Worrying About A Nuclear Iran: A HistoryMike Rappaport
This article in the New Republic by
The first reports from militaryintelligence about an Iranian nuclear program reached the desk ofYitzhak Rabin shortly after he became prime minister in May 1992.Rabin’s conclusion was unequivocal: Only a nuclear Iran, he told aides,could pose an existential threat to which Israel would have no credibleresponse. But, when he tried to warn the Clinton administration, he metwith incredulity. The CIA’s assessment–which wouldn’t change until1998–was that Iran’s nuclear program was civilian, not military.Israeli security officials felt that the CIA’s judgment was influencedby internal U.S. politics and privately referred to the agency as the “cpia“–“P” for “politicized.”
Well, the CIA appears to have been incompetent and political for a long time. Not surprisingly, the Clinton Administration overlooked the threats that existed.
The second paragraph:
The indifference in Washington helpedpersuade Rabin that Israel needed to begin preparing for an eventualpreemptive strike, so he ordered the purchase of long-range bomberscapable of reaching Iran. And he made a fateful political decision: Hereversed his ambivalence toward negotiating with the PLO and endorsedunofficial talks being conducted between Israeli left-wingers and PLOofficials. Rabin’s justification for this about-face was that Israelneeded to neutralize what he defined as its “inner circle ofthreat”–the enemies along its borders–in order to focus on the comingconfrontation with Iran, the far more dangerous “outer circle ofthreat.”
Wow. Oslo was the result of an attempt to make Israel stronger defensively against Iran. This seems a worse blunder than anything Bush’s critics accuse him of. Leaving the PLO in Tunisia would have been a pretty a good defensive position for Israel.