CrossFireArabia
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a reprint of an article written by me and posted in 2008 about Israel gearing up to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. Perceptive is the fact it took Israel and and the USA 17 years, in June 2025, to make a direct hit on Iran and its nuclear facilities. Today, US President Donald Trump, and with the current protests in Iran, is weighing the options for another direct on Iran. However Tehran said it will retaliate with more launches on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities just as it did last year as well on as US military bases. The reprint is made here with the same title, Weighing the hit against Iran as it appeared in the Media Monitors Network.
Will Israel hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, or won’t they? You would think everyone would be talking about it on the international level, and it might be the case judging from the newspaper articles that are being churned out about a possible nuke followed by regional conflagration.
In Jordan news is in full throttle: Yes Israel is contemplating a hit on Iran and it is in line with its power-hungry policies to dominate the region even if it eventually destroys itself.
Newspapers here see Israel as careless and would not only be prepared for that slippery-slope of a nuclear exchange but would use her nukes as a deterrent force to stop Iran from gaining her own nuclear capability.
Iran is not afraid, saying time and again, her nuclear development is for peaceful purposes and it will have a nuclear capability come what may regardless of what Israel is trying to do and of the international nuclear inspectors monitoring her activities which is more than can be said of Israel whose nuclear reactors and capabilities remain a state secret.
On a more personal level, I briefly talked to my wife about the possible hit in Iran, which I thought was well probable after reading the recent articles, and she just looked and said the issue is being blown out by media talk: There “won’t be war” and it is “media hype”.
Someone else just made fun of the issue. All this was going on when International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad Al Baradei was warning that if a strike does happen then it will surely turn the region into a ball-fire.
Ball-fire or not, the journalists and media were having a field day, now they say is the best time to strike because US President George W. Bush is nearing his tenure in office and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in trouble over allegation of corruption charges and accepting bribes, and so the theory states if he is going to go then he wants to go in style.
But such reports and opinions are being made when the actual devastation and the far-reaching consequences of a potential strike and the subsequent military and nuclear exchange is underplayed and even treated as a daily occurrence where people will just pick up the pieces and continue with their lives.
People, including the media are not fully aware of what a nuclear exchange would mean, in terms of the scale of human losses, of radiation, devastation, the so-called nuclear winter of darkness, the nuclear holocaust that would actually make the area, the region and the geography completely uninhabitable for many years to come.
While this maybe the case in the West with the media there long tackling these issues, especially at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, here the media has taken more of a sedate view about tackling these subjects especially since more important issues were on the scene.
That is up till now. Seeing the issue as an extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, today the media is using the possible strike as a point of titillating us into fright regardless of the cynicism of many people like my wife who keep saying its media scare-mongering. But, and regardless again, what is required is a real cold analysis of the situation as it exists.
Would Israel be willing to take a chance and strike, whether military or nuclear, knowing full-will that the present Iran has the long-range missile capability, and knowing also the United States is not too sure and can’t make up its mind about the strike while playing lip service to negotiation and diplomatic talk.
Iran is not Iraq; this is not 1982 when Israeli F 16s flew over the region and bombed the Ozreiq reactor being built by under Saddam Hussein. Despite the fact the Americans are in Iraq, and the Israelis are flexing their muscles against the Palestinians and frequently threatening the Lebanese and Syrians, the security and military environment in the region is changing,
New powers like Iran, Syria, Turkey and non-state actors like Hizbollah and maybe Hamas are increasingly making headways in the region and internationally, and therefore a direct hit on Iran by Israel would not be received at all well by the Europeans who already recognize Israel’s intransigence on the Middle East process regardless if they want to do something about it or not.
Today, Israel’s image is increasingly at stake, an image that has come to be increasingly tarnished since the start of the Intifada in the year 2000, and Israel would definitely not want to rock the boat by seeking to pot practice with its own nuclear war heads and missiles–guessed at 200 in the late 1990s–on states like Iran.
The other important thing to remember is that Israel values its own existence and survival; that’s why it will not practice adventurist measures to the point where it may destroy itself through nuclear striking other nations even though such would be surgical strikes or limited which are nullified for all intense and purpose.
Hence survival is not only a security argument but an ideological one that involves an entity, identity and statehood. An Israeli state even if it does survive a nuclear exchange would probably be sitting in an ocean of radiation still far to be within the parameters of Europe, and certainly too far to remain as the United States valuable ally because if all things are destroyed there would be no need to have a “trusted friend” in the Middle East.
These continue to be in the realm of possibilities and conjectures. However, and against the argument of nuclear hit on Iran is the fact that American troops are in Iraq, in the middle of what would become a “nuclear ball-fire”. This is, unless of course, Israel refuses to give warning and go for the element of surprise and unleashes its weapons against Iran in the hope of preemption, a doctrine the US used for launching its 2003 war to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy his so-called weapons of mass destruction which were subsequently proved false.
