The Israeli political and media elite are war-hungry fools, writes Bernard Avishai:
As I write, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mainly young Iranians are deciding whether or not to risk going out into the streets. There is little someone like myself can add regarding the poignancy of their decision. Yet one thing seems obvious: a generation of Iranians has been changed by these rallies–changed in roughly the opposite way they would have been had Israeli military intelligence got its way, and won American and IDF agreement to an aerial strike on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.
Even in the face of mass protest, not only did Mossad chief Meir Dagan refuse to admit the obvious–that an attack would have caused widespread carnage, put Iran on a war footing, and preempted its twittering liberalism–but he’s had the audacity to predict to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee what nobody could possibly know at this point, that the protests will peter out; that, anyway, a Mousavi government would be worse than Ahmadinejad‘s regime, for it would give Iran’s nuclear program a prettier face. (“To hell with those students; the PowerPoint is done.”)