The technicalities were formidable, including the need to fly over Iraq and refuel in the air. Israel’s bombardment of South Lebanon showed, he argued, how you could mount strikes for weeks and miss the essential targets. A single Israeli strike would immediately provoke Iran to withdraw from arms control treaties, rush to make a nuclear weapon, bolster hardliners and retaliate in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq (where it was certainly capable of forming a short-term alliance with al-Qaeda).
“No one in the world would believe that Israel acted without US permission,” he argued. “What Israel would do with its one strike is take us [the US] to war,” he said, and no US president would welcome that.
Instead, he recommended that the new Obama team acknowledges the big difference between Iran acquiring the skills and material to make a bomb, and actually making it. This is an increasingly popular distinction among Iran analysts in Washington, recognising that it may be impossible to stop the first, and that, for all the reasons Professor Sick laid out, military action by the US or Israel is deeply unattractive.
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