But if we are to believe what Iran's rulers say about destroying Israel, there will be no deterrence. Iran will strike Israel and Israel will retaliate. There will be a nuclear war.
And as I've written, such retaliation will not be restricted to Iran. If Israel is crippled by a nuclear strike, they will be a tempting target to Arab states that are deterred only by Israel's military might. Israel might very well strike a broad range of targets in a second strike:
I am not comforted by the notion that Israel can deter Iran if we just do nothing about Iran's looming nuclear weapons. Discussions that Israel could lob an awful lot of nukes at Iran and therefore take care of the problem if deterrence fails ignore the fact that there is no way that Israel would restrict its retaliation to Iran if it loses Tel Aviv.
Consider the Israeli strategic situation. Their enemy isn't a particular state but the Arab world collectively plus Iran. If Iran hits Israel with a nuke and that nuke does significant damage to Israel, Israel is wounded and perhaps an inviting target for hostile states like Syria and even barely friendly states like Egypt which has a population that hates the Jewish state notwithstanding little things like peace treaties. Add the Palestinian-majority Jordan and the always hostile Saudis and you might have the makings of a 1948 Round 2 as hostile Arab states try to throttle Israel where they failed sixty years ago.
Heck, Iran under that whackjob Ahmadinejad might consider it a real honor to take a spear for the team if it gets rid of Israel.
This article (via Real Clear Politics) argues the same thing:
It is possible, even likely, that Israel could survive an Iranian nuclear attack physically — but not psychologically. It is doubtful that Israel could carry on as a sane, not to mention democratic, society. This is the great insight of Ahmadinejad.
An Israel assaulted in this way would react, of course. But it might not react in the predictable, proportionate, tit-for-tat fashion that the realists have laid out. What, after all, is the practical value (not to mention the moral justification) for killing a million innocent civilians in Tehran?
There are other ways a brutalized Israel might respond. For example, it could decide to settle accounts with a broader group of enemies. That would mean immiserating Iran and the Arab world by destroying their oil fields. Or, if the Palestinians cheered the mass murder of Israelis in Tel Aviv, as they almost certainly would, the Israeli reaction might be to settle the territorial issue of western Palestine once and for all. And if Hezbollah or Syria attempted to intervene, well, the genie would already be out of the bottle.
In other words, if you want to think realistically about the Middle East in a first-strike environment, you had better be ready to contemplate something more dire than a few flattened neighborhoods in downtown Tehran.
A nuclear first strike by Israel (because they don't think we will hit Iran and they don't think they can do the job with a conventional strike) might be the least bad nuclear war that could happen in the Middle East.
Yes indeed, lovely decade we're having.
