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As Israel continues its dismantling of Hamas in Gaza, and proceeds with its ferocious assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the government in Jerusalem is also pondering when, and what, to strike in Iran, the puppetmaster of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, that has supplied all three of these malign proxies with money and weapons to attack Israel, and has itself launched its own missile attacks on Israel — 300 launched in April, and 180 ballistic missiles launched on October 1 — almost all of which were either intercepted or fell harmlessly in open areas. The attack on October 1 did result on damage to housing, but not to any military targets at Nevatim Airbase, save for one hole punched in the roof of one building.

The Biden administration insists that the Jewish state must avoid targeting nuclear facilities, even though Iran is believed by the most knowledgeable monitors of its nuclear program, including David Albright, founder and head of the Institute for Science and International Security, to be within a few weeks of being able to produce a nuclear weapon, should it decide to do so. Biden has also urged Israel “to reconsider” any plans to attack Iranian oil facilities, presumably including not just oil fields but also the terminals at Kharg Island, from which 90% of Iran’s oil is exported. Washington also wants to be kept informed about the IDF’s plans for dealing with Iran — a preposterous demand, considering our leaking ship of state.

But there are other voices of sober realism who remind us that the Iranian threat is not limited to Israel. Iranian-supported militias have launched attacks on American bases in Iraq and Syria. Iran has been an evil actor in Europe, providing Vladimir Putin with munitions, artillery shells, drones, as well as Fath and Shahid missiles. In the Red Sea, Iran supplies the Houthis in Yemen with missiles to hit ships and force 15% of the world’s seagoing vessels to change their routes from Asia to Europe; the ships that used to go up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal now must go round the Horn of Africa and up Africa’s western coast to Europe, a much longer and more expensive trip for such shipping. Iran provided support to the terrorists — “Hezbollah” had not yet announced itself — who launched an attack in Beirut in 1983, that resulted in the deaths of 220 American Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers, as well as of 58 French soldiers, all of them murdered while asleep in their barracks. Iran has been behind both a suicide attack in 1992 on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people were killed, and in 1994 another attack in the same city on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), killing 85 and injuring hundreds more. Iran’s tentacles, and those of its proxies, extend across the globe, from Moscow to Buenos Aires. In recent years, Hezbollah operatives have been caught preparing attacks as far afield as Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Cyprus, Egypt, Peru, and Thailand. Hezbollah weapons caches have been discovered in the Gulf, in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa.

Unlike our own current leadership, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre was forthright in his support for an Israeli attack on Iran, insisting that for Israel to prevent the “genocidal” Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons “would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”

At a press briefing he held outside Canada’s House of Commons on September 8, Poilievre said, “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship, that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people, to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing that the world could ever allow.”

And the former National Security Adviser in the Trump Administration, General H. R. McMaster, has gone even further than Pierre Poilievre. He thinks the Americans should not rely on Israel to do all the heavy lifting against Tehran, but should themselves consider launching their own strikes to destroy Iran’s key military programs, including its nuclear program. More on General McMaster’s view can be found here: “McMaster urges consideration of U.S. strikes on Iran,” by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, October 9, 2024:

Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said on Tuesday [Oct.8] that the U.S. should consider military strikes against Iran’s key military programs.

The former national security adviser, speaking on Tuesday at an Atlantic Council event moderated by NBC correspondent Courtney Kube, said that the U.S. should consider wiping out drone and missile factories inside Iran. Hearkening back to the mid-1990s, he said the U.S. should give serious consideration to military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.

When do the missile facilities, as well as the nuclear facilities — when are those options brought to the president?” McMaster, who served in the Trump administration from 2017-2018, said.

But he noted that any U.S. strikes must pursue clear strategic goals, including restoring deterrence; degrading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s capabilities to supply, communicate with and coordinate its proxies; and setting back Iran’s nuclear and missile programs….

Will General McMaster’s call for American attacks on Iran’s key military programs be heeded? Or will tiny and embattled Israel, its hands already full with dismantling Hamas in Gaza and, even more, with fighting Hezbollah with its huge arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles, be expected to take on as well the task of removing the Iranian regime’s nuclear threat all by itself? And if Israel finds it must do so alone, will Washington supply it with all the weaponry, including the 30,000 pound bunker-buster bombs — Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs — that would be required to destroy nuclear facilities built inside a mountain at Fordow, or underground elsewhere? Or will the Americans attempt to dissuade the Jewish state from such an attack by withholding such weapons? In arguing that the United States itself should take part in an attack on Iran’s military assets, including its nuclear program, General McMaster has made an important contribution to the debate.