In 1938, Edith Muhlbauer, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, wrote to Muriel Roberts, Edith’s pen pal and the future prime minister’s older sister, asking if the Roberts family might help her escape Hitler’s Austria. The Nazis had begun rounding up the first of Vienna’s Jews after the Anschluss, and Edith and her family worried she might be next. Alfred Roberts, Margaret and Muriel’s father, was a small-town grocer; the family had neither the time nor the money to take Edith in. So Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and persuading the local Rotary club to help.

Edith stayed with more than a dozen Rotary families, including the Robertses, for the next two years, until she could move to join relatives in South America. Edith bunked in Margaret’s room, and she left an impression. “She was 17, tall, beautiful, evidently from a well-to-do family,” Thatcher later wrote in her memoir. But most important, “[s]he told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.” For Thatcher, who believed in meaningful work, this was as much a waste as it was an outrage. Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith recalled years later, “I would have stayed in Vienna and they would have killed me.” Thatcher never forgot the lesson: “Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life,” she told audiences in 1995 after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.

Other British politicians and their families housed Jews during the war, but none seems to have been profoundly affected by it as Thatcher was. Harold Macmillan, a Thatcher foe and England’s prime minister from 1957 to 1963, provided a home for Jewish refugees on his estate, but his relations with Jews were always frosty, the mark of a genuflecting anti-Semitism common among the Tory grandees.

During the controversial Versailles peace talks that ended World War I, Macmillan wrote to a friend that the government of Prime Minister Lloyd George was not “really popular, except with the International Jew,” the mythic entity thought to be behind all of Europe’s troubles and made famous by Henry Ford’s eponymously titled book. Macmillan often made snide jokes about Jews and Jewish politicians, derisively calling Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Liberal member of Parliament and a critic of appeasement in the years before World War II, “Horeb Elisha,” a jabbing reference to Mount Horeb, where the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses. Viscount Cranborne, a Tory member of Parliament and a Foreign Office official in the 1930s, undermined attempts to ease the entry of Jews into Britain or Palestine, shutting out those other would-be Ediths from finding safety under the British Union Jack. And together, Cranborne and Macmillan were among the Tory parliamentarians who forced Hore-Belish out of the government in the early 1940s for allegedly conspiring to force Britain into a war on behalf of the Jews on the mainland.

Thatcher, by contrast, had no patience for anti-Semitism or for those who countenanced it. “I simply did not understand anti-semitism myself,” Thatcher confessed in her memoirs. Indeed, she found “some of [her] closest political friends and associates among Jews.” Unique among British politicians, she was unusually free of even “the faintest trace of anti-Semitism in her make-up,” wrote Nigel Lawson, her chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1992. Lawson knew of what he spoke. Alan Clark, a senior Tory politician, wrote in his diaries that some of the old guard, himself included, thought Lawson could not, “as a Jew,” be offered the position of foreign secretary. Lawson’s “Jewish parentage was disqualification enough,” the Sunday Telegraph wrote in 1988, without a hint of shame. Rumors and speculation persisted well into the 1990s about why this or that Jewish member of Parliament couldn’t be made leader of the Conservative Party.

Early on in her career—even before she entered politics—Thatcher had worked alongside Jews as a chemist at J. Lyons and Co., a Jewish-owned company. (She had graduated from Oxford in 1947 with a degree in chemistry.) After quitting chemistry, she became a barrister and grew increasingly involved in politics. She ran for office in some of the more conservative districts and lost each time. Thatcher finally won when she ran in Finchley, a safe Tory seat in a north London borough. Finally she had found her constituents: middle-class, entrepreneurial, Jewish suburbanites. She particularly loved the way her new constituents took care of one another, rather than looking to the state: “In the thirty-three years that I represented [Finchley],” she later wrote, “I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my [town meetings],” and she often wished that Christians “would take closer note of the Jewish emphasis on self-help and acceptance of personal responsibility.” She was a founding member of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley and a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Aghast that a golf club in her district consistently barred Jews from becoming members, she publicly protested against it. She even joined in the singing of the Israeli national anthem in 1975 at Finchley.

The Jews of Finchley were “her people,” Thatcher used to say—certainly much more so than the wealthy land barons that dominated her party.

***

When Thatcher became leader of the opposition in 1975, it was suggested that her closeness with British Jews might imperil the country’s foreign policy. Official correspondence released in 2005 shows the unease with which bureaucrats at the Foreign Office treated Thatcher’s affiliations in the run-up to her election as prime minister in 1979. Michael Tait, an official at the British embassy in Jordan, worried that Thatcher might be too readily seen as a “prisoner of the Zionists” unless she severed her official ties with pro-Jewish groups. Tait even suggested that Thatcher give up her beloved Finchley constituency for Westminster, a less Jewish district, and distance herself from the “pro-Israel MPs” that might make Middle East peace impossible. In the end, Thatcher reluctantly agreed to quit the Jewish groups she belonged to, but she kept her district and her relationships with pro-Israel parliamentarians.

Continue reading: Making British politics a meritocracy

Things have changed since then. For starters, we learned in 2009 that Iran has a second uranium-enrichment facility buried deep in a mountain just north of Qom. Indeed, an International Atomic Energy Agency report released this month indicates that Iran’s nuclear program continues to make steady progress. That report has only intensified talk of a possible Israeli strike. The question is whether such a strike still has a good chance of succeeding. I believe it does.

First, a brief review of where things stood four years ago.

While the Israeli Air Force lacked the capability to target all Iranian nuclear facilities, it could, we believed, attack the most critical subset: the uranium-conversion facility at Esfahan, the fuel-enrichment plant at Natanz, and the heavy-water production plant and heavy-water reactor under construction at Arak. (We did not include the light-water reactor at Bushehr in our calculations as it is not a major proliferation threat and because, unlike some of the other facilities, it is near the Persian Gulf coast and thus it can be targeted by Israeli submarine assets.) Of those three critical targets, only the Natanz facility would pose a real challenge for the Israelis to destroy because it is underground and very large. Esfahan and Arak, although they are also large, are above ground and thus relatively easy to target. The probability of success against the facilities Esfahan and Arak—using 25 F-151 and 25 F-161 aircraft carrying so-called bunker-buster bombs, refueled by KC-707 aerial tankers—was over 90 percent. But the probability of successfully targeting the massive Natanz facility was only about 45 percent, assuming the Israeli Air Force used 25 5,000-pound bunker busters.

