Who wants a war with Iran? Not the Israeli people, according to a poll done late in February by Israel’s Dahaf Institute. Only 19 percent of Israelis surveyed said they would support an attack against Iran without the backing of the United States. Even with U.S. support, less than half—42 percent—favored a strike against Iran, while 32 percent were against it.
And only 22 percent of Israelis thought such an attack would put off Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon by more than five years.
In America, a mid-February poll by the Pew Research Center showed that those responding were very concerned about the possibility that Iran might develop nuclear weapons; 58 percent said that that should be prevented, even if preventing it took military force. Yet 51 percent—65 percent of those aged 18 to 29—said the U.S. should remain neutral if Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. Thirty percent said the use of force should be avoided, even if that meant letting Iran develop nuclear weapons.
What’s meant by “military force”? When Israelis were asked how long they thought it would take to disable an Iranian nuclear weapons program (which both American and Israeli defense experts agree does not exist yet), only 18 percent said it could be destroyed within a matter of days. The idea of a military “surgical strike,” in other words, has no credence with Israelis in this case, while with Americans it may have. About 51 percent of Israelis thought a war with Iran would last months or years.
Among the alarming things about the public discourse on Iran in the U.S. is the stereotyped nature of it. The name of the country George Bush called part of an “axis of evil” has become a scare word with surprisingly little examination. Never mentioned are the horrors perpetrated by the minions of the shah the U.S. supported; the anger about that overflowed in the hostagetaking of 1979, which is always spoken of here as if it were simply unprovoked. Never mentioned is the fact that Iran as a society is quite different than the Taliban-dominated enclaves of Afghanistan; Iran has, for example, many educated women. Never mentioned is the fact that Iran has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, or that a Jew occupies a seat in Iran’s parliament, where one seat has been reserved for a Jew since 1906.
Never mentioned is the fact that Iran has energy needs; though it has vast oil resources, its refining capacity is not well developed and it cannot well afford to buy all the refined oil it would need to satisfy its growing demand. Of course asserted needs for energy may mask a hidden agenda, but Iran’s realities are never discussed in sufficient detail for the public to make a judgment about how likely or unlikely that is.
Iran says it needs nuclear power for domestic use, but according to the conventions of Bush-era and post-Bush-era public debate, nothing Iran says is ever to be believed—even though the failed “search” for WMD in Iraq, which caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, should have taught us that the administration that coined the phrase “axis of evil” was not always to be believed.
Meir Dagan, former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, said this week he sticks by a statement he made last year that the idea of attacking Iran is “the stupidest thing I ever heard. “
And if—as 90 percent of Israelis polled last month believe will happen someday—Iran did develop a nuclear warhead, would Iran be likely to attack Israel with it? Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East from 2000 to 2005, now teaches security studies at Georgetown University. Here is his assessment:
“If Iran acquired the bomb, Israel would retain overwhelming military superiority, with its own nuclear weapons—which international think tanks estimate to number at least 100 and possibly 200—conventional forces, and delivery systems that would continue to outclass by far anything Iran will have. That is part of the reason why an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be an existential threat to Israel and would not give Iran a license to become more of a regional troublemaker. But a war with Iran, begun by either Israel or the United States, would push Israel farther into the hole of perpetual conflict and regional isolation. Self-declared American friends of Israel are doing it no favor by talking up such a war.”
