Is Israel about to attack Iran?
Last week’s “Spectator” magazine made its cover feature an article by Douglas Davis with the title “Israel will do whatever it takes to stop another holocaust”. Davis argued that sometime in the next 12 months, and maybe sooner rather than later, Israel is likely to launch an attack – probably nuclear – in an attempt to cripple Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The thinking is that Iran’s nuclear programme is intended to create nuclear weapons and not simply civilian power and that the country is approaching what Israel (and the USA) sees as “the point of no return” – that stage when Iran starts producing weapons-grade uranium . To stop the process, Israel would have to destroy Iran’s centrifuges which are buried deep underground, requiring a nuclear strike to disrupt them.
I hope that this attack does not happen for two reasons.
First, as Roger Howard explained in an article this week in the “Guardian”:
” ..what is certain is that the use of military force against Tehran would be an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved, not just the civilians incinerated in such an attack. Not only would military strikes be unlikely to knock out targets that are well dispersed and defended, they would provoke deadly retaliation by Tehran’s proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan against British and US servicemen; the price of oil would rocket, particularly if Iranian commanders retaliated by disrupting tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; and throughout in the Muslim world and beyond massive popular reaction could well bring down pro-western regimes.”
Second, I’m planning to visit Israel for this first time this Easter and i’d like to make the trip in the absence of another war in the Middle East.