Netanyahu’s dream was a US war with Iran. It is now Israel's nightmare: Opinion
By rights, this should be a moment of sweet joy for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The work of 40 years is finally coming to fruition: the goal of “destroying” all the Middle East “terror states” is close at hand.
Netanyahu has followed a single strategy for around 40 years, outlined in a book he wrote in 1986 called Terrorism: How the West Can Win (currently £143 or $187 on Amazon UK).
In it, Netanyahu defined terrorism as the "deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends” - a pretty accurate description of what Israel has done in Gaza for the last year and is now doing to Lebanon.
Netanyahu’s theory of “fighting terror” relies, first and foremost, on the use of force. As he explained in a Congressional hearing in 2002 in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
Less than entirely convinced of Netanyahu’s faith that regime change would bring a flowering of peace and stability across the region, Representative John Tierney, a more critical voice than you are likely to hear in the sycophantic Congress of today, responded: “Is that speculation on your part or do you have some evidence?”
Netanyahu was unfazed: “I was asked the same question in 1986. I had written a book in which I said the way to deal with terrorist regimes, with terror, was to apply military force against them.”
“The way we did in Afghanistan?” responded Tierney.
“What we saw was something else,” the then-Israeli foreign minister replied. “First of all, we saw everybody streaming out of Afghanistan; the second thing we saw was many Arab countries, Muslim countries trying to side with America, trying to be OK with America.”
Afghanistan became a 20-year war that ended in failure. However, Netanyahu’s comments about the Arab states were not entirely without merit. The more the Israelis and the Americans tore through the Middle East, from Iraq to Lebanon, Libya and Syria, the more the remaining pro-western Arab states drew closer to the US and Israel.
Read more: Netanyahu’s dream was a US war with Iran. It is now Israel's nightmare: Opinion by Joe Gill
