By Jason Miks
“Many analysts argue that Israel lacks the military capability to stop the Iranian nuclear program for more than a few years and assert that the cost of any attack will exceed the benefit,” foreign policy analyst Mitchell Bard wrote yesterday. “This is the conventional wisdom, but it is just that, conventional, and Israel has repeatedly proved that it has the daring and creativity to disprove the skeptics.”
I’m not sure I find the reasoning that because Israel surprised most countries by trouncing its neighbors in 1967, that it’s destined to confound naysayers about a military strike on Iran now, very reassuring. Nor is the suggestion that as it took Iran 20 years to get to where it is now, Israel will buy itself more than a couple of years if it does manage to demolish Iran’s nuclear program.
As the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Anthony Cordesman notes in an important piece of research last week:
“Iran has moved far beyond the point where it lacked the technology base to produce nuclear weapons…Iran has pursued every major area of nuclear weapons development, has carried out programs that have already given it every component of a weapon except fissile material, and there is strong evidence that it has carried out programs to integrate a nuclear warhead on to its missiles.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat