Iran dares Israel to attack, because the retaliation would send the Jewish state to "the dustbin of history," a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said, according to the Fars news agency Monday.
"Our greatest wish is that they commit such a mistake," the chief of the Guards' aerospatial division, Amir-Ali Hadjizadeh, was quoted as saying.
"For some time there has been a hidden energy we hope to expend to consign the enemies of Islam forever to the dustbin of history," he said.
"Our ballistic (missile) capacity never ceases to grow," he added.
This is the problem of focusing on the weapons program and not the regime. Even a successful strike just leaves the nutballs in place to rebuild and plot attacks (not "revenge" since the intent to destroy Israel wouldn't be created by a strike on Iran's nuclear programs). While it would be better to have a nutball regime without nukes rather than a nutball regime with nukes, it is better still to have no nutball regime.
So while I think Israel would strike, even though they can't do as good a job as we could, they have to know they are buying time.
On the surface, it might seem like a grim necessity to use their own nuclear arsenal to destroy Iran before they can destroy Israel. But it is a bad idea. Really bad. Israel doesn't have the nukes to destroy Iran. So Iran could be crippled but not destroyed. Eventually they'd be back and everyone would want to vaporize Israel. I may have strong doubts that an Israeli conventional attack would rally Iranians around the flag for long, but I do think that nuking Iran will rally the survivors around the flag.
Plus, Israel would turn the entire Moslem world against them. Sunni Arabs may not like Shias or Persians, but having Jews nuke even that kind of Moslem will get them all to rally around the green flag. Then Israel has to worry about any Moslem state getting and using a nuke on them. They might not have to wait long. Remember that Pakistan already has them. They might spare one through their many terrorist support channels.
And I don't think America could long support Israel if it uses nukes first. Israel would guarantee that their survival depends purely on nuclear weapons used fairly regularly to gut their seething enemies just waiting to get just one nuke in place to raze Tel Aviv. Emigration of Jews would then gut Israel over time as surely as a crater at Tel Aviv would.
So the focus has to be on the regime itself in Tehran. And if Israel strikes Iran's nuclear programs, it will be game on and a battle to the death--either the mullah regime is destroyed or Israel is destroyed. Iran's Revolutionary Guards have made it clear that it is game on.
This doesn't mean that Iran necessarily launches a spasm of attacks against everyone in reach in response to an Israeli attack. That just guarantees others must join with the Israelis, doesn't it? Iran has managed in the past to mute responses to attacks (I'm thinking of the Tanker War where Iran for quite a long time sucked up our intervention and mostly focused on Iraq). So this isn't mirror imaging them. They certainly might lash out--they've done that in the past, too, to bad results (I'm thinking of their attacks on our ships, also during the Tanker War, which led us to smash up their navy a bit). But Iran might be smart and just get to work on hitting Israel the first chance they get, however long it takes.
Iran welcomes an attack on the symptom of their regime. Our focus should be on the Iranian regime, and any attack on their nuclear infrastructure should be phase one of a full court press on the regime itself. The extended open hand is so 2009, isn't it?
