by mike Evans
MDE:
Would you describe what a dirty bomb is and what kind of damage that could do in a high-population area?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
You can bring a dirty bomb to any city using maritime cargo or air cargo or ground cargo. It doesn’t matter. It might be brought by ship, by airplane, or by truck to be used in a very highly populated urban area like a city anywhere. It might be Tel Aviv, it might be Berlin, it might be New York. And, of course, to cause devastating collateral damage—to kill as many civilians as they can—but to contain it to a certain area like a big city.
MDE:
Our worst horror was 9/11—and we know the number of deaths. Just approximately what would be a rough number [of casualties] if a dirty bomb went off in a highly populated city?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
It might be dozens of thousands; it might be hundreds of thousands of casualties. It depends on the quantity of the materials in a dirty bomb.
MDE:
If Iran is not stopped and they go nuclear, then are you saying that they cannot be stopped—or, if they were stopped, what consequences would that take?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
I believe that in one way or another they should be stopped. They shouldn’t have nuclear capability. I prefer that a military option would be the last resort. We haven’t experienced yet the political and economic option. It should be used early on—and I prefer that by not using the political and economic option—which means political isolation and economic sanctions—we will have to use the military option. I’m talking about the West—like my people—and no doubt Iran will respond to any option. They even might respond to economic sanctions, not talking about military option. They might respond using proxies, terror organizations—special Iranian apparatus—to execute terror attacks against certain targets.
Appendix H
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH
ALAN DERSHOWITZ
Alan Dershowitz is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,” “the top lawyer of last resort,” and “America’s most public Jewish defender.” He is also a prolific writer whose editorials and commentaries appear in a variety of magazines, newspapers, and online. He is also the author of twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including six best sellers, among them The Case for Israel and Why Terrorism Works.
MDE:
Israel is in a great crisis, and you’ve read many books that relate to this subject. One of them has to do with preemption. Talk to me about the Iran crisis—as Israel is faced with it—and the consequences of it as it relates to Israel and the United States.
Prof.Dershowitz:
Iran is the big winner of the most recent crisis in the Middle East. Israel lost many civilians and soldiers. The Lebanese lost civilians, and Hezbollah lost soldiers. Iran lost no one. They gained power, they gained influence, and I think they tried very hard to send a message to the United States and to Israel that their nuclear facilities are invulnerable to attack because they have figured out a strategy for how to fight moral democracies. You hide behind your own civilians. You build a nuclear facility and then you put a hospital on top of it. You build a nuclear facility and you build a school on top of it, and you challenge the democracies. Either kill our children, our weak, our elderly, and get condemned by the United Nations, or leave us alone. What Israel tried to do in Lebanon is get to the Hezbollah fighters without killing civilians, but inevitably some civilians die in the process. In every war civilians die.
Our greatest generation in the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and in other parts of the world where we were fighting in Japan—but Israel is held to a very different standard. Every time Israel kills a single civilian it becomes a first page story, a UN issue, and the blame is not put on those who deserve the blame, namely Hezbollah or Hamas, who hide behind civilians and basically induce Israel to kill them. The blame falls on Israel. So this is the beginning essentially of a new one-hundred-year war that will go beyond my children and my grandchildren’s lives—a war between terrorist tyrannies and moral democracies.
This method of fighting couldn’t work with an immoral democracy. If anybody ever tried this with Russia, Russia would simply do what they’re doing in Chechnya. They would carpetbomb the cities and kill as many civilians as necessary to get at the one military target. It never would’ve worked with Stalin. It never would’ve worked with Hitler. It wouldn’t work with China today. It wouldn’t work with many of the nations in the world. It only works with a moral democracy like Israel and the United States.
MDE:
Now in light of that, how serious of a threat is Iran to the United States?
Prof.Dershowitz:
Iran is a major, major threat to the United States. Iran, if it’s not stopped, will get a nuclear bomb, and it will use that nuclear bomb to blackmail America and other countries. Imagine if Iraq had a nuclear bomb when they went into Kuwait. They’d be in Kuwait today and they’d still be in power—Saddam Hussein and his sons. A nuclear weapon, whether used or hung, is the sword of Damocles—it changes the entire structure and balance of power—and an Iran with a nuclear bomb—especially an Iran more than North Korea, because North Korea’s leaders don’t want to die; they are secularists, and you can deter people who don’t want to die—but many of Iran’s leaders welcome death. They are part of the culture of death. They see life on Earth as only a segue to paradise with their seventy-two virgins—or whatever the rewards are going to be—and it’s very hard to deter a culture that welcomes death. So Iran would be a great threat to the United States.
As Tom Friedman once said, “If terrorists are not stopped in the Middle East, they’re coming to a theater near you”—and they’re coming to the United States, to Europe, selectively in Europe. The French make their own deals, but most other Western European countries are vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear threat.
