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Intelligence reports about Iran's capacity to
produce nuclear weapons aimed at Israel are becoming
ominous. Unless diplomatic pressure causes the
Iranian mullahs to stop the project, Iran may be
ready to deliver nuclear bombs against Israeli
civilian targets within a few short years. Some
Iranian leaders, such as former president Hashemi
Rafsanjani, have made it clear that this is
precisely what they intend to do. Killing 5 million
Jews would be worth losing 15 million Iranians in a
retaliatory Israeli strike, according to
Rafsanjani's calculations.
No democracy can wait until such a threat against
its civilian population is imminent. Israel has the
right, under international law, to protect its
civilians from a nuclear holocaust, and that right
must include pre-emptive military action of the sort
taken by Israel against the Iraqi nuclear reactor at
Osirak in 1981 — which resulted in only one death.
Thousands of lives — Israeli, American and Kurd —
were almost certainly spared by Israel's pro-active
strike. Imagine what danger American troops would
have faced during the first Gulf War if the Iraqi
military had developed nuclear weapons. Still,
Israel was unanimously condemned by the United
Nations Security Council, with the United States
joining in the condemnation. Today, most reasonable
people look to Israel's surgical attack against the
Osirak nuclear reactor as the paradigm of
proportional pre-emption, despite the Security
Council's condemnation. (Many forget that Iran
actually attacked the Iraqi reactor before Israel
did, but failed to destroy it.)
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice recently
said that history has vindicated the Israeli strike,
but she declined to say whether the United States
would support an Osirak-type attack by Israel
against Iranian nuclear facilities. Although she
declared earlier this month that the United States
and its allies "cannot allow the Iranians to develop
a nuclear weapon," current international law — at
least as defined by the U.N. — preclude a democracy
threatened with nuclear annihilation from taking
proportional, preventive military action to
dissipate the threat to its civilians.
Under this benighted view, the United States would
not be able to take proactive steps against
terrorist groups that threaten our civilians. We
would have to wait until the terrorists attacked us
first, even if they were suicide bombers. This
unrealistic perversion of international law must be
changed quickly to take into account situations in
which deterrence simply cannot be counted on to
work. Democracies must be authorized to take
pre-emptive military actions against grave threats
to their survival or to their civilian population.
Current international law is woefully inadequate for
the task of preventing the deployment of weapons of
mass destruction. It requires that the threat be
immediate, as it was when Israel pre-empted an
imminent coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria in
1967.
But the threat posed by the future development of
nuclear weapons does not fit this anachronistic
criterion. It is the nature of the threat — the
potential for mass casualties and an irreversible
shift in the balance of power — that justifies the
use of preventive self-defense with regard to the
Iranian threat. International law must be amended to
reflect this reality, but it is unlikely that any
such changes will take place if it is seen as
benefiting Israel.
Although military pre-emption has gotten a bad name
among some following the attack on Iraq, it must
remain an option in situations where deterrence is
unrealistic and the threat is sufficiently serious.
If the Iranian nuclear facilities were located in
one place, away from any civilian population center,
it would be moral — and, under any reasonable regime
of international law, legal — for Israel to destroy
them. (Whether it would be tactically wise is
another question.) But the ruthless Iranian
militants have learned from the Iraqi experience
and, according to recent intelligence reports,
deliberately have spread its nuclear facilities
around the country, including in heavily populated
areas. This would force Israel into a terrible
choice: Either allow Iran to complete its production
of nuclear bombs aimed at the Jewish state's
civilian population centers, or destroy the
facilities despite the inevitability of Iranian
civilian casualties.
The laws of war prohibit the bombing of civilian
population centers, even in retaliation against
attacks on cities, but they permit the bombing of
military targets, including nuclear facilities. By
deliberately placing nuclear facilities in the midst
of civilian population centers, the Iranian
government has made the decision to expose its
civilians to attacks, and it must assume all
responsibility for any casualties caused by such
attacks. Israel, the United States and other
democracies always locate their military facilities
away from population centers, precisely in order to
minimize danger to their civilians. Iran does
precisely the opposite, because its leaders realize
that decent democracies — unlike indecent tyrannies
— would hesitate to bomb a nuclear facility located
in an urban center.
Israel, with the help of the United States, should
try everything short of military action first:
diplomacy, threats, bribery, sabotage, targeted
killings of individuals essential to the Iranian
nuclear program and other covert actions. But if all
else fails, Israel, or the United States, must be
allowed under international law to take out the
Iranian nuclear threat before it is capable of the
genocide for which it is being built.
Alan Dershowitz is the author of "America on Trial"
(Warner Books) and "The Case for Israel" (John Wiley
& Sons, 2003).
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