So Iran will attack Israel regardless of whether Israel actually attacks them. The saying is, if you see all your problems as nails you'll always use a hammer. Iran's mullahs have their own version: when all of your problems are Jews, hitting the Jews is never a bad idea. So check this out:
"We have announced that whenever America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," the Iranian Student News Agency quoted Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani as saying.So my quesiton is why do the mullahs want to widen a conflict right off the bat?
Now I know that Arab governments don't like it that Israel has nukes, but will they really stand aside and let Iran go nuclear just because Israel still has nukes? Will having two countries that don't get along with Arab states be better than one? When Arabs and Iranians still argue over the name of the Gulf between them? Hey, if Iran gets nukes you can forget about the cartography debates. It will be the Persian Gulf for a long time.
The Iranian statement that they will hit Israel seems to indicate that the mullahs know that they will have even less success at gaining Arab support when under attack by the West than Sunni Arab Iraq got when under attack by the West in 2003.
But the Iranians are delusional in thinking that bringing Israel in will rally Moslems to their side. Consider that Sunni-run Arab Iraq didn't get any support from the Sunni Arab world in 1991 even after lobbing missiles Israel's way. Heck, not even Iran was roused by Islamic solidarity to support Iraq in 1991. Iran kept the Iraqi planes that fled to Iran and scooped up the bits of Iranian land that Iraq still held when the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988.
Now, one Pasdaran commander may not speak for all the nutballs (though they undoubtedly think this way about Israel), but the threat seems to indicate that Iran's mullahs are not terribly confident of their ability to rally Moslem support in the Sunni Arab world if we strike Iran over the nuclear issue.
Heck, even though some critics of action say the Iranians want us to attack to shore up their intenral support, the mullahs may not even be sure that they can get support in their own country unless they make it a Jewish issue. I wonder what the mullah polling is telling them?
