Quote:
Originally Posted by kingorpawn
 
Well, I'm sure Israel has no intention of finding out if that statement is true or not or
taking your word for it. They'll just have to make sure themselves Iran doesn't have that capability. |
The costs of making sure that Iran doesn't have that capability far outweigh the risks of permitting them to proceed.
The Israelis, UK and US are using low cost covert methods to set back the Iranian program, but starting another regional war isn't in the cards.
The Israelis have very good intelligence on Iranian motives.
Israeli intelligence has been doing business with the Iranian government since 1980, and devotes a lot of attention to Iranian internal politics.
They are well aware that the Iranians have no plans to attack them and no interest in doing so.
The Israelis will conduct low cost operations to slow down the Iranian program just as they performed similar operations against the Iraqi nuclear program as well as the Iraqi "supergun" which could have boosted ballistic missiles at Israel in the 1980s. In that case the gun's manufacturer, Gerald Bull, was assassinated by Israeli agents ouside his house in Brussels.
Iraq and the Baath party [not Iran] have always been the preoccupation of Israel since the Camp David Accords took Egypt and Jordan out of the threat equation.
Unlike the Iranians[ who the Israelis have done business with for decades] the Iraqis were implacably opposed to the existence of Israel and could have turned on Israel at any moment were they not bogged down in other conflicts.
Maintaining these other conflicts was always a priorty of the Israelis. In particular they helped the Iranians in their war against Iraq in the 1980s, and then performed all manner of operations to goad Saddam Hussein into various miscalculations and wars, such as the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They also promoted the split between Syria and Iraq as an Iraqi-Syrian alliance would have been fatal for Israel.
The Israelis finally succeeded in eliminating the Baath threat altogether when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.
With the elimination of the Iraqi threat however has come the new threat from the Arab Spring. New, populist governments in Egypt and elsewhere may pose dramatically new threats to Israel in the future.
Israel is constantly working against threats, and when one declines others emerge. However the Israeli nuclear arsenal is the ultimate card preventing any direct military attack. Should another regional power like Iran gain a nuclear arsenal not only will the Israeli nuclear monoploy be lost, but a nuclear war might come about through miscalculation or accident. It is the nuclear stability granted by Israel's monopoly which explains why the UK and the US are working against the Iranian program, not any particular attachment to Israel. The US has no alliance with Israel.
