Michael B. Oren is the author of the definitive history of the modern Middle East: Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, and of the just-published Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present [which is on my reading list].
Oren, together with Shalem Center compatriot Yossi Klein Halevi, has authored the best analysis I’ve seen on Israel and Iran titled Israel’s worst nightmare. At 4,000 words this is not a short op-ed, but rather a draft chapter for the next history of the Middle East. I think this is about as close to the truth as you are likely to come - unless you work for the Mossad:
The first reports from military intelligence about an Iranian nuclear program reached the desk of Yitzhak Rabin shortly after he became prime minister in May 1992. Rabin’s conclusion was unequivocal: Only a nuclear Iran, he told aides, could pose an existential threat to which Israel would have no credible response. But, when he tried to warn the Clinton administration, he met with incredulity. The CIA’s assessment — which wouldn’t change until 1998 — was that Iran’s nuclear program was civilian, not military. Israeli security officials felt that the CIA’s judgment was influenced by internal U.S. politics and privately referred to the agency as the “CPIA” — “P” for “politicized.”
The indifference in Washington helped persuade Rabin that Israel needed to begin preparing for an eventual preemptive strike, so he ordered the purchase of long-range bombers capable of reaching Iran. And he made a fateful political decision: He reversed his ambivalence toward negotiating with the PLO and endorsed unofficial talks being conducted between Israeli left-wingers and PLO officials. Rabin’s justification for this about-face was that Israel needed to neutralize what he defined as its “inner circle of threat” — the enemies along its borders — in order to focus on the coming confrontation with Iran, the far more dangerous “outer circle of threat.” Rabin’s strategy, then, was the exact opposite of the approach recently recommended by the Iraq Study Group: Where James Baker and Lee Hamilton want to engage Iran — even at the cost of downplaying its nuclear ambitions — in order to solve crises in the Arab world, Rabin wanted to make peace with the Arab world in order to prevent, at all costs, a nuclear Iran.
Now, more than a decade later, the worst-case scenario envisioned by Rabin is rapidly approaching. According to Israeli intelligence, Iran will be able to produce a nuclear bomb as soon as 2009. In Washington, fear is growing that either Israel or the Bush administration plans to order strikes against Iran. In Israel, however, there is fear of a different kind. Israelis worry not that the West will act rashly, but that it will fail to act at all. And, while strategists here differ over the relative efficacy of sanctions or a military strike, nearly everyone agrees on this point: Israel cannot live with a nuclear Iran.
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