Need some more pacifism with your coffee sir?
The tension over the issue was shown in an interview published yesterday in which ElBaradei appeared to warn Israel not to bomb Iranian atomic facilities. ?You cannot use force to prevent a country from obtaining nuclear weapons. By bombing them half to death, you can only delay the plans,? ElBaradei was quoted as saying by Oslo newspaper Aftenposten. ?But they will come back, and they will demand revenge.?
This is why you follow bombing with troops. If anyone honestly believes Isreal will allow Iran to get a nuke they are some other plane of existence. It won’t happen. Hopefully we will be there beside them.
I think ElBaradei needs some homework. What happened on this date: June 7th, 1981?
When Israeli intelligence confirmed Iraq’s intention of producing weapons at Osiraq, the Israeli government decided to attack. According to some estimates, Iraq in 1981 was still as much as five to ten years away from the ability to build a nuclear weapon. Others estimated at that time that Iraq might get its first such weapon within a year or two. Prime Minister Menachem Begin felt military action was the only remedy. Begin feared that his party would lose the next election, and he feared that the opposition party would not preempt prior to the production of the first Iraqi nuclear bomb.
The raid would have to occur before its first fuel was to be loaded, before the reactor went “hot” so as not to endanger the surrounding community. The target was distant: 1,100 km from Israel. Preparations included building target mock-ups and flying full scale dress-rehearsal missions. The aircrews were selected from the cream of the IAFs fighter corps. The IDF Chief-of-Staff, Lt. Gen. Rafael (Raful) Eitan, briefed the pilots personally. Displaying unusual emotion, he told them: “The alternative is our destruction”.
At 15:55 on 07 June 1981, the first F-15 and F-16’s roared off the runway from Etzion Air Force Base in the south. Israeli air force planes flew over Jordanian, Saudi, and Iraqi airspace After a tense but uneventful low-level navigation route, the fighters reached their target. They popped up at 17:35 and quickly identified the dome gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight. Iraqi defenses were caught by surprise and opened fire too late. In one minute and twenty seconds, the reactor lay in ruins.
So I guess a delay of 25 years isn’t good enough for him.
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I had met Raful Eitan back in 1993 when I was in Israel, but never got to ask him about Osirak. His actions made the Middle East far safer than it would have been had Saddam gotten the bomb. And the fact is that had Saddam gotten the bomb in the early 1980s, he might have used it first not on Israel, but on Iran with which it was locked in a bloody war (which saw repeated use of chemical weapons).