In terms of range, we calculated that Israeli aircraft could arrive at and return from a target 1,700 kilometers away with a full weapons load without refueling. (The shortest distance from the Negev to Natanz, for example, is 1,750 kilometers, which means planes would have to refuel in the air for any of the routes.) We determined three basic routes to the targets: fly north and east along the Turkey-Iraq border (or over Syria part of that distance); fly almost due east across Iraq; or fly south and east across Saudi Arabia and then north across the Persian Gulf. The Iraq route would be shortest, but highly sensitive to the United States, creating potential interference from U.S. planes. The Saudi route would be difficult given the long distance, unless the Saudis tacitly allowed Israeli tankers in their airspace to refuel. The Turkey or Syria-Turkey route flew close to Turkish and Syrian surface-to-air missiles and fighter bases but seemed plausible because Israel could refuel in international air space over the Mediterranean.

Iranian air defense is weak, and it relies on either advanced but short-range Russian systems such as the Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile, or on longer-range but much older systems supplied by the United States during the time of the Shah, such as Improved HAWK missiles. Iranian fighter pilots do not receive substantial flight training and were not very effective during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. Therefore, we believed that it was unlikely that Israel would lose more than 10 percent of its aircraft, with a high probability of losing none, though some aircraft might have to abort the mission if engaged by Iranian missiles or fighters.

***
Since we published our paper, the Israeli Air Force has demonstrated its ability to conduct extremely precise counterproliferation strikes. On Sept. 6, 2007, Israel targeted an under-construction nuclear reactor near Dayr az Zawr, in the eastern part of Syria. The operation was a complete success: The Israeli Air Force incurred no losses, and it proved its strike capability and its ability to penetrate Syrian air defense—and possibly Turkish, as the flight path may have crossed Turkey—with impunity. This gives substantial confidence that Israel will be capable of addressing the Iranian air-defense challenge effectively.

The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq means that the Iraq route is now much more feasible. Without U.S. aircraft and radars, Iraq will have minimal ability to control its airspace. A route crossing northern Syria (which may still be in turmoil next year) and Iraq would likely encounter no significant opposition if well-planned.

In addition, the Israeli Air Force has modernized and expanded its aerial tanker fleet. Several sources have confirmed that the United States has been transferring bunker-buster bombs to the Jewish state. Finally, the Israeli Air Force has conducted training missions with simulated operations as far as Gibraltar at the western edge of the Mediterranean, which indicates it could effectively organize a very large long-range strike.

Set against Israel’s demonstrations and acquisitions is the 2009 revelation of a second Iranian uranium-enrichment site: the Fordow facility near Qom. Fordow is substantially tougher to target than Natanz, since it is located in a mountain under a reported 90 meters of rock and concrete. However, it is also smaller than Natanz, intended to hold only 3,000 centrifuges compared to Natanz’s 50,000. If a single large bomb detonated in the centrifuge hall at Fordow, those 3,000 centrifuges would be rendered unusable.

In thinking about targeting a facility buried so deep, I make a few assumptions. First, I assume the Iranians have ensured that neither the door to the facility nor the ventilation shafts lead directly into the centrifuge hall. If they have not, this presents a vulnerability obvious to anyone who has seen the movie Star Wars: A single penetrating weapon accurately targeted could reach the centrifuge hall by traveling down one of these openings. Even minimal construction efforts, such as right angle bends in a ventilation shaft, could eliminate or at least reduce this possibility.

Therefore, I assume that the Israeli Air Force will have to do things the hard way, targeting many weapons on a single aimpoint in order to burrow through the rock. To my knowledge this has never been attempted against such a deeply buried target, and there are two principal challenges, both of unknown difficulty. First, the weapons themselves, dropped from miles away and thousands of feet in the air, must arrive at very close to the same angle in order to create a pathway each subsequent weapon can follow. Otherwise much of the penetrating power of the bombs will be wasted. The second unknown is the spoil problem, where the sides of the pathway, destroyed by previous explosions, clog the pathway for subsequent bombs.

Using the same methodology Raas and I used in our International Security paper, and making some assumptions about the two problems noted above, I calculated the probability of the Israeli Air Force successfully targeting the Fordow facility. I assume 25 F-15I aircraft, each carrying one 5,000-pound bunker buster and two 2,000-pound bunker busters, would expend all 75 of those bombs on a single aimpoint at Fordow. If angle-of-arrival control is good, the Air Force could have between a 35 percent and 90 percent chance of at least 36 of those weapons arriving on the same aimpoint (this calculation is very sensitive to assumptions about individual weapons). If the spoil problem compounds the depth by only 30 percent or less (in other words, pulverized and collapsing rock adds the equivalent of no more than 27 meters of solid rock) this would likely be sufficient to have at least one weapon penetrate the facility. It thus seems plausible that Fordow can be targeted successfully, if my assumptions are correct.

But make no mistake: It would be a very complex operation. Each weapon release would have to be delayed so that the explosion of the one before it did not damage the following one as it was about to impact the target. This operation would require at least 40 minutes from the time of first bomb release to the last, assuming only 30 seconds of separation between them (which may be insufficient, as the plume from each strike will interfere with laser designation). This would give even the inferior Iranian air defense substantial opportunity to interfere with the strike, and the F-15Is might be forced to ditch their heavy bomb load in order to maneuver.

Additionally, as all of the F-15Is would be dedicated to Fordow, this option would require F-16Is carrying the smaller 2,000-pound bunker buster to be used against the Natanz facility, which would make that strike more difficult. However, IAEA inspections note that as of this month centrifuges have been installed in only one of the two halls at Natanz, thus cutting in half the size of the target and making it more manageable.

