The maxim that wars are easy to start and hard to end does not appear to be troubling Benjamin Netanyahu. For the Israeli prime minister, conflict is an end as much as a means, extending his political survival. Under international pressure – however belated and insufficient – over the slaughter in Gaza, he launched the attack on Iran. Initially presented as essential to prevent Tehran from the imminent acquisition of a nuclear bomb, a claim running counter to US intelligence, it is increasingly discussed as the path to bringing down the regime. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has said that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “can no longer be allowed to exist”.
Donald Trump has generally seen armed conflict as a trap rather than an escape route. He said that the US would “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into”. Yet his failure to achieve the Nobel-worthy peace deals he wants, and Mr Netanyahu’s manoeuvring, appear to have made him keener on US intervention.
Israel wants US bunker-busters to attack the underground nuclear facility at Fordow. There is no guarantee that those would succeed. Israel’s regime-ending aspirations further undermine its claim to offer what might be called, in the term infamously used of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a cakewalk. There isn’t a bad plan for the day after; there is no plan.
What Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu have in common is that they consistently subsume their nations’ best interests to their personal political imperatives,
and that neither cares about 90 million Iranians. The brutal theocratic regime is repugnant to many, but hundreds of civilians have already died as Israel offers to bomb them to freedom, and the horrors of Gaza suggest that far worse could come. Many Iranians lived through the unforeseen and unwanted consequences of toppling a hated ruler in 1979, and more watched those spawned by the US invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, Israeli civilians now face Iranian retaliation.
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