If one listens to the Bush administration and major pro-Israel groups, it’s hard to escape the impression Iran is the reincarnation of Nazi Germany — but with ballistic missiles and an almost-finished nuclear weapons program.
The Iran danger is real, but in an environment of snowballing anxiety and naked political hype, it’s getting harder to understand its dimensions.
It is harder still to know what to do about it, especially since the one nation capable of confronting it isn’t exactly swimming in credibility on the issue of weapons of mass destruction.
For American Jews, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and the threatening, sometimes demented statements of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have created a sense of foreboding and uncertainty.
Pro-Israel fundraisers have long cited “existential threats” when pitching for funds; but it has been decades since Israel’s survival has really been in jeopardy.
The Palestinians could unleash suicide bombers, but they lack the military capacity to throw Israel into the sea. Neighboring countries were too weak, their leaders too accustomed to having a hated Israel as a distraction for their own suffering people.
Ahmadinejad and Iran are different. The idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of a government committed to Israel’s destruction, with martyrdom-seeking leaders who might be crazy enough to use them, has made the Jewish community worry that Israel could be wiped out.
But wait. What do we know about Iran that is not filtered through myriad political interests, starting with those of an administration in Washington that is trying to use a traditional political weapon to restore its battered public standing: fear?
A terrible legacy
The Bush administration, according to many critics, either lied or gravely misunderstood the threat of Iraq, plunging the nation into a seemingly endless war to stop a WMD program that proved a chimera. What evidence is there that its warnings on Iran are any more accurate?
This is one of the terrible legacies of the Iraq war. Even if the Bush administration is correct in its assessment of Iran, fewer and fewer people in America and around the world are willing to believe it, and few if any countries will join us in serious efforts to meet the threat.
That the administration has cranked its scare campaign on Iraq in the weeks before critical congressional elections, even likening former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to Hitler and Iraq war opponents to appeasers, does not inspire confidence about its ability to make correct choices on Iran.
Won’t that kind of rhetorical overkill simply prove to the world that the administration is exaggerating the Iranian threat, as it did the Iraqi threat?
That doesn’t mean Iran isn’t a menace. Many Israel leaders, on the front lines, share the view that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a grave threat. (Many of them also misjudged the threat of Iraqi WMDs let us remember.)
But Israeli leaders have been more cautious in their warnings about Iran than their American counterparts. Many in Israel are watching Iran’s nuclear program warily, but also fear that the Bush administration is pushing Israel to take the military action that U.S. forces, bogged down in Iraq, may be unable to take.
American pro-Israel groups, while not pressing for the war option, have led the effort to keep Washington focused on Iran and prevent a cave-in to the softer positions of the Europeans. That may be the only responsible option for these groups, given the risk.
But what happens if we do fight a costly and maybe even disastrous war against Iran, and again the threat is found to have been exaggerated? A further weakened and discredited America, Israel’s only real ally, is also a real danger to the Jewish state.
The Iranian situation is further complicated by there being fewer and fewer options for dealing with it.
As U.N. deadlines on Iran come and go, European countries that could find themselves within range of Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles within a decade aren’t inclined to go along with a U.S. administration discredited by the war in Iraq.
Without a broad international coalition, sanctions will be a pinprick at best. Without a credible threat of real sanctions, diplomacy will founder in the face of Teheran’s stalling game.
And if diplomacy and sanctions fade as options, an overextended U.S. military may not be up to the job of knocking out Iran’s hardened and dispersed nuclear program.
Allies in any military action against Iran will be few, perhaps nonexistent. And with Americans turning increasingly sour on the Iraq war by the day, it’s hard to picture strong public support if Bush tells the nation that Iran can be stopped only by military means.
It’s easy to argue the need to get tough with Iran, a lot harder to figure out exactly what that means in a world of highly imperfect options and at a time when America has few allies and little international credibility.
Iran may be every bit the mortal danger the Bush administration, and some Israeli leaders, say it is.
But the issue has become so garbled by leaders eager to use fear of Iran as a blunt political instrument, and so ensnared in the administration’s web of lost credibility, that it’s hard to separate the risk from the hyperbole.
Those same factors have magnified the difficulties of doing anything about it if Iran is, indeed, the menace the Bush administration and many Israelis claim.
Former Madisonian James D. Besser has been Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week and Baltimore Jewish Times since 1987.
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