Israeli Retaliation vs. Restraint
On Jan. 22, 1991, Middle East king thug Saddam Hussein launched a flurry of Scud missiles into a Tel Aviv neighborhood. There were over a hundred Israeli casualties, including several deaths.
“The attack on Israel, the most destructive launched by the Iraqis in six days of war, demolished apartment buildings and storefronts,” reported the Washington Post. “The Israeli deaths, all apparently from heart attacks, also raised the issue of whether Israel’s government, widely praised for not retaliating after two earlier Scud attacks, would now strike back.”
The Bush White House condemned Iraq’s “brutal act of terror against innocent victims.” It also commended Israel for “remarkable restraint in the face of this aggression.”
Why did Saddam do this? Because the United States a week earlier had sent troops into Kuwait to liberate that country from the Iraqi invasion in August 1990. The cynical Saddam responded with an attack not on America but Israel. The Bush administration had assembled against Iraq an extraordinary coalition of nearly 30 countries, including much of the Arab world, which didn’t like Saddam Hussein. But the Arabs also didn’t like Jews. Saddam hoped that by attacking Israel, he would bring Arabs to his side. And indeed, right on cue, Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank stood on their rooftops cheering as Saddam’s Scuds soared overhead.
No better way to unite the Arab brethren than through a little Jew-stomping.
Saddam further hoped to fracture President George H. W. Bush’s fragile Arab coalition by provoking Israel to respond to Saddam’s Scud attacks. If Israel suddenly joined the precarious U.S. allied coalition, the whole thing might collapse. Thus it was imperative for the United States to keep Israel from responding. But alas, that would be a tough sell to the Israeli leadership, especially to conservative Likud leader Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. And yet, that pitch was made, delivered personally by Vice President Dan Quayle. (Quayle, incidentally, is a longtime friend of this publication and especially its founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., dating back to their Indiana days in the early 1970s. Also an early friend was Vice President Quayle’s chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who started writing for this magazine at age 16 in the late 1960s.)
In an extraordinary diplomatic effort for which he never got due credit (I wrote about it in a 2000 book on the vice presidency), Quayle successfully convinced the Israeli leadership to let the United States handle Saddam. We even provided batteries of Patriot anti-missiles to shoot down Saddam’s Scuds. These were, in effect, an early version of Israel’s Iron Dome.
I mention this now for obvious reasons. The Biden administration is urging the current Israeli leadership not to respond to Iran’s unprecedented attack last weekend with a direct hit on Iranian territory; they don’t want to escalate the dangerous situation. So far, Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu and his team have indeed showed restraint, restricting their response to Hezbollah targets outside Iran.
On the other hand, many are urging Israel not to be so cautious. What Iran did was outrageous and merits a stronger response. Sen. Marco Rubio says that Biden’s telling Israel not to respond will merely “encourage” Iran. Walter Russell Mead argues that Netanyahu’s taking Biden’s advice would be “political suicide” for himself and “national suicide” for his country.
Though I’m sympathetic to these arguments, it does seem that perhaps the Iranians expected their flurry of drones and ballistic missiles to be ineffective — to be intercepted by Israel’s defenses and the assistance of allies like the United States and even neighboring Jordan (which has long had a majority Palestinian population). The pathetic Iranians threw about 300 punches and barely landed a lick.
By this thinking, the Iranians did what they did because they otherwise would be seen as weak had they not responded to the killing of their military leader by Israeli forces in Syria two weeks ago. Thus, they warned the world of an imminent attack, fired their shots, killed no one, and then waved the white flag, saying, “We’re finished.”
That would mean that perhaps Israel is finished, too. That is to say, Israel might not do anything as dramatic as major strikes on Iranian territory. Or perhaps Israel might strategically hit some Iranian sites with the intention of sending signals but avoiding deaths. That might be Israel’s preferred response.
We shall see how this plays out. I know this much: None of us want a wider war in the Middle East. A major, direct, hot war between Israel and Iran, fought not by proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas but man-to-man between Jews and Persians, is something to be avoided.
READ MORE:
Iran’s Tactics and Targets Open a New Chapter in the War
Hitler’s Meeting With Grand Mufti Shows War in Middle East Is About Hatred of Jews
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