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Israeli national security expert on the Iranian threat.

Israeli Internal Assessments of Iran Belie Threat Rhetoric
by Gareth Porter

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week at the Herzliya conference that Israel could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Iran – that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel.

The internal assessment by the Israeli national security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate.

Since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear weapons.

But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of the Israeli national security officials. In fact, Israelis began in the early 1990s to use the argument that Iran is irrational about Israel and could not be deterred from a nuclear attack if it ever acquired nuclear weapons, according to an account by independent analyst Trita Parsi on Iranian-Israeli strategic relations to be published in March. Meanwhile, the internal Israeli view of Iran, Parsi told IPS in an interview, "is completely different."

Parsi, who interviewed many Israeli national security officials for his book, says, "The Israelis know that Iran is a rational regime, and they have acted on that presumption." His primary evidence of such an Israeli assessment is that the Israelis purchased Dolphin submarines from Germany in 1999 and 2004 that have been reported to be capable of carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

It is generally recognized that the only purpose of such cruise-missile equipped submarines would be to deter an enemy from a surprise attack by having a reliable second-strike capability.

Despite the fact that Israel has long been known to possess at least 100 nuclear weapons, Israeli officials refuse to discuss their own nuclear capability and how it relates to deterring Iran.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a former Pentagon official who visited Israel last November, recalls that Israeli officials uniformly told his group of eight U.S. military analysts they believed Iran was "perfectly willing to launch a first strike against Israel," if it obtained nuclear weapons.

But when they were asked about their own nuclear capabilities in general, and the potentially nuclear-armed submarine fleet in particular, Francona says, the Israelis would not comment.

In fact, Israeli strategic specialists do discuss how to deter Iran among themselves. An article in the online journal of a hard-line think-tank, the Ariel Center for Policy Research, in August 2004 revealed that "one of the options that has been considered should Iran publicly declare itself to have nuclear weapons is for Israel to put an end to what is called its policy of 'nuclear ambiguity' or 'opacity.'"

The author, Shalom Freedman, said that in light of Israel's accumulation of "over 100 nuclear weapons" and its range of delivery systems for them, even if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons within a few years, the "tremendous disproportion between the strength of Israel and an emergent nuclear Iran should serve as a deterrent."

Even after Ahmadinejad's election in mid-2005, a prominent Israeli academic and military expert has insisted that Israel can still deter a nuclear Iran. In two essays published in September and October 2005, Dr. Ephraim Kam, deputy head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former analyst for the Israeli Defense Forces, wrote that Iran had to assume that any nuclear attack on Israel would result in very serious U.S. retaliation.

Therefore, even though he regarded a nuclear Iran as likely to be more aggressive, Kam concluded it is "doubtful whether Iran would actually exercise a nuclear bomb against Israel – or any other country – despite its basic rejection of Israel's existence."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=10435