The Real Aim of Israel's Bomb Iran Campaign

Reuel Marc Gerecht's screed
justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening
of the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House Resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What
is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of
Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to
support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into
direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That
has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot
fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to
know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to
start.

Gerecht
openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli
attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. "If Khamenei has a
death-wish, he'll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the
entrance to the Persian Gulf," writes Gerecht. "It might be the only
thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily...." Gerecht
suggest that the same logic would apply to any Iranian "terrorism
against the United States after an Israeli strike," by which we really
means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East. Gerecht writes
that Obama might be "obliged" to threaten major retaliation "immediately
after an Israeli surprise attack."

That's
the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going
to be "obliged" to join Israeli aggression against Iran unless he
feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to
resist. That's why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong
majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama's
options.

In
the absence of confidence that Obama would be ready to come into the
war fully behind Israel, there cannot be an Israeli strike.

Gerecht's argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario
of Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the
Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists,
as Gerecht's past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran's
Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence.

Gerecht
first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000, before the
Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an essay written
for a book published by the Project for a New American Century.
Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a "terrorist act," the
U.S. Navy should "retaliate with fury". The purpose of such a military
response, he wrote, should be to "strike with truly devastating effect
against the ruling mullahs and the repressive institutions that maintain
them."

And
lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was more
explicit: "That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize the body
count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless Washington
uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

In
2006-07, the Israeli war party had reason to believed that it could
hijack U.S. policy long enough to get the war it wanted, because it had
placed one of its most militant agents, David Wurmser, in a strategic
position to influence that policy.

We
now know that Wurmser, formerly a close adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu
and during that period Vice President Dick Cheney's main adviser on the
Middle East, urged a policy of overwhelming U.S. military force against
Iran. After leaving the administration in 2007, Wurmser revealed that he had advocated a U.S. war on Iran, not to set back the nuclear program but to achieve regime change.

"Only
if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental assault on
the survival of the regime will it have a pick-up among ordinary
Iranians," Wurmser told The Telegraph.
The U.S. attack was not to be limited to nuclear targets but was to be
quite thorough and massively destructive. "If we start shooting, we
must be prepared to fire the last shot. Don't shoot a bear if you're not
going to kill it."

Of
course, that kind of war could not be launched out of the blue. It
would have required a casus belli to justify a limited initial attack
that would then allow a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. In
2007, Cheney acted on Wurmser's advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a
war with Iran over Iraq, but it was foiled by the Pentagon.

As Wurmser was beginning to whisper that advice in Cheney's ear in 2006, Gerecht was making the same argument in The Weekly Standard:

Bombing
the nuclear facilities once would mean we were declaring war on the
clerical regime. We shouldn't have any illusions about that. We could
not stand idly by and watch the mullahs build other sites. If the ruling
mullahs were to go forward with rebuilding what they'd lost--and it
would be surprising to discover the clerical regime knuckling after an
initial bombing run--we'd have to strike until they stopped. And if we
had any doubt about where their new facilities were (and it's a good bet
the clerical regime would try to bury new sites deep under heavily
populated areas), and we were reasonably suspicious they were building
again, we'd have to consider, at a minimum, using special-operations
forces to penetrate suspected sites.

The
idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious
lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it
both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it
clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound
Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts,
"are mentally in a different galaxy than they were under President
Bush." Even though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the
world as a rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando
killings of unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the
U.S. Congress appears as strong as ever.

Moreover, polling data
for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been
manipulated into supporting war against Iran - in large part because
more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that
Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to
exploit that advantage. "If the Israelis bomb now, American public
opinion will probably be with them," writes Gerecht. "Perhaps decisively
so." Netanyahu
must be feeling good about the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to
join an Israeli war of aggression against Iran. It was Netanyahu,
after all, who declared in 2001,
"I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily,
move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."