I believe that the Israeli Air Force, thanks in part to its efforts since 2007, retains the ability to successfully strike Iranian nuclear facilities. Still, the Fordow facility is substantially more challenging to target than Natanz, and it requires an unprecedented level of precision. This would make the operation more difficult than the original Osirak strike and many times more difficult than the strike against Dayr az Zawr.

• When Iran launched its first air strikes in 1980 to kick off the decade-long Iran-Iraq War, Hussein insisted to his advisers, “This is Israel.” It wasn’t.

• Hussein worried that Israel would attack his nuclear facility at Osirak. Less than a year later, Israel did.

• To protect that facility, he had it fortified with many sandbags. The sandbags were no match for Israel’s, er, bombs.

• Hussein’s paranoia led him to execute the Iranian journalist Farzad Bazoft for allegedly spying for Israel, a fiasco that led to Britain’s withdrawing its ambassador and, indirectly, the first Gulf War.

• “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel,” Hussein said. “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.” No word on whether Israel has accepted the dead man’s vindication as a compliment.

Archive Offers Glimpse Inside the Mind of Hussein [NYT]

Bob Dylan has his own official Website, of course, which contains things like lyrics to all his songs. But the leading (albeit unofficial) site for Dylan guitar tablature—for transcriptions of the music that accompany the lyrics—is, appropriately, Dylanchords.com (now Dylanchords.info, an “unofficial mirror” created in response to music publishers’ objection to tab sites). You can visit now to find the tabs on hundreds and hundreds of Dylan’s songs. That is, assuming you are not trying to access the site from Israel.

That’s right! A year ago, right after the flotilla raid, the site’s proprietor, a Norwegian-born musicologist and programmer named Eyolf Østrem, shut down his site to those trying to access it from Israeli IP addresses; they instead are told that they are being blocked “as a contribution to a cultural boycott of the state of Israel—a long overdue reaction to the absurd inhumanity that is demonstrated in its actions and that goes against everything that I and this site stands for.” It adds, “The boycott is not directed against individuals of Jewish descent or religion, but against the state of Israel and its actions.” (Thanks to my friend B.J. for pointing this out.) In a series of blog posts from around that time, Østrem expands on his decision. (Mr. Østrem: Get in touch, would love to chat!) Clearly Israel does go against everything he stands for. But his site? That is, Dylan? That is more dubious.

Østrem’s first post about the boycott was called “Neighbourhood Bully indeed,” a reference to “Neighborhood Bully,” a song off Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels. Written in the wake of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak (an act widely condemned at the time and widely celebrated now), in it Israel is the titular neighborhood bully—except, of course, it’s not at all. Sample verse: “Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized/Old women condemned him, said he should apologize./Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad/The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad/He’s the neighborhood bully.” The song is very obviously ironic, although apparently not obviously enough for Østrem.

In an essay about the song, contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg quotes a Dylan scholar: “Everybody felt it was preachy and had no subtlety, completely black and white. They said it’s a non-Dylan song. But it is a Dylan song. That’s the beauty of it. You have to deal with it as a Dylan song.” Adds Goldberg, “You have to deal with Dylan as a Jew and not as an ordinary, temporizing, self-conscious Jew—but a Jew with dangerous feelings.” Østrem, of course, fails to do this, to acknowledge that the man to whom he has devoted his site feels quite differently about the Jewish state. Indeed, click on Dylanchords’s link for “Neighborhood Bully,” and you are directed not to its tabs but to a blog post about it entitled, “Bob Dylan’s racist song.” (Østrem did tab it, though: Here it is.)

In fairness, “Neighborhood Bully” was 30 years ago. How does Dylan feel about Israel now? Does he, for example, join Østrem in his cultural boycott? Presumably no, given the concert he played in Tel Aviv last week.

Neighborhood Bully

My Back Pages
Related: Subterranean Homeland Blues [Jewsrock/Jewcy]

But presidencies are not judged on legislation alone. Obama’s status as the first African-American president will surely help shape his legacy. But an equally powerful, if less talked-about, aspect of what will be the historical judgment of the Obama presidency is his relationship with various American constituent groups—including American Jews. As a candidate, Barack Obama successfully courted much of the American Jewish community, in which concerns about the appearance of racism may have served to keep many American Jews in Obama’s camp. But upon becoming president—notwithstanding his success in garnering Jewish support—Obama undertook actions and implemented policies that run the risk of losing him significant Jewish support.

As a longtime resident of the Chicago area, and as a Jew, I have had the opportunity to see how Obama relates to the Jewish community here. My synagogue is right across the street from the Obamas’ house, which helps in perceiving the nature of the president’s connection with the Jewish community. The president seems to feel close to our synagogue—or at the very least, he puts on a good show of feeling close to us. When my beloved rabbi—and a strong Obama backer—Arnold Jacob Wolf died, Obama sent a letter of condolence to the synagogue. He did the same after the death of Leon Despres, the longtime dissident Chicago alderman during the reign of the first Richard Daley. During High Holiday services, our rabbi mentioned that she was recently on a conference call with the president, and with other Jewish religious leaders, in which the president spoke fondly of our congregation and of hearing the shofar emanating from our services while at his home. “Nice shout-out,” another conference call participant remarked to our rabbi, she told us.

Obama sought to win Jewish support for his political campaigns by joking that his name could have been “Baruch Obama,” a clever, if obvious, way to try to identify with the Jewish people. During the 2008 campaign, I saw any number of people with lapel buttons and yarmulkes with Barack Obama’s name spelled out in Hebrew. Rabbi Wolf’s enthusiastic support for Obama, and his strong standing in Chicago’s Jewish community, helped protect Obama from suspicion about his politics and policies in general and about his support for Israel in particular. All of this was essential in helping cement good and productive ties between Obama and American Jews.

Absent this political cover, there certainly was plenty in Obama’s record that might have caused American Jews to view him and his candidacy skeptically. There are, of course, various claims that Obama has been uncomfortably close (from a Jewish, pro-Zionist perspective) with figures like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, and that his closeness to such figures said something negative about the level of Obama’s support for Israel. Whether these charges are fair or not is almost beside the point when contemplating the amount of damage that they might do to a political candidate in a city with a substantial and politically active Jewish population.

