Blundering Into War

Wars usually begin because someone miscalculated the resolve of the other side.

Having successfully faced down England and France over the Sudetenland, Hitler thought that threats of war against Germany if he invaded Poland were simply bluffs. Hitler invaded and France and England declared war.

When Argentine dictator General Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands he refused to believe that a pacifist Britain would insist on taking back control of its colony by force. He expected Margaret Thatcher to accept the Argentine occupation as a fait accompli. Instead, she sent the Royal Navy.

Saddam Hussein was one of the great “misestimators.” When the I5anian Revolution purged the officer corps of the army he expected to be able to seize a tidy parcel of Iranian coast for himself. What he got was a decade-long stalemated war that won him precisely nothing.

So Saddam followed up that blunder with a bigger one. Figuring the West was too effete, too decadent to resist, Saddam invaded Kuwait, a nation friendly to the United States and a key oil-producing country. This time even France joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that, under the command of General Norman Schwartzkopf, destroyed the Iraqi military and tossed the invaders ignominiously out of Kuwait.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the potential of eclipsing the late great Saddam as the worst judge of another country’s intentions.

If he gets the Jerusalem Post he may have noticed an item this weekend headlined, “Israel slated to buy U.S. smart bombs.” The bombs in question are 1,000 GBU-39s, a GPS-guided munition that can penetrate 90 centimeters of steel-reinforced concrete to deliver a 22.7-kilogram package of high-yield explosives from a launch point 110 kilometers from the target.

This is not the weapon of choice to burrow into a target like the Natanz underground uranium enrichment facility in Iran. Israel has plenty of 900-kilo bunker-buster missiles for that particular job.

What the GBU-39 purchase demonstrates is that Israel is thinking ahead to the post-strike environment. Iran will surely unleash Hizbulla against Israel if Natanz is taken out. The GBU-39 will allow the Israeli air force to engage hardened enemy targets in Lebanon and Syria without having to overfly enemy-held territory. Ordering the bombs now is also a hedge against a possibly unsympathetic administration in Washington, should Barack Obama be elected.

The bottom line is that Israel is taking Ahmadinejad’s threats of extinction quite seriously. Even if Europe and the United States do nothing, Israel will not allow Iran to threaten its existence. Ahmadinejad needs to believe this.