.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:27 PM