In addition to getting significant Jewish religious and political figures to vouch for him, Obama also sought, while plotting his political ascent, to back away from past positions and statements that would not be well-received by the Jewish community. Ali Abunimah, the Chicago-based founder of the Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to advancing the political rights of Palestinians and detailing what it perceives to be Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, detailed how Obama initially expressed strong sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people and deep aversion to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but began to backtrack from his statements in 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race,” Abunimah says Obama told him when they saw each other while Obama was trying to capture the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat. Obama assured Abunimah that “when things calm down I can be more up front.” As Abunimah describes it, Obama was only doing what was necessary to ensure that he wouldn’t face electoral problems at the hands of a politically active American Jewish community.

Other actions on the part of the Obama campaign served to keep American Jews on board. Throughout the 2008 campaign, and indeed throughout the Obama presidency, there has been the not-so-subtle implication on the part of Obama supporters that a significant number of those who oppose the administration do so because they cannot stand the presence of an African-American president. We have seen the charge of racism regularly issued against members of the Tea Party movement, and while some in that movement have certainly expressed objectionable statements on the issue of race, it is unfair to ascribe those objectionable statements to the entire group, which seems to be mainly exercised by a more generalized anger about the failing economy. Nevertheless, supporters of the Obama Administration have shown little hesitation to accuse detractors of racism, which causes constituent groups in American politics to carefully calibrate their actions in response. Since no one wants to be tarred as racist by a charismatic president who is a gifted orator, it makes sense to assume that opposition to the president and his administration might have been chilled in certain quarters, including among segments of the American Jewish community.

Having secured the support of American Jews in his quest for the White House—support that has traditionally been given to politicians from the Democratic party—the president went about implementing policies that seemed designed to lose that support as quickly as possible. Snubs great and small were dished out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which served to needlessly alienate the United States’ chief ally in the Middle East and damage America’s role as an honest broker in the Middle East peace process. While American and Israeli interests certainly diverge at times, and while friends must be prepared to speak fully and frankly with one another, the Obama Administration allowed its disputes with Israel to take on a public, melodramatic, soap-operaesque quality that did nothing to advance the cause of peace. While slamming Israel, the United States engaged in a renewal of diplomatic ties with Syria—without any concessions on the part of the Syrian government, which is brutal toward its citizens and a consistent destabilizing force in the region.

It comes as no surprise that Democrats like Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a likely contender to lead the Senate Democrats if Harry Reid loses his re-election bid, has taken the White House to task for its treatment of Israel, calling Obama’s Israel policy “counter-productive.” Schumer’s stance on this issue likely reflects the stance and beliefs of a great many American Jews in assessing the Obama Administration’s Mideast policy. While a significant case can be made that the administration’s policy concerning Israel and the Mideast peace process does not fundamentally differ from policies undertaken by past American administrations, the atmospherics of the administration’s actions appear to be causing a significant rift with the American Jewish community.

The Obama Administration’s Iran policy does little to inspire confidence either. The administration does not appear to be willing or eager to use military force to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. To be sure, the Iranians have learned much from Israel’s 1982 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power plant and have taken measures to prevent any military strike from halting, or even significantly slowing, their drive toward nuclear weapons, but the administration’s bark on the issue of Iran appears to be worse than its bite, which does little to reassure either Israel or American Jews with deep connections to Israel that an existential threat against the Jewish state is being effectively dealt with. Obama lauds as “unprecedented” the sanctions that his administration has sought to impose on Iran, but the Iranians are used to sanctions, and there is no evidence that economic pressure applied by America and its allies is doing anything to halt Iran’s effort to make itself a nuclear power.

The administration might have used the popular uprising against the Iranian government’s acts of electoral fraud in the country’s 2009 presidential elections, and the Iranian government’s subsequent and bloody violations of human rights, to push for the Iranian government’s ostracism in the international community, to pressure the Iranian government to reform and liberalize, to support the Iranian opposition movement, as many young Iranians called for, and to force significant concessions from the Iranian government as a price for helping Iran to once again be a member in good standing of the international community. Instead, Obama gave, at most, pro forma support to the Iranian opposition movement; issued, at most, pro forma condemnations of the actions of the Iranian government; and did nothing to isolate the Iranian regime or wring concessions from it in return for helping end the regime’s isolation.

The inability or unwillingness of the Obama Administration to forcefully speak out against instances of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party should also be a cause for concern. The demagoguery of Democrats like Rep. James Moran, who has stated that an “extraordinarily powerful” pro-Israel lobby—with “the strong support of the Jewish community”—was responsible for causing the United States to go to war with Iraq, is well known, but the Obama Administration has not decided to challenge him, or other Democrats like him, for seeking to profit politically from the popularization of anti-Semitic tropes. Nor has the administration taken on members of the liberal blogosphere for engaging in reflexive anti-Israel hatred and general anti-Semitism and for potentially causing a serious rift between liberals and American Jews, a rift that would harm the president’s political prospects and the Democratic Party’s electoral future.

Some might say that a lone Congressman or a handful of lefty bloggers are beneath the attention of the president of the United States. But while no American president wants to engage in rhetorical overkill, there are disturbing trends developing within the base of the Democratic Party that ought to concern the president and certainly concern the American Jewish community. A shocking 2009 poll revealed that 18.4 percent of Republicans blamed Jews for the recent financial crisis. That’s appalling enough, but even worse, the poll revealed that nearly a third of Democrats also blamed Jews for the near-collapse of the American economy. As the administrators of the poll wrote, this statistically significant difference was surprising “given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.” It would be in the president’s interests to fight against anti-Semitism in the liberal community, if only to prevent the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party. But he seems to be unwilling to do so. If American Jews are not alarmed by this lack of action on the president’s part, they should be.

Many Jews still support the president despite his recent actions and those of his administration. Part of the reason likely has to do with the fact that whatever the shortcomings of the president and his administration on issues important to the American Jewish community, the longstanding ties between American Jews and the Democratic Party make it difficult for an abrupt break between the two to take place. The longstanding view of many Jewish Democrats is that the political philosophy of the Democratic Party is close to the philosophical teachings espoused by Jewish religious laws, and as a consequence, it would come as no surprise to find out that many American Jews believe that being Democrats is equivalent to being on the side of right and good, as right and good are defined by Jewish laws, customs, and teachings. But despite the longstanding ties between the American Jewish community and the Democratic Party the Obama Administration, through its policies, runs the risk of putting the relationship asunder.

