Today on CNN, Fareed Zakaria, host of the Fareed Zakaria GPS show and former editor of Foreign Affairs, raised the issue of the possibility of an “October Surprise” in the Middle East -an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities with his guests: Irshad Manji, an award-winning journalist, human rights advocate and author of the international bestseller, The Trouble With Islam Today: A WAke-Up CAll for Honesty and Change; Bret Stephens, a writer and news commentator for the Wall Street Journal and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post; and Gideon Rose, the current Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs.

Bret Stephens, familiar with the Israeli political scene and with poppular Israeli attitudes and fears towards the Iranian mullah regime, opined that if there were to be such a surprise, it would rather be a “November surprise”, close on the heels of the US Presidential elections -and that it would only take place if Senator Obama were to become President-Elect.  He stated that while neither the Israeli political class nor the Israeli citizens as a whole would passively acquiesce to Iran’s acquistion of nuclear capabilities, they would trust a President McCain to deal decisively with such a threat and eliminate it by force, if necessary; whereas they believed that a President Obama would finally accomodate himself with the reality of Iran as a nuclear power and attempt to negotiate some kind of “grand bargain” with Iranian President Ahmedinejad. Should Senator Obama win in November, the Israelis would only have a three-month window of opportunity to attack Iran and eliminate an existential nuclear threat whilst still benefitting from a friendly US government in the Bush White House and strike then, if at all.

Irshad Manji focused on the volatile Israeli political scene, where the recent resignation of Prime Minister Omert, deeply wounded by the disastrous Lebanon campaign of 2006 as well as by corruption investigations in his fun-raising practices, led to his replacement by Tzipi Livni, his former Foreign Affairs Minister and the first woman to hold that post since Golda Meir.  In order to consolidate her position, Ms. Livni would have to first run and win the leadership of her own party, Kadima, then prepare herself for a tough election against two former Prime Ministers, Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Labour’s Ehud Barak. In these circumstances, Ms. Nanji thought it rather imporbable that an acting Prime Minister facing two tough elections would take the risk of engaging in a military action against Iran with potentially global consequences.

Gideon Rose, finally, made a connection between such a possiblity and Georgia’s recent conflict with Russia, where the US failed to restrain Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in “annoying” its powerful neighbour and triggering a conflict which brought US-Russian elections to its worst moment since the end of the Cold War.  Mr. Rose commented that the Bush government could not afford to have a second major geopolitical crisis triggered by one of its close allies within six months without appearing not only incompetent, but increasingly powerless to reign in its surrogates, and would therefore do its outmost to dissuade Israel to take such a step and potentially engage the US in a third major conflict in the Middle East for which it would not be prepared either militarily or politically.

Bret Stephens is in all likelihood closest to the mark. A lame-duck President Bush would hardly have the ability to reign in a determined acting Prime Minister Livni, convinced not only of the existential and immediate threat a nuclear Iran would pose to the continued survival of Israel and of its citizens, but also of the fact that any sign of weakness or hesitation on her part to agressively devend Israel’s vital national interests and security would open the door wide to the Prime Ministership to either Barak or, more likely, Netanyahu.  Whereas a McCain victory would offer her enough political cover to justify delaying any strike against Iran, Senator Obama’s election would have the opposite effect and leave her little choice other than attacking during the remaining months of the Bush Administration. From here to make the argument that an Obama victory in November would likely trigger an Israeli-Iranian conflagration with explosive geopolitical consequences there is but a very small step. As Mearsheimer and Walt recently noted, Israel’s perspective is that “Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Israel would like Washington to solve this problem, but Israeli leaders do not rule out the possibility that the Israeli Defense Forces might try to do the job if the Americans got cold feet” (J.J. Mearsheimer and S.M. Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Penguin, 2007, at p. 284).

Lost in this conversation is any in-depth analysis of the extent to which the Israeli Defense Forces are at all prepared to carry out, in the wake of the significant setback of the Lebanon campaign of 2006, such a momentous strike, compared to which the June 1981 attack against Iraq’s Osirak Nuclear plant would seem a simple weekend exercise; and whether the US military, already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, could either support Israel in case of an Iranian / Arab counterattack or actually carry out the Iranian strike itself in return for an Israeli promise of non-interference similar to that given (and kept) in the First Iraqi War of 1990-1991.

(To be continued)