Thursday, December 29, 2005

Is There an Israeli Consensus on Iran?

Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner has a post entitled "Preemting WMD's".
It starts off like this:
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein reports a political consensus in Israel in favor of an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Bernstein makes a strong case that an Israeli attack is likely.
That's all well and good--but apparently The Volokh Conspiracy has been done for most of the day.

I'd like to know more about this 'political concensus'.
I'd like to know how Israelis feel about this.
I'd like to know more about the case Bernstein makes for Israel attacking Iraq.

Does anyone have any interesting links to share on any of this?

UPDATE: Volokh is back up, and the complete post by David Bernstein that I was looking for is back. He writes in part:

...My contribution is that I just returned from Israel, and I found a remarkable consensus in favor of doing whatever is necessary to stop Iran (a consensus no doubt solidified by Iranian threats to annihilate Israel, and recent vicious anti-Semitism emanating from the highest rank of the Iranian government). One leftist member of my wife's family told me that the IDF will do whatever is necessary. When I expressed concern that Iran will retaliate through Hizbullah, he replied that the Lebanese government will stop any large-scale retaliation, or the ramifications will be disastrous in and for Beirut...Given that the anti-Iranian consensus is so solid even on the Left, I would be very surprised if the Israeli government fails to follow through on its promise to prevent Iran from acquiring atomic weapons--assuming, of course, that Iran isn't stopped by other international forces.
In a subsequent post, David Bernstein adds:
There's been a lot of reaction in the blogosphere, most of it supporting Israel's right to preemptively defend itself, but wondering whether Israel has the capacity to send enough long-range bombers to wipe out enough secret enrichment locations against a prepared enemy to truly put a dent in Iran's program. I wonder about this, too, which also makes me wonder if Israel will do something less predictable, but perhaps ultimately more effective, than what everyone has been talking about. I don't know what this might be, but neither do the Iranians.
There may be alot of confidence in the IDF, but Entebbe was long ago.

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