I think Bibi Netanyahu is one of the smartest guys around. He continues to prove that intelligence a conversation he had with James Taranto, recounted in the Opinion Journal.
To begin with, Netanyahu has grasped a playground principle that seems to elude others; namely, that when you cave to a bully, the bully doesn’t back off, he pushes harder:
For the 57-year-old Mr. Netanyahu, there is a sort of grim vindication in such attacks. He quit the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in August 2005, objecting to Mr. Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. “I had a very big argument with him on this,” Mr. Netanyahu recalls. “He thought that we would have the right of free action–that we would garner international support for any reaction. I thought that is a very thin sheet of ice–the international community can turn against you as quickly as it turns for you–but the overwhelming fact is that the Muslim militants and Iran will find a new base, a few miles from Tel Aviv, with the ability to cover the south of the country and the center of the country with rockets.”
Five years earlier, Ehud Barak, Mr. Netanyahu’s successor as prime minister, had similarly withdrawn from southern Lebanon, creating a safe haven for Hezbollah, which has periodically rocketed cities in Israel’s north. In both cases, Mr. Netanyahu says, Israel’s leaders were “captivated by a concept, and the concept was that we purchase security from retreat, from withdrawals–that is, that the way to stop the attacks on us is to placate our enemies by unilaterally withdrawing from territory under our control, thereby robbing them of the pretext to attack us. In fact, this was interpreted exactly in the opposite manner. . . . It was interpreted not as a sign of strength but as a show of weakness.”
Bibi also agrees that there is a third way to get to Iran, and that is to destroy it economically:
The Iranian regime, he argues, is economically vulnerable. He is in America to urge state and local pension funds to divest from foreign companies that do business in Iran (U.S. law already keeps American firms out).
“This could be very effective,” he tells me, “because Iran is in desperate need of new investments for its sagging oil industry. It’s curtailed its oil production by 7%, I think, in each of the last three years. It’s running unemployment to a rate of close to 20%, and Ahmadinejad is continuously being criticized from rivals within the regime and outside the regime for failing to deliver on economic problems.”
Divestment “could stop Iran dead in its tracks,” Mr. Netanyahu argues. “We’re talking about several dozen companies . . . that are propping up the energy sector in Iran and a few other relevant sectors. They are eminently susceptible to stock prices. Their chief executives are compensated by stock prices. Divestment depresses stock prices and immediately forces reconsideration.” This in turn would squeeze “Iranian economic elites,” who Mr. Netanyahu says are motivated by money, not ideology. “That elite funds and finances a lot of politicians, and when they see their own holdings and their own businesses endangered, they’ll put pressure to either block the nuclear program or to change the regime.”
Mr. Netanyahu believes Americans across the political spectrum could unite behind the principle that “a regime that promotes genocide cannot receive American taxpayers’ savings . . . through European intermediaries.” And the idea is catching on.
Bibi’s not the first one to point out how fragile the Iranian economy is and I find it peculiar that people aren’t embracing the same kind of divestment that they used so proudly against South Africa. Okay, I take it back. I don’t find it peculiar at all. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle means that many who are blinded by hatred of America and Israel are going to willingly sacrifice their own self-interest if they think they can humiliate America and Israel. So, rather than take down an exceptionally brutal government that hopes to obtain nuclear weapons by which it can control all of the Middle East and Europe, they’re going to cavil that the U.S. is mean to Iran and just needs to be nicer to it.
You can read everything Bibi had to say here. You may not agree with his conclusions, but I think they’re all credible.
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/04/28/State/Florida_looks_to_lead.shtml
The only valid reason for withdrawing from those territories, is to allow the enemