What else could Israel do?

Spectator

9 hours ago

Over the past few days British readers have been able to enjoy a number of hot takes on the situation in the Middle East. First, there have been all the politicians, such as the Scottish First Minister John Swinney, who have called for our government to step in and 'de-escalate' the conflict between Israel and Iran. But even leaving aside whether the mullahs in Tehran can be swayed by Britain or Scotland, 'de-escalation' is the only surefire way to ensure that they continue to pursue a nuclear capability.
Elsewhere, the BBC has been playing a blinder. When the conflict began, it decided that its audience would be well served by having the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall give his thoughts on the matter. At the weekend HFW (as he's known in the Middle East) treated BBC1 viewers to his opinion, too, that 'de-escalation' is the priority and that, to this end, the British government must stop selling arms to Israel. Meanwhile, one of the BBC's own correspondents highlighted the worries of 'those who argue that Israel is violating international law by launching an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation'.
I'm not sure what the definition of 'provoked' might be if it doesn't include the Revolutionary Islamic government using the terrorist groups it backs in a seven-front war on you for the past couple of years. Perhaps BBC staff would regard themselves as having been somewhat 'provoked' if they'd been attacked by Hamas, then by Hezbollah, then by the Houthis, then by the Iranian government and so on and so on.
Perhaps, then, it's worth going back to first principles. The stated view of the British, American and all European governments is that Iran should never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. The stated view of the International Atomic Energy Agency is that Iran has been enriching uranium to levels required only to develop them. At Fordow and elsewhere, the Iranians have spent decades building facilities deep underground in order to avoid those facilities being bombed from the air. Which is definitely the sort of thing that a government would do if it was not lying and had nothing to hide.
During this same period the regime has continued to state its ambition of wiping Israel off the map, calling for the destruction of the 'little Satan' (Israel) and then the 'great Satan' (America). It's unclear if the Iranian government has come up with a 'Satan' category into which Swinney's fiefdom might fall. But I think that we can safely conclude from all Tehran's statements that they consider Britain as a whole very much on the 'Satan' side of the ledger. Indeed, if you want to read accounts of how the UK actually runs the world and is the malevolently scheming power behind the USA and everyone else, you need look no further than Iranian state media.
As a side note, it might also be observed that the regime has been sending hit squads to take out opponents in Britain and America. As well as operating in cells within the UK, Iranian agents have been found trying to kill critics in Brooklyn; President Donald Trump's former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and his former national security adviser, John Bolton.
The Iranians have proved masters at outwitting the international community, and since Israel is their stated first target it was inevitable that the Israeli government could not be as sanguine as, say, the Scottish one over the question of exactly when Iran would develop the levels of enrichment necessary for a deliverable nuke.
Anybody who really wants peace should have spent recent years working harder to stop the Iranian regime in its tracks. But in the final analysis what were all these other governments ever going to do about Iran's race to the bomb? The Iranians long ago worked out that they could play for time, not least because they work within a different chronological framework from the rest of us. If you believe that history is to be judged by when the hidden Imam reappears and heralds the end times, you might easily take the view that western governments come and go. As indeed they do. So all the ayatollahs ever needed was to deceive, develop and wait.
If Israeli pilots had not bombed the Iranian nuclear project, who else might have done it? The RAF? The French? The Germans? After all these years and all these talks, the only country that ended up taking action was the one with the most skin in the game: the one that the Ayatollah Khamenei and his predecessors have always said they want to annihilate.
The world's sole Jewish state takes the threat of its annihilation seriously. Among the few things that can unite the Israeli left, right and centre is the conviction that life in their country will be made impossible – if not ended immediately – once Iran has the bomb. So they acted.
In these circumstances, I'm not sure what calls for 'de-escalation' actually mean, other than being a way for irrelevant people to try to prove their relevance. But anyone interested in peace in the Middle East – and the wider world – would do well to wish for something rather different: a swift and intense escalation to finish off the Iranian nuclear project once and for all. That way, a roomful of the country's negotiators won't be able to continue running rings round whichever second-rate muppets govern western countries in the years to come.
There's a low-resolution viewpoint in the West that everyone in the world has the luxury of living as we do. But not all people have the good fortune to be in Fife or Inverness. And of course, at times in our own past we didn't enjoy the luxuries of peace either. Perhaps we could recall those times and remember that at our own moments of greatest peril, nothing short of total victory was desirable for us. And nothing short of total victory should be desirable for our allies either.