As the midterm election approaches, Obama’s relationship with American Jews stands at a crossroads. It is entirely possible that the relationship may improve as the president and his political team prepare for his re-election effort in 2012 and seek to increase support and enthusiasm in the American Jewish community. But American Jews now have had time to take the measure of the 44th president and are now well-suited to make an informed decision as to whether he cares about issues that are of special concern to our community. Chances are that the American Jewish community will remain largely loyal to the Democratic Party. But no one should be surprised if, as a result of the Obama Administration’s policies and practices, the Democrats’ hold on the American Jewish component of its base is permanently damaged by an approach that evokes precious little of the enthusiasm that the community showed for him in 2008.

Pejman Yousefzadeh is an attorney and writer in Illinois. He blogs at A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days.

But it is also true that the excitement of the Oslo peace agreements culminated in the second intifada, and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza brought thousands of Hamas missiles directed at southern Israel. Maybe then the problem is not that Israelis don’t want peace, but that the context into which they have been forced is fatally flawed. So, why do Western diplomats and policymakers keep pursuing the same formulas even though the evidence of failure is plain?

For answers I went to visit Robert Aumann, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics whose work in game theory, or interactive decision theory, is a formal analysis of repeated games. “Repeated games model long-term interaction and account for phenomena such as altruism, cooperation, trust, loyalty, revenge,” Aumann said in his Nobel lecture, “War and Peace.” If anyone could explain the repeated failure of the Middle East peace process, I thought, it is a Nobel laureate who actually lives in the region and who has experienced the results of diplomatic failure in his daily life.

“I want peace,” Aumann told me in his office at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, where he has taught since 1956, after obtaining his doctorate from MIT. “I am not a proponent of greater Israel. I’m for the two-state solution, or something like that. But what we are doing does not promote that.”

“I want peace,” he said, pausing for effect, “not peace now.”

The 79-year-old German-born Israeli still speaks English with a New York accent—he graduated from City College in 1950—and it is a little strange to hear him ask his assistant for help translating Hebrew words into English every now and again. This is a small office for a Nobel laureate, but it befits the modesty of a man who lost a son in one of Israel’s wars and a wife to cancer.

Aumann stood and walked me over to his chalkboard, where he showed me a quote from a fellow Nobel winner’s acceptance speech in Stockholm: “The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it.” “That’s Barack Obama,” Aumann said, nodding appreciatively. “Smart kid.” Aumann then commented on the talk about Obama being unfriendly to Israel, calling the idea only marginally true. “There’s always a lot of pressure on us coming from Washington, for the last 50 years,” he said.

Aumann, who wears a long white beard and a kippa, is an observant Jew whose skepticism regarding the peace process has put him on the right side of Israel’s political spectrum and made him controversial in academic circles—for using his scientific research to support his politics. Of course, the other way to see it is that Aumann’s politics are shaped by the facts his research makes plain.

Aumann’s analysis of repeated games explains how cultures build systems that allow them to function reasonably smoothly. The problem is when one player does not understand the sort of game being played. For instance, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli peace process, Aumann believes that the problem isn’t that the Israelis and Arabs don’t want peace, but rather that the Israelis and their U.S. patron believe they are playing a one-time game whereas the Arabs see themselves as playing a repeated game. Jerusalem and Washington are in a hurry to conclude negotiations immediately, whereas the Arabs are willing to wait it out and keep playing the same game. The result is that Israel’s concessions, or the desire to have peace now, have brought no peace.

What Aumann is getting at is what he called in his Nobel lecture “one of those paradoxical upside-down insights of game theory.” Of course, poker players are familiar with the principle: Don’t show your hand with chips still on the table. “For repetition to engender co-operation, the players must not be too eager for immediate results,” Aumann said in his lecture. “The present, the now, must not be important. If you want peace now, you may well never get peace. But if you have time—if you can wait—that changes the whole picture; then you may get peace now.”

In Aumann’s view, the post-Oslo period shows that Israel’s behavior leaves it at a serious disadvantage in a repeated game. “In games that repeat over time,” Aumann wrote in an article called “The Blackmailers’ Paradox,” “a strategic balance that is neutral paradoxically causes a cooperation between the opposing sides.” Aumann offered the example of two men forced to split $100,000. Person A assumes that they will split it evenly and is astonished when Person B explains that he will not accept anything less than $90,000. Afraid that he will leave empty-handed, A relents and takes one-tenth of the money. In this situation, A acted as if this were a one-time game, but had he understood it as a repeated game and refused the split so that both he and B walked away empty-handed, he would have shown for future reference that he was every bit as determined as B. This in turn would make B more willing to compromise. “Likewise,” Aumann wrote, “Israel must act with patience and with long-term vision, even at the cost of not coming to any present agreement and continuing the state of belligerence, in order to improve its position in future negotiations.”

Game theory, Aumman explained to me, “has to be borne out by history and historical evidence.” One might add that it is also borne out by other human experiences, like commerce. In the Middle Eastern souk, as the Arab novelist Abdul Rahman Munif once observed, showing your interest in an item immediately triples the merchant’s price. And yet, as Aumann explained to me, “Middle Easterners are no different than anyone else in the world. Game theory is based on the idea that people react to their incentives, and you should be aware that the other party reacts to its own incentives. The other side does not always agree with you or share the same goals.”

