Netanyahu’s choice: Olmert or Sharon?

crisis, he frequently uses analogies drawn from World War II. But as he

returns home to consider his next moves in light of what he heard from

US President Barack Obama on Monday, I suspect he will be pondering

events much closer in time and space: the experiences of his two

immediate predecessors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

It was on Sharon’s watch, as Ronen Bergman related in The New York Times

in January, that Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment operation at

Natanz was first discovered, thanks to “cooperation between American,

British and Israeli intelligence services.” Some Israeli officials

wanted the site “bombed at once.” But Sharon opted for a different plan:

“Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian

group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was

building a centrifuge installation at Natanz.”

The outcome is well known: The news, quickly confirmed by International

Atomic Energy inspectors, produced much talk but little action. Over the

next 10 years, several rounds of sanctions were imposed, but these

sanctions utterly failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which continued

to progress apace. Since 2002, Tehran has produced enough low-enriched

uranium for four nuclear bombs; further enriched some of this uranium to 20 percent, a step experts say

is far more difficult to master than the subsequent stage of going from

20 to 90 percent (which is what is needed for a bomb); installed thousands

of additional centrifuges, including at a new underground facility in

Fordow that would be almost impossible to attack; and conducted

experiments in weaponization, including technology to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads and “a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.”

One can understand why Sharon decided as he did. Natanz was discovered

at the height of the second intifada, when the army was fully occupied

in combating the Palestinian terrorists who were slaughtering civilians

in cities throughout Israel. Under these circumstances, the idea of

opening a second front against Iran must have seemed daunting.

But by not doing so, he allowed a relatively small problem to

metastasize. Iran now has far more nuclear facilities, far better

defenses, and above all, far more technological know-how than it did in

2002. Thus today, Iran’s nuclear program is both much harder to destroy

and much easier to rebuild than it would have been when it was first

discovered.

This lesson wasn’t lost on Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, when he

faced a similar situation five years later: Israeli intelligence had

confirmed that Syria was building a nuclear reactor, and that it was

likely to become operational in another few months.

Olmert first presented the evidence to then-President George W. Bush and

asked him to bomb the reactor. But the Bush administration was divided:

While Vice President Dick Cheney supported Olmert’s request, Defense

Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rich preferred

the diplomatic option – getting the IAEA to declare Syria in violation

of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and asking the Security Council

to impose sanctions. Ultimately, Bush sided with Gates and Rice: In his

memoirs, he wrote

that he proposed sending Rice to Israel immediately so she and Olmert

could give a press conference disclosing the reactor’s existence.

But to his great credit (and it’s one of the very few decisions he made

as premier that I consider to his credit), Olmert rejected this proposal

out of hand. It couldn’t have been an easy decision: Syria has

thousands of missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel, and

chemical warheads to load them with; the threat of massive retaliation

was very real. But he had seen firsthand, as a senior minister in

Sharon’s government, how ineffective the diplomatic option proved with

Iran, and he wasn’t prepared to let that failure be replicated on

Israel’s northern border. Given the mischief a non-nuclear Syria was

already making as the patron of anti-Israel terrorist organizations in

both Lebanon and Gaza, the threat of a nuclear Syria – whose

mischief-making potential would be vastly greater, because it would no

longer be restrained by fear of provoking an Israeli attack on Damascus –

was too deadly to be tolerated.

The decision Netanyahu faces is incomparably harder. The chances of an

attack on Iran being successful are unquestionably lower, given the much

greater distances, the greater number of targets that must be struck,

and Iran’s stronger defenses. It may well buy less time than the five

years and counting bought by the Syrian strike, since the technological

knowhow Iran has gained over the last 10 years will make rebuilding

easier. The likelihood of retaliation is greater, because while the

Syrian attack was a stealth operation that Damascus could and did decide

to ignore, any attack on Iran will be the culmination of a very public

confrontation, making it harder for Tehran to refrain from retaliation

without losing face. And finally, while Olmert was confident that Bush,

despite his initial opposition, would give Israel full backing after the

fact (as indeed happened), Netanyahu can have no such confidence about

Obama.

But all these risks will have to be balanced against one inescapable

fact: Sanctions and diplomacy have never yet succeeded in halting any

country’s nuclear program. They didn’t succeed in North Korea, as

detailed in a devastating blow-by-blow account

in PJ Media last month; they didn’t succeed in Pakistan; and they

aren’t succeeding in Iran – unless you define 10 years of steady

progress toward nuclear weapons as “success.” In contrast, military

action has succeeded the only two times it has been tried, in Iraq in

1981 and Syria in 2007: Neither country ever successfully reconstituted

its nuclear program.

I don’t know what decision Netanyahu will ultimately make, and I don’t

envy him the responsibility of making it. But one thing I’m certain of:

To persuade this very history-conscious prime minister to ignore the

history of the last 10 years, Obama will have to come up with something a

great deal more convincing than “trust me.” 

The writer is a journalist and commentator.