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COMMENTARY
March 10, 2012
Iran won't go away
History does not repeat itself, exactly. Instead, like literature, it offers a string bag of standard characters, and narrative elements, that can be mixed together to produce a seemingly infinite variety of stories. My emphasis is on "seemingly."For our next world conflagration, we have all the usual elements. People express frustration at writers who keep mentioning the lessons of the last world war, and reduce everything to "Chamberlain versus Churchill." Needless to say, only the Churchill fans do this. But those two were themselves only standard political characters: the "appeaser" and the "confrontationist." They correspond to the two standard foreign policy positions. Think of it as a puppet show, with audience participation. You want war, vote for the appeaser. You want peace, vote for the confrontationist. Benjamin Netanyahu - surely a standard character - passed through our continent this last week, sounding the ancient note of the sacrificial goat, preparatory to sacrifice. He has been trying to win support from the English-speaking far west of the western world - the people best acquainted with the Chamberlain/Churchill narrative. He delivered a powerful Churchillian speech to the friendly American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. He tried to sound prophetic. Prophets are, according to a well-established storyline, without honour in their own countries, and just as Churchill was written off as a nutjob in Depression-era England, Netanyahu has seriously alarmed detractors back home in Israel. Read Ha'aretz (the New York Times of Tel Aviv) to get some taste of how atheism flourishes in the foxholes, and liberalism at the very front line. Netanyahu is actually more popular in the U.S. and Canada; and we probably underestimate the limitations upon his action within the Israeli military, cabinet, and Knesset. Indeed, he cultivates popularity here, to enhance his standing there. On returning home Thursday, he told Israeli TV, "I am not standing with a stopwatch in hand. It is not a matter of days or weeks, but also not a matter of years." Israel is waiting, to see if economic penalties that hurt Iran's people, will also stop its nuclear weapons program. (Of course they won't.) This nuclear weapons program, with missile delivery systems and all other requisites, is plain as day. You do not excavate the middle of a mountain to produce medical isotopes. The skeptics' reminder of intelligence failures in Iraq are irrelevant to this case, where there can be no dispute over the facts from which we are inferring. That U.S. President Barack Obama is by nature an "appeaser," and thus the Chamberlain figure in our unfolding puppet play, might go without saying. He has backed off every challenge to U.S. and western interests in the Middle East, and elsewhere. But it would be unfair to suggest that he does not realize Iran's nuclear ambition, and Israel's existentially self-defensive response to it, could ignite a conflagration into which the U.S. would be dragged. It would be fairer to suggest, that when he says that he "has Israel's back," he is being about as sincere as when he said "marriage is between a man and a woman" during the 2008 election campaign. We know what Obama really thinks of Netanyahu; it was captured by the microphones while he was chatting with Nicolas Sarkozy in France. We know what Chamberlain really thought of Churchill, thanks to cabinet minutes disclosed to history. In both cases, something along the lines of, "knuckle-dragging warmongering idiot." In the end, it doesn't matter: Chamberlains get replaced by Churchills, not Lord Halifaxes. Chamberlain knew perfectly well that Europe was sliding into war; that Britain could not hope to stay out of it. And in his defence, he was buying time for the rearmament of Britain, when he cynically affixed his signature at Munich. And Obama knows, if less perfectly than Chamberlain, that he has a problem negotiations can't solve, only delay (at terrible cost over the longer term). But he is, nevertheless, trying to delay the fireworks until after his own November reelection. So I don't think the comparison to Chamberlain is quite fair. The British prime minister was consciously playing for higher stakes than his own political survival. For the revolutionary government of Iran, nuclear weapons are also a survival issue. The ayatollahs will no more desist from seeking nuclear weapons, than agree to retire after free and fair elections. It is not their country, but their regime they are preserving. For Israel, the question isn't the survival of Netanyahu's government, but of Israel and her people. That is what puts Netanyahu's position, both at home and abroad, beyond conventional politics. He knows opinion polls have nothing to do with the hard reality; that Iran does not relent if his government falls. Action appears unavoidable, from this last, Israeli view. But not in days or weeks, nor in years. I think we can translate Netanyahu's reply to inquiring Israeli media into the inevitable answer. "Months." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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