News

Israel is ready and anxious to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities soon. At least that's the claim in a lengthy new Atlantic piece, which puts the chances of a strike within the next year at "better than 50 percent."

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who has run into some problems in the past with his Middle East writing, still puts together a well detailed, if somewhat one-sided, look at Israel's plans for Iran, for which he spoke to "roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike" on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Basically the situation is this: Israel expects Iran to have an operational nuclear weapon within a year. The Israeli government sees this as a direct existential threat that would lead to the annihilation of Jews. They're not going to wait for the United States' permission to strike if they see fit, although they would really appreciate it if Washington did the Iran-bombing for them.

Because here's what would happen if Israel did the bombing unilaterally, as Goldberg sees it:

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel-regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran's centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or wh... >>>