Israel Cannot Attack Iran Alone

"If all the talk, rumors and leaks about the impending war are not a ploy, then this government is going out of its political mind." That line comes from the opening of an article headlined "Bloody Poker" in Haaretz on May 14, 1982, in which the writer warned the government about the danger of a large-scale military operation in Lebanon. But prime minister Menachem Begin and defense minister Ariel Sharon, a highly thought-of leadership duo, ignored the warnings and three weeks later invaded Lebanon and embroiled Israel in a bloody war that went on for years, during which high school students about to enlist sang a song that went, in rough translation, "Fly us off to Lebanon / There we'll fight for Sharon / And come back in a coffin." That war begat Shi'ite power, brought Hezbollah to Lebanon and turned Iran into the most dangerous of Israel's sworn enemies.

The Iranian regime doesn't speak of two states for two peoples or of a construction freeze and removal of outposts. It speaks about wiping Israel off the map. It doesn't even pretend that the nuclear weapons it is developing and its long-range missiles are for self-defense. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may look like a peanut vendor, but that's misleading. He has far more satanic power than meets the eye, and he makes it abundantly clear that his aim is the destruction of Israel. His holocaust will not be "a Zionist fiction."

Quite naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are preparing for the worst. The media is full of items about a preemptive Israeli strike. But Iran isn't Iraq, which built its French reactor almost overtly, making it an easy target for the Israel Air Force in 1981. In Iran, everything is underground, with reinforced concrete roofs and walls 2.5 meters thick, and there are dummy targets as well. It is incumbent upon our intelligence organizations to know what to hit and what special kinds of ordnance are required, ordnance we may not even possess. And it goes without saying that any large-scale operation of ours will bring a hail of missiles with half-ton warheads or more on Israeli cities, and rockets from Hezbollah's stockpiles.