The Real Reasons Some Israeli Politicians Want War Against Iran

The real reasons why extremist politicians in Israel keep talking about launching an unprovoked attack on Iran are slowly coming out, and it's not what you thought.

Tel Aviv extremists, led by Netanyahu, talk endlessly about the "existential threat" to Israel supposedly posed by Iranm while Israeli military-intelligence officials keep trying to calm tensions and put Israeli-Iranian hostility in context. It is no wonder that both the current and former heads of Mossad are worried about Israeli politicians whipping up war fever against Iran: the justifications for an Israeli attack keep getting more and more ludicrous. An Israeli general recently admitted that the Israeli war party was concerned that a rising Iran might "constrain" Israel's ability to commit aggression (WM: my words) against its neighbors. And now an even thinner "justification" has emerged: the possibility that intelligent Israelis might choose to live somewhere else! According to Robert Windrem of NBC:

some Israeli officials believe the continuous threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon would lead as many as 200,000 of their best and brightest citizens to leave for the United States and other Western nations. That is the “existential threat” Israeli officials worry about, not that Iran could destroy Israel.

Surely that justifies an open-ended war (especially if the U.S. can be tricked into fighting it on behalf of the Israeli war party) and genocide.


And genocide is exactly what an attack on Iran's massive, partially underground (civilian, as far as is known) nuclear infrastructure is likely to be, whether so planned or not. Israeli national security officials, including most notably recently retired Mossad director Meir Dagan, have made it very clear that Israel has little chance of significantly crippling Iran's nuclear infrastructure, containing some 300 known sites. An attack followed by obvious failure to achieve anything strategically significant will create enormous pressure on the guilty politicians to use every weapon they have. As for what the highly militarized Israeli state has, Robert Windrem notes:

The Israelis have long had nuclear tipped sub-launched cruise missiles as part of their deterrent force.

Windrem's point was that Israel does not plan to launch a nuclear strike against Iran, a non-nuclear state that has officially rejected the possession of nuclear arms, but even if Israeli leaders in fact plan to attack Iran without using nuclear arms (a risky assumption at best), they would have great political difficulty sticking to it in the face of military defeat and the subsequent near certain ruin of their careers. Perhaps now is the time for Israel's "best and brightest" to join Meir Dagan in speaking out against an Israeli-caused catastrophe before it is too late.