The next preemptive strike?
<font color=brown> Egypt and Jordan offer little threat to Israel, and Syria is a danger insofar as it is allied to Iran, for example in its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. On March 29, Iran's atomic energy agency announced that it would resume enrichment of uranium at its Isfahan nuclear facility, abandoning previous commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran well may have deliverable nuclear weapons in a year or so.
What will Israel do in response to the Iranian challenge? Israel cannot simply re-enact its 1981 raid upon Iraq's Osirak reactor. Iran’s nuclear fuel processing facilities are harder to get at, perhaps beyond the capacity of non-nuclear weapons. Suppose Israel were to attack Iranian nuclear capabilities with nuclear weapons? What would Europe do then? Israel would be condemned from the Bosphorus to Bantry Bay, but what would anyone actually do about it? I doubt that the Americans would mind at all. A mushroom cloud over Isfahan might represent a minor inconvenience during the presidential election campaign, but in all likelihood the incumbent administration would benefit from a heightened sense of risk.
The use of nuclear weapons, to be sure, is something of a taboo, but like many taboos, no one really cares after they are broken. Israel is in a position analogous to that of Germany in 1914, when its General Staff argued that Russia must be attacked straight away, before it built enough railways to mobilize its huge army at speed. The logic is inescapable. Therefore I believe Israel will indeed conduct a nuclear strike against Iran's processing capacity, and I am as curious as you are to find out what the Europeans will do about it - I should think not much of anything besides noise.
Spengler
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