To take another example, consider World War II. Aumann remembered his family fleeing Frankfurt in 1938 when his father understood what was on the horizon. “It was Chamberlain who brought war, not Hitler,” Aumann said. If both Chamberlain and Hitler wanted peace, the difference was that Hitler’s vision of Germany at peace included it possessing large chunks of Central Europe. “Hitler was furious when the British declared war,” Aumann said. “And he was right to be. Chamberlain had sent the wrong message.” If Chamberlain had wanted peace he would not have indicated with the Munich Agreement that Hitler was free to have the rest of Czechoslovakia as well as the Sudetenland. That the British eventually drew the line with the invasion of Poland and decided to make war went against the rules of the game as Hitler and Chamberlain had played it up to then. For another example in the Israeli context, Aumann told me to consider the Second Lebanon war. “Nasrallah said, had he known how the Israelis were going to react, he never would’ve started it,” Aumann said. In Nasrallah’s eyes, the withdrawal from Gaza had given him free rein to act with impunity, and it was Israel that had stepped outside of the rules of the game.

“The way to make peace is to make your intentions clear,” Aumann told me. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza brought not only the second Lebanon war but also the bombardment of southern Israel and most recently the Mavi Marmara incident. To explain what was wrong with the Gaza withdrawal, Aumann drew on an unusual source for a scientist, the Bible, quoting Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

God’s people, according to Aumann’s interpretation of the passage, have done two stupid things—not only did they abandon God but they also worshipped broken idols. “It’s one thing to do something unconscionably bad,” Aumann said. For him, an expulsion that uprooted thousands of people who have yet to get their lives back in order was “unquestionably immoral.” “If it brings the peace,” Aumann said, “if the ends justify the means, that’s one thing, but this doesn’t even achieve the means. It was morally wrong and strategically stupid. The expulsion from Gaza is unprecedented. Jews have been expelled throughout history, but we own the dubious distinction of being the first people to have expelled ourselves. Never before had this happened, and it led to disaster. Our standing in the world was not improved. We didn’t get sympathy. We get sympathy when we act decisively—after Entebbe, Osirak, a lot of sympathy came after the Six Day war.”

When policymakers and analysts use the same sort of examples to draw the same historical conclusions, they’re dismissed as right-wing ideologues, and Aumann has endured the same treatment. The Nobel committee nonetheless realized he’d hit on a truth that explains a fundamental aspect of who we are as political beings—or who we are when we are most human, sitting across the table from our neighbors trying to figure out how to live together. The paradox is that there can be no co-existence if one person isn’t willing to negotiate as hard as the other. The appeaser will always be swallowed up and simply cease to exist. It is stubbornness rather than the willingness to make immediate concessions that brings about successful negotiations. In other words, if you want peace, prepare for war.

Now the career diplomat has turned his surreptitious scribbles into a 700-page narrative, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, that he explains “is not history, but a story about history.” His insider’s account of the founding and building of the state of Israel is also a memoir of sorts, peculiar in that the memoirist gives all the best lines away to others. “Of course, I have my feelings, philosophies, ideas about things,” said the 81-year-old Avner, “but the book is not about me. My intent was to bring back to life episodes showing how these figures behaved, primarily under situations of stress, and also some unforgettable intimate moments.”

But The Prime Ministers is also a sobering post-Oslo account of pre-Oslo Israeli leadership. With the conclusion of the Cold War, U.S. presidents could afford to entertain fantasies of a new world order and a peace dividend, but not Israel. In many ways, Jerusalem forgot how to make its case to Washington, that it was not merely a chip in a game of geopolitical poker, but a strategic asset in its own right—and had been recognized as such even by a U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, who seemingly had no love for the Jews. It was Begin who clearly explained that the Jews had rights, not merely claims, to their historical homeland. Avner’s book is a timely reminder that Israel has not survived these last 60-plus years because it has satisfied the claims of the world community, but has rather thrived thanks to the ingenuity, inspiration, and courage of its leaders.

The major figures here are the four prime ministers for whom Avner worked, with Begin as the book’s undisputed protagonist, often stealing scenes from the other three even when they are the sitting prime minister and Begin is the leader of the opposition. In this telling, Begin towers over them all, an Israeli leader, Avner writes, “possessed of a unique, all-encompassing sense of Jewish history.”

While the election of the right-wing Begin government moved mainstream Israeli politics to the center (in the same way that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher affected the United States and the United Kingdom), Rabin forged a strategic relationship with the United States. These two more than any of the country’s other famous patriarchs are the founders of current-day Israel.

Rabin’s influence came in part from his direct involvement in domestic U.S. politics beginning with his support of Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election. As Avner writes, Rabin explained his tactical style to a somewhat astonished Begin:

It is not enough for an Israeli ambassador here to simply say “I’m pursuing my country’s best interests according to the book.” To promote our interests an Israeli ambassador has to take advantage of the rivalries between the Democrats and Republicans. An Israeli ambassador who is either unwilling or unable to maneuver his way through the complex American political landscape to promote Israel’s strategic interests would do well to pack his bags and go home.

I asked Avner, the former ambassador to the United Kingdom and Australia, if he thought this sort of direct involvement should be part of the Israeli ambassador to Washington’s job description. Not at all, Avner insisted. “It could only happen by default, if one wins trust and is invited into the inner sanctums of power. But you can’t set out to do it. And I don’t know of anyone else before or after Rabin who had the chutzpah to say it this way as he did.” Rabin was special. “He was the right man there, winning the trust of the Nixon Administration and not least Kissinger himself. He once said the only secretary of state who truly understood the Israel-Arab conflict in all its complexities was Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, for much of the time, they had a love-hate relationship with each other.”

***

Avner’s book is something of an anomaly among political memoirs, where mid-level bureaucrats typically assert a centrality for themselves that rarely survives book reviews, never mind the first draft of history. Avner on the other hand is a major player, “one of that same impressive generation of British-born Israelis who made their mark in serving the State of Israel, like Efraim Halevy and the late David Kimche,” said Jonathan Spyer, a British-born Middle East analyst who moved to Israel 20 years ago. Nonetheless, Avner’s own account of his career invariably forces him to the margins, which becomes the book’s source of self-effacing humor.

