Making Aggression Respectable

I am asked from time to time what I worry about the most in national security affairs. My current answer—with the criteria for worrying being a significant probability of an event occurring and severely negative consequences for U.S. interests if the event does occur—is an Israeli military strike against Iran. Recent months have seen an acceleration of commentary about the possibility of such a strike, or of the United States conducting such an attack itself. The major new article by Jeffrey Goldberg on the subject in The Atlantic provides insight into why an Israeli attack on Iran within the next year or so has a disturbingly large chance of occurring. I leave aside the issue of what may be Goldberg’s own agenda, which others have addressed. The article, based on interviews with a wide assortment of Israeli officials, portrays the outlook that could lead to such a step. Goldberg discusses the relevant influences on Prime Minister Netanyahu (including the influence of his unyielding 100-year-old father) but the state of mind he describes runs across much of the Israeli political spectrum. It is a state of mind—one that is more a matter of the amygdala and emotion than of the cortex and thought—that sees the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon as a fight-at-all-costs threat to the existence of Israel.