The Hawks are Sometimes Stupid

The Times Online reported that Pres. Bush has given yet more good vibrations to the idea of air strikes on Iran, if Iran is seen as an imminent threat to Israel. The article included this little snippet:

Iran’s state-run media reported that one of them was a modified Shahab-3 ballistic missile, which has a claimed range of 1,250 miles and could theoretically deliver a one-ton nuclear warhead over Israeli cities.

If they had any nuclear warheads! Does anyone even remember the fact that they almost certainly do not?!? Certainly not the author of the Times Online article.

As a kid, I readily swallowed the Israel-must-be-protected-at-all-costs line my Republican culture fed me. But now… Here are some points that speak very loudly in my head:

• Iran, as far as everyfreakingbody knows (including the American intelligence community) … repeat after me … HAS NO NUKES! Also, it is believed that they stopped even trying to get them, a few years ago.
• ISRAEL HAS LOTS OF NUKES!
• Our last involvement in a preemptive war is now generally seen as a large mistake.
• This would be not even be a classic a preemptive war, but something one step worse: a preemptive war on behalf of somebody who is not us. Since when do we care about attacking countries suspected of posing a threat to someone else?
• Also not helpful, though not directly related: recent revelations that Israel has active spies in the U.S., sending state security secrets back to Mossad or whoever. What the Heck, So-Called Allies?
• Also also not helpful, and slightly more related: Israel uses some very questionable tactics in its dealings with suspected terrorists and other threats to its security. When North Korea does similar things, our President wastes no time calling them evil. There’s just a teensy bit of a double standard here.

I’m currently sensitive to the view that Israel has followed a somewhat bellicose foreign policy for many years, apparently confident that Big Brother America would bail it out of any serious problems it might get itself into. I think we need to temper our support. Israel can take care of itself, and even if it couldn’t — this is key — we have no responsibility to fight its battles. Like pretty much everybody else on the planet, Israel might even benefit from having some motivation to pursue diplomatic channels before resorting to saber-rattling and unilateral shows of force. But that’s another issue; it’s really Israel’s business.

Let me reiterate that phrase. It’s their business. Not ours. Keep us out of it. Yes, they’re an underdog in some ways, but it’s also true that they could obliterate Iran at the push of a button. We are an overextended empire, slogging through at least one too many foreign military commitments. We need to just chill out with the preemptive military strikes and related rhetoric. Especially on behalf of a whole other nation, whose intentions toward us are not so certain as we used to think.

Let Israel fix its own problems, at least until someone actually attacks them. We’ve got problems of our own, and they’re going to take a long time and a lot of money to fix.