Acting the Duck: Netanyahu and Attacking Iran

Doom, gloom and imminent demise – this is the language of Israel’s latest posturing on Iran. With such belligerent talk, the Israelis are qualifying for the tag of ‘threat to international security’ that entitles the UN Security Council to get excited and tuck in. But adolescent hysteria is typical for a state that is living on a permanent knife-edge – the feeling that their candy is about to be nicked. At the very least, they can nick the candy from others.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s cranky remarks of late verge not merely on the absurd but the comedic. Before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he felt at home, allowing his limited imagination to roam. ‘If it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, then what is it?’ The answer, in merciful absurdity, follows: ‘It’s a duck. But this duck is a nuclear duck.’ Few could believe this described bird was Iran, but that state has become a feature of Netanyahu’s game mania of late.

He is the jester with nuclear arms, the man with an allergy against peace. He is Iran’s mirror clown, Israel’s own asylum escapee, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Knesset, a wailer who uses patriotism as a crutch and the pretext to assault another nation’s sovereignty as a justification for its existence. In such a state, one is bound to find enemies everywhere. Even relations with ‘friends’ are testy, as the latest visit to the United States by the Israeli leader has shown.

In his private discussions with Obama, Netanyahu is said to have disclosed that Israel is deliberating over the possibility of a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, and refuses to abandon the option. This is the worst secret in foreign relations - probabilities of a strike increase by the week.

What is surely disturbing about this is the advertisement feature to the proceedings. No one will be surprised. It has a certain Operation Barbarossa feel to it, the promise of lethal woe – if one regards Generalissimo Stalin as being the only one in the Soviet Union who refused to believe that Hitler would attack in June, 1941. In this sense, as Patrick Cockburn explains in CounterPunch (Mar 5), the element of surprise is lacking, in a way that it has not in previous conflicts in the Middle East.

Well and good for Israel to be the ‘master of its fate’ as Netanyahu terms it, but what about the fate of others? The projecting lunacy coming out of the current government is something that can only be managed, the anger of a selfish dangerous child who is intent on being permanently immature in the making of its foreign policy. Obama’s response is seemingly tepid. ‘We do believe there is still a window that allows for a diplomatic resolution to this issue.’ But that is Obama rehearsing a role the he knows he can’t play: holding back Israel from what is rapidly becoming the inevitable, absurd because the inevitability of it is entirely voluntary.

Instead, Obama has decided to take steps that appear, dangerously, to redefine ‘aggression’. As Tom Engelhardt has claimed in his meaty observations at TomDispatch.com, the doctrine being offered is that the United States will offer to strike a nation to prevent it from acquiring a weapon. This has nothing at all to do with whether this state would, in fact, strike the United States, or threaten it, or even have the capability of doing so. ‘I don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean that what we say.’ Charming.

Chaos is bound to ensue from any Israeli stomping, though what calamitous form it takes is impossible to know. Should an Israeli strike take place, it may go through Iraq’s busy airspace, crammed with American aircraft. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic writes (Sept 2010), ‘It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace.’ The answer: do not shoot them down. Then, a split between Jerusalem and Washington; a series of lethal conflicts through the middle east that will embroil the United States and its allies, the expected entrenchment of extremists on all sides.

The cycle of violence is also set to be permanent – everything in terms of striking Iran is not based on the a peaceful resolution but a tactic, a delay, a crippling blow to simply stave off what will eventually happen – unless Iran is obliterated. What will such a strike buy? Three years, maybe five. Iran will go nuclear. And that is that.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

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