MDE:
In the latest crisis in Lebanon, it was obvious that they were subcontractors—Hezbollah were subcontractors, the right arm of Iran—but the media by and large exploited that to the advantage of Iran and did not have any sense of moral clarity and didn’t see Jews suffering. Why? Why is that propensity?
Prof.Dershowitz:
The president of Iran is a clever man. He recently had an interview with Mike Wallace where he in many respects bested Mike Wallace—came across as a reasonable, charming person. He is, of course, the new Adolf Hitler without the means currently to do what Adolf Hitler did, but he and his surrogates have basically said their goal is to destroy Israel.
The head of Hezbollah said a couple of years ago that he hopes that all the Jews come to Israel—that will make Hezbollah’s job easier in the sense that they can destroy all the Jews in Israel. They won’t have to chase them around the world the way Hitler had to do.
The goal of Hezbollah, the goal of Hamas, the goal of Iran is not a two-state solution. It’s not peace in the Middle East. It’s the end of Israel and the end of all Western influences in the Middle East—and indeed in the world. This is an apocalyptic war between reason and democracy on the one hand, and between Islamic extremism and tyranny on the other hand—and it’s a battle that will be fought to the death certainly by the Islamic extremists now headed by Iran.
MDE:
When the president of Iran says, “I see the world without Zionism and without America”—does he mean it?
Prof.Dershowitz:
He means it as much as Adolf Hitler meant it. The president of Iran would like to see a world without Zionism—without a crusader mentality—without Western values over which he is the dictator of a fourth Reich. That is what he would like to see. Can he accomplish it? Not without a nuclear weapon—but with a nuclear weapon there are almost no limits to what he could do because he
will hide his nuclear weapons among civilians. We in the West, because of our moral code, will not bomb hospitals. We will not bomb day centers for children. We will not bomb schools. They will bomb anything, and it’s very hard to fight an asymmetrical battle. You always hear about asymmetrical battles between Western armies that are more powerful and terrorist armies that are less powerful. There’s a new form of asymmetry in warfare that is much more powerful, and that is the asymmetry of morality.
If you have an amoral and an immoral society willing to sacrifice their own children and their own hospital patients, their own aged people to the war, and you have another culture, Western democracy, that will not willfully kill children, will not willfully kill the elderly, will not willfully kill uninvolved civilians—that’s asymmetrical.
When Israel was threatened with an Iraqi nuclear reactor, they said very clearly, “We are not at war with the children of Baghdad. We will not bomb Baghdad. We will not destroy a nuclear reactor if it means killing the children of Baghdad.” And Golda Meir put it also very, very well when she said, “We can perhaps forgive the terrorists for killing our children but we can never forgive them for making us kill their children.” Countries like Israel and the United States will do anything to avoid killing children, whereas the tyrannical regimes of terrorism will do anything to kill children—they figured out this cruel arithmetic of death.
Every time the terrorists kill a civilian, they win. Every time the terrorists get the democracies to kill a child, they win. It’s a win/win for the terrorists, it’s a lose/lose for the democracies, and it’s all because of the asymmetry of morality.
MDE:
Who is winning the bigger battle in the media as far as Iraq?
Prof.Dershowitz:
Well, there’s no question that Iran and its terrorist surrogates are winning the media war. They’re winning the media war because today, unlike in the Second World War, every civilian casualty is featured on the evening news—the picture of the dead child, the picture of the weeping woman. Imagine if those media images had existed during the Second World War. Every time the United States bombed a facility, a nuclear facility as the British and United States did in Norway to prevent the development of nuclear bombs—every time we bombed a military facility anywhere in Germany, there would be pictures of dead German children and weeping German mothers. It would be almost impossible for the United States to carry out its military activities.
The Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas have learned how to use the media and how to use the United Nations—which is a democracy of tyrannies. Namely, every tyranny gets one vote at the General Assembly, and as Abba Eban once put it, “If the Algerians introduced a resolution to the General Assembly that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would win 124/22 with thirty-six abstentions,” and you could figure out which countries would be on which side. When the case involving the Israeli security fence went before the General Assembly, virtually every country that voted to send the matter to the International Court of Justice was a tyranny, and virtually every country that voted against the court having jurisdiction was a democracy—and yet the tyrannies outvoted the majorities.
And so the combination of the United Nations—the democracy of tyrannies—coupled with the media, which focuses always on the pictures of the civilian casualties, coupled with the fact that Israel is an open society and allows the media full reign, whereas Iran is a closed society, Hezbollah is a closed society, Hamas is a closed society. So the media images are always going to be more powerfully used against Israel than against its terrorist enemies.
MDE:
In your book The Case for Israel, you talk about why terrorism works and you use the analogy about how Arafat did it. There seems to be an enormous similarity between what’s happening now and what happened then.