Avner writes, for instance, of how Eshkol once stopped in the middle of delivering a speech Avner had written to disapprove of a passage and chastise Avner in front of the audience. On another occasion, at a White House banquet, Avner’s lavish kosher meal created such a stir with his table companions that across the room President Gerald Ford wondered what was going on. It was Avner’s birthday, explained Prime Minister Rabin. Accordingly, the U.S. commander-in-chief led the entire banquet hall in a chorus of “Happy birthday, Yeduha,” unaware that Avner’s name had been misspelled on his place card. Afterward, Rabin explained to Avner that he had no choice but to fabricate the story about his birthday. Otherwise, he tells him, “there’d be a headline in the newspapers that you ate kosher and I didn’t, and the religious parties will bolt the coalition, and I’ll have a government crisis on my hands.” Justice is served when Betty Ford drags Rabin out on to dance floor, where he nearly trips over his own shoelaces, only to be saved by the comparatively light-footed Henry Kissinger.

The book’s much more significant duet is Kissinger and Rabin’s, which helped consolidate the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem. Eshkol named Rabin ambassador to the United States in 1969, and Avner followed him there, marveling at this future prime minister’s access to the White House.

“Rabin was central to the U.S.-Israel relationship, especially within the Cold War context,” said Avner. Rabin understood that the Nixon White House’s chief concern was the Soviet Union and made the case for Israel as a strategic asset primed to take on Moscow’s regional allies, Egypt, and Syria. He also teamed up with Kissinger in an intra-Beltway battle against Nixon’s less than Israel-friendly Secretary of State, William Rogers.

As in most portraits, Kissinger comes off as a complicated character, best understood, in Avner’s reckoning, in light of two of Kissinger’s German precursors, Metternich, the 19th-century statesman and strategist, and Heinz, a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany who wound up at George Washington High School in upper Manhattan—that is, the adolescent Kissinger.

Avner relates a remarkable story of sitting at the King David hotel in Jerusalem with a Washington psychiatrist whom Avner pseudonymously refers to as Willie Fort. As Kissinger makes his way through the lobby, Fort hails him—“Heinz, Heinz”—and Kissinger’s face turns flush, before he moves on, ignoring Fort. Avner demands an explanation for the strange scene, and his companion relates how he and Kissinger were close friends in high school, both of them refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Avner writes:

Henry Kissinger, [Fort] said, habitually insisted he had no lasting memories of his childhood persecutions in Germany. This was nonsense! In 1938, when Jews were being beaten and murdered in the streets, and his family had to flee for their lives he was at the most impressionable age of 15. At that age he would have remembered everything: his feelings of insecurity, the trauma of being expelled, of not being accepted; what it meant to lose control of one’s life, to be powerless, to see one’s beloved heroes suddenly helpless, overtaken by the brutal events, most notably his father whom he greatly admired. Those demons would never leave Henry Kissinger however hard he tried to drown them in self-delusion.

How, Avner asks Fort, does this impact his role as mediator between us and the Arabs?

“ ‘People like him invariably over-compensate,’ ” Avner quotes Fort. “ ‘They go to great lengths to subdue whatever emotional bias they might feel, and lean over backwards in favor of the other side to prove they are being even-handed and objective.’ ”

***

For Avner, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Kissinger is Begin, who would do anything for his own people. “He was a quintessential Jew,” said Avner, who, as he explains, had not been a Begin supporter until then. “For years the word ‘terrorist’ clung to him,” Avner told me, “and when he was elected in 1977 he was described in many a corridor of power as a ‘warmonger.’ Nevertheless, it was he who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace with Egypt. Upon election he asked me to stay on working with him as an adviser, and I was hesitant at first. I asked him for time to think it over, and he said, ‘You want to speak to Rabin don’t you?’ Yes, I told him. So I called Rabin and he said, ‘Take the job, Begin is an honest and responsible man. He’s your kind of Jew, observant.’ Before Begin, all of Israel’s leaders were diehard socialists. It was unheard of before him, for example, that a dinner at the White House would be kosher. After him, all White House dinners for visiting Israeli prime ministers are kosher.”

Avner stayed on to “shakespearize,” as Begin said, the prime minister’s Polish English, but the most important piece of writing Avner may have done on Begin’s behalf is this book. In the afterword, Avner recalls explaining to Margaret Thatcher that Begin never produced his own memoirs. Accordingly, Begin is the presiding spirit of The Prime Ministers, which opens with Avner’s first recollection as a boy of hearing English neighbors cursing the name of the Irgun leader, and concludes with Begin’s death in 1992.

“What opened my heart was the man himself,” Avner said. “His nobility stretched into the small things. I was recently telling Natan Sharansky something about Begin, which he didn’t know and which brought tears to his eyes. When Sharansky was imprisoned in the Soviet Union, his wife, Avital, received a government stipend to make phone calls to Moscow each week to keep the campaign for his freedom alive, but some bureaucrat told her she was overstepping her budget. When Begin heard about this, he instructed that all of these bills should come to him, and he would pay for them out of his own pocket.”

I asked Avner where Begin’s reputation stands today. “In all the polls for the last few years, Begin has overtaken Ben Gurion. Why? Overwhelmingly, people ascribe to his credit the peace treaty with Egypt. He is also fondly remembered for his humble and chivalrous lifestyle. He is particularly revered by the Sephardic Jews who gave him his majority in 1977. In fact it was Begin who emancipated them into the democratic system, virtually all of them having come from lands—North Africa and the Middle East—where democracy is an eccentricity. He was the first to appoint a swath of Sephardic Jews to his cabinet. Moreover, Begin is the man credited for having prevented two civil wars,” said Avner, referring to the sinking of the Altalena in 1948 and before that when Begin and Ben Gurion squared off against each other in 1944. “Begin believed that a Jew must never raise a finger against another Jew. He was haunted by the Holocaust and lived Jewry’s ancient past when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 CE because Jews were fighting each other. He was so steeped in Jewish history, he talked about the destruction of the temple as if it had happened yesterday.”

And what, I asked Avner, would Begin make of Israel’s strategic situation today? After all, against the good opinion of the international community, including Washington, Begin ordered the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Would he do the same thing with Iran?

