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The Case for Humility

(Foreign Policy) David Makovsky - It's time for the U.S. and Israel to dial down the rhetoric on Iran. For Israel, public confrontation with the U.S. does not make any strategic sense. But we in the U.S. could also use some humility. First, let's admit that our track record in halting rogue nuclear programs is rather poor. We may have bought off Libya, but we did not stop the nuclear programs of North Korea and Pakistan. As has been said by the former deputy head of the Israel Atomic Energy Agency, Ariel Levite, the U.S. approach has been "too early, too early, oops, too late." We need to admit that there are legitimate questions whether the U.S. will be able to detect with confidence Iran's dash to weaponization. In his UN remarks, Netanyahu alluded to Iran's ability to reach a level of enrichment by next summer that would put it in easy reach of weapons-grade nuclear fuel in as little as one to two months. If the Islamic Republic takes that step, will Washington discover it quickly enough to do something about it? The fact is, by sometime after the summer of 2013, we simply may not know what Iran is capable of. Finally, it is worth stating the obvious: Israel is threatened by the Iranian leadership with "full annihilation," in the words of armed forces chief of staff Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, and is routinely called a cancerous tumor that needs to be removed. As such, it perceives its margin of error as narrower than a superpower with global interests resting safely an ocean away. The writer is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
2012-10-03 00:00:00
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