Jeffrey Goldberg, writing the cover story of next month’s Atlantic, newly online today, gives us something new — well, not new, but something newly revived — to #PANIC!!!! about: Israel attacking Iran in the near future. Outlining the scenario that he envisions potentially unfolding, Goldberg writes:
When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.
Again I say, #PANIC!!!!! Although, Goldberg then adds:
If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks (though the public condemnation) of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House.
Read the whole thing.
You know, I for one thought that there’d be a war in the Middle East by now, so this isn’t causing me to PANIC. The Israelis may be waiting for the mid-term elections–Team Obama can wreak a lot less havoc when they know there will be a GOP Congress looking for any excuse to get in their sh*t.
The fact that the Saudis came up on the net and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve got codewords for shutting down our air defense system. Just sayin’ in case you were, oh, wondering if we were going to interfere or something.”
We all will owe a great deal of gratitude to the UN when it steps in to prevent catastrophe here, treating Israel fairly in the process no doubt…
See, Israel wants to be the attacker and not the defender so they can roll three dice instead of just two.
Oh goody, are we playing yatzee!!!!?!
No, Risk!