Bombing Iran Would Be Criminal Aggression

The Netanyahu government obviously doesn’t care if it tramples on international law and the U.N. Charter, but the rest of us should.

The Washington Post reports that Israel may attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in the first half of this year:

Israel is likely to attempt a strike on Iran’s nuclear program in the coming months in a preemptive attack [bold mine-DL] that would set back Tehran’s program by weeks or perhaps months but escalate tensions across the Middle East and renew the prospect of a wider regional conflagration, according to U.S. intelligence.

The Israeli government has been threatening to do this for decades, but this time they might follow through on their threat to launch a major unprovoked attack on Iranian territory. No state can lawfully use force against another in this way. If Israel launches such an attack, it will be committing an act of criminal aggression. The Netanyahu government obviously doesn’t care if it tramples on international law and the U.N. Charter, but the rest of us should.

The report refers to this as a “preemptive attack,” but that is wrong. It is important to remember that an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is absolutely not a preemptive attack in any sense. Preemption is when a state is acting to counter an imminent threat, and Iran’s nuclear facilities pose no such threat. Hawks have so distorted the meaning of preemption that it has become commonplace for supporters and even some opponents of preventive warfare to refer to this aggression as preemption.

The problem really started, as so many problems have, with the Bush administration. George W. Bush endorsed taking military action to eliminate threats before they existed, and then labeled his insane policy preemption. As the 2002 National Security Strategy put it, “To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” In this way, Bush and his allies embraced preventive warfare by calling it something else, and their dishonest branding stuck. That is how supporters of the illegal invasion of Iraq dressed up the war as “self-defense” when it was nothing of the sort.

There is no way that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities could be preemptive. For one thing, it isn’t a response to an imminent threat. For that matter, it isn’t a response to a threat at all. It’s a choice to attack another country years before it would have a deliverable weapon. This is all the more absurd when we know that the would-be attacker possesses dozens of nuclear weapons and therefore has little to fear from this imaginary Iranian arsenal in the first place.

One big reason that it can’t be preemptive is that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. Despite the best efforts of Iran hawks to provoke them into doing it, the Iranians are not working to develop nuclear weapons. The threat that the Israeli attack is supposed to be preventing doesn’t exist. The possible existence of a threat years in the future is not a justification for military action, and it certainly isn’t self-defense. On top of all that, Israeli military action makes it more likely that the Iranian government would finally decide to build nuclear weapons. Far from preempting anything, military action runs the risk of creating a threat that does not currently exist.

Attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities also risks triggering another round of hostilities between Iran and Israel. There is always a danger that the U.S. will either join that conflict from the start or be drawn into it. The Trump administration might very well be reckless enough to assist or participate in the attack, and in that case U.S. forces would immediately become targets for Iranian reprisals. The Iranian government might decide to hold the U.S. responsible for any Israeli attack since the U.S. is Israel’s principal patron and weapons supplier. If the U.S. permitted an Israeli attack, it would be putting American military personnel at risk even if U.S. forces weren’t directly involved in the bombing.

Unfortunately, Trump has publicly endorsed the idea of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the past. I doubt he will change his position on that. If Trump is presented with the option, I assume he would give the Israelis a green light to strike. That would be a disastrous error.

The U.S. ought to tell the Israeli government that an attack would be unwise, unnecessary, illegal, and unacceptable to Washington. Under no circumstances should the U.S. participate or help with in an attack on Iran. The U.S. should not bail Israel out if it goes ahead with an attack on its own.