Prof.Dershowitz:
Yasser Arafat is the godfather of modern terrorism. He figured out how to use terrorism to his advantage. I didn’t say to the advantage of the Palestinian people, because I don’t think in the end it worked to the advantage of the Palestinian people, but it certainly worked to Arafat’s personal advantage and allowed him to accumulate billions of dollars in payments, basically extortion payments, made by Europe into his own bank accounts—but Arafat figured out how to use terrorism to gain publicity.
The destruction of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich was not the first but perhaps the most publicized. The destruction of airplanes in flight—the blowing up of the Swiss airliner, the attempt to blow up El Al planes, the destruction of four planes on the tarmac in Jordan—all of that brought tremendous attention to the situation of the Palestinians—much more than, for example, to the situation of the Kurds who never use this kind of international terrorism, or the Tibetans who never use terrorism at all—and the Kurds and the Tibetans’ situation in the world today is ignored, whereas the Palestinian situation is highlighted because of their use of terrorism. So they figured out how to use terrorism, and they also figured out how to hide behind civilians and make it difficult for democracies with their high moral standards to get at the terrorists—and that paradigm continues to haunt Western democracies today.
MDE:
In your book Preemption, you talk about how the United States tends to look toward its experience. What are the American people thinking when they see the Iran crisis in its present form, as opposed to how you’ve explained how Iran is thinking?
Prof.Dershowitz:
For Iran, this has been a great victory. It’s been muscle flexing; it’s been thumbing a nose at the West—but for Americans, Iran is very far away. Most Americans don’t understand why Iran poses this great threat. After all, they’re so many thousands of miles away. We don’t have soldiers in Iran since the hostages were released twenty-five years ago. We’ve never really lost anybody to Iran, so it’s very hard to create an interest in a problem that’s so distant.
It reminds me again of what was going on in Nazi
Germany in the early 1930s, when Americans were not concerned and isolationist candidates were winning and it was very hard for President Roosevelt to energize the American people to get them concerned about what was going on in Europe at the time—and we better learn the lesson of having ignored Nazism.
The preventative war that was in the middle 1930s—before Hitler became the most powerful figure with the most powerful army in the world—he could’ve been prevented. Winston Churchill said he could’ve been prevented—and most interestingly, so did many of the Nazis themselves. They were shocked that the West, that France, that England, that the United States didn’t attack them when they violated the Versailles Treaty and when they threatened to kill the Jews of the world. We didn’t take them seriously. We didn’t take them at face value—and the potential need for a preventive strike against Iran if they were on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon is also, I think, today being widely ignored in the West.
One of the reasons I personally was against the war in Iraq—for me it was a very close question, but I came out against it—was because I thought it would divert attention away from Iran, which posed a much more serious threat because religious extremism is always more dangerous than secular extremism. I also worried about the rule of unintended consequences—that the tyranny of Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a tyranny of radical Islamists—and unfortunately those fears have come to fruition and the United States probably today does not have the resources—or the incentive—to take as seriously Iran as we would’ve been able to had we not been bogged down today in Iraq. So I think there is a real crisis ahead of us.
MDE:
The generals in Israel see the military action as a success as it relates to long-range missiles, medium-range missiles, destroying Iran’s infrastructure, military infrastructure, and retaliating. From that aspect they consider it a success. But before Ehud Olmert was able to get anywhere near the Litani River, the United States rushed to the UN to pressure Israel into a quick ceasefire with Hezbolla
h. Why?
Prof.Dershowitz:
I think that the United States expected Israel to be able to disarm Hezbollah more quickly and more effectively, and Israel was caught between a rock and a hard place. In fact, the world today is divided in its criticism of Israel. Everybody is critical of Israel, but many people say Israel didn’t do enough and many people say Israel did too much. Nobody thinks—except perhaps some of the generals in Israel—that Israel did just about the right thing. I think the United States in some respects thought it did too little in the beginning of the war and then, with all the civilian casualties, too much by the end of the war, and it felt the necessity to finally bring it to a halt. I think there were a lot of disappointed people in the American Pentagon—in the American State Department—that Israel was not able to disarm Hezbollah, but the only way Israel could’ve disarmed Hezbollah would’ve been by inflicting more civilian casualties.
Now let’s remember that the total number of real civilian casualties inflicted by Israel during the fight in Lebanon was probably less than five hundred. The number being given by the Lebanese is over one thousand—but when you include among those Hezbollah fighters, active Hezbollah collaborators, active volunteer human shields who stayed behind, people who were prevented from leaving because of Hezbollah, the number of actual civilians for whom Israel bears any, any degree of responsibility—and I don’t think they do deserve moral responsibility; it was Hezbollah’s fault—is probably below five hundred.