“I don’t know. He would have opposed sanctions from the start,” said Avner, believing that Begin would have had no faith in their efficacy against an ideologically driven regime like Iran. “At the same time,” Avner continued, “Begin, having himself once commanded a force of his own—the Irgun during the British mandate—knew the limits of military power, and I don’t know if he would have thought that Israel had the power by itself to defang Iran. But as obsessed as he was with the Holocaust, he would have mounted a vociferous worldwide campaign against the Iranian leaders who deny the Holocaust and threaten to wipe the Jewish state off the map. I don’t think our present leaders—and the Diaspora Jewish leadership for that matter—are doing enough to alert the world of the existential dangers for the whole of the West, and not only Israel. Begin would be shouting from the rooftops demanding that this be put at the very top of the international agenda. For all the talk it is still not at the top of the international agenda. One thing is clear: Given our geopolitical situation, Israel simply cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.”

We will leave the final word here to Bob Dylan and his 1983 song “Neighborhood Bully,” which, as Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg has noted, was penned in response to the international outcry that followed the Osirak raid:

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad.
He’s the neighborhood bully.

‘Israel Must Compensate Iraq For Osirak’ [JPost]

Related: Subterranean Homesick Blues [Jewcy]

Certainly there was plenty of concern about what Iraq was up to, but the long public debate, the hand-wringing, the threats, the counter-threats, the journalistic chorus about what a terrible thing a pre-emptive attack would be, how dangerous, none of this happened. One day Iraq had a nuclear reactor. The next day it didn’t. The attack was met with the usual outrage, but then a funny thing happened, and the tide began to turn in Israel’s favor, in part because Menachem Begin had no apologies.

At the time, I was in Philadelphia, visiting a family friend with my father. Both he and his friend, Dr. Teplick, were then in their late sixties. Both were liberal Democrats. We were having breakfast, going through the newspapers and talking about the astounding news, when Teplick encountered the editorial in The New York Times. It characterized Israel’s action as a “sneak attack” and called it an act of “inexcusable and shortsighted aggression.” As the editorial was read aloud at the table, I remember the chagrin of these two men, ardent liberals for whom the Times had long been at the center of their universe. They received the editorial as a betrayal.

My own reaction was to pick up the phone and call the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, where I was then working. I reached a colleague, Adam Meyerson, and asked him to relay to George Melloan, who was Robert Bartley’s deputy and managed the editorial page, my own two cents, which was that the Journal shouldn’t do what the New York Times had just done. Adam asked me to hold the line for a moment. He came back on a few minutes later and said that he’d spoken with the magnificent Melloan, who had replied, “When have we ever done what the New York Times did?”

The editorial that Melloan and Bartley were planning ran the next day, on June 10, 1981, under the headline “Mourning the Bomb.” It began: “An atom bomb for Iraq, we have learned in the last 24 hours, has become the latest great cause célèbre of world opiniondom. Various governments, including our own, and a lot of pundits have been busily condemning Israel’s raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Our own reaction is that it’s nice to know that in Israel we have at least one nation left that still lives in the world of reality.”

The editorial went on to speak of the incongruity of Iraq, “awash in cheap crude oil,” wanting a
big nuclear reactor. It noted that Baghdad had rebuffed “French suggestions to give up the original design and substitute one that does not need weapons-grade uranium.” The Journal was particularly exercised over the way “world opinion” was taking comfort in the fact that Iraq had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It said: “This kind of silliness has a mysterious power to blind most who man foreign ministries, think tanks and editorial sanctums. Of course Iraq was building a bomb. Of course its intended target was Israel. Of course, given the Iraqi reputation for political nuttiness reaffirmed again in its starting a war with Iran, its atom bomb would also have been a danger to all its neighbors.”

Then the famous sentence: “We all ought to get together and send the Israelis a vote of thanks.”

The Journal recognized that Israel “was not acting out of some abstract concern with nonproliferation.” It presumed that Israel was “pursuing its own interest” and conceded the timing of the raid was “no doubt” in Begin’s “political interest in the impending elections.” But the Journal reckoned that the strong medicine of the pre-emptive attack “would not have been necessary” had “the reality that marked the Israeli decision been present in the United States’ nonproliferation policy this last decade or so.” It cited not only France’s sales to Iraq but India’s atomic program.

A point was made to give, as the Journal put it, “the worriers about Israel their due.” It noted that “there is always reason to be concerned that any military act could prove to be the spark in the tinderbox of the Middle East. “ But, it said, “we have been under the impression that the Middle East wasn’t a very peaceful place even before” the attack on Osirak. It concluded by noting that being “concerned about the peace of the Middle East does not make it necessary to be deceived about the necessary components for peace.”

What the Journal was supporting then was not Zionism, per se, nor, for that matter, any other ideological line of right or left but rather a certain hard-headedness, an honesty, about America’s, and other nations’, interests. It proved merciless in criticizing those, including its great friend Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was then President Reagan’s envoy at the United Nations, who’d drawn the unfortunate assignment to coauthor, with an envoy of Iraq, a resolution condemning Israel’s raid. It provoked in the Journal a fierce editorial called “Andy Kirkpatrick,” which likened the hawkish, pro-Israel Kirkpatrick to President Carter’s permanent representative at the world body, Andrew Young.

It later came out that Reagan was less worried about the attack privately than his envoys had to be publicly. His national security adviser, Richard Allen, informed his boss of the Israeli raid by asking him something roughly like this: “Mr. President, you know those F-16s we provided Israel? Guess what they have done with them? They’ve bombed a nuclear reactor in downtown Baghdad.” Reagan is said to have stammered: “They did what?” When Allen repeated the facts, Reagan shook his head, uttering the famous line, “Well, boys will be boys.”

Today, everyone is more tense. The amount of debate, in and out of government, and diplomacy on the matter stands in sharp contrast to the earlier time. All the leaders of the West—not just President Obama—have stood up and pronounced an Iranian A-bomb unacceptable. The question is whether they are going to conduct themselves in a way that is consonant with that conclusion. Surely Iran is a more difficult military mission than Iraq was, though our weapons systems are also more advanced. But surely Iran is further along the road to a bomb-making capacity than Iraq was. Menachem Begin refrained from debating any of this in public before he made his attack, and then one day there was no reactor in Iraq—a fact that eventually came to be viewed with a great deal of relief by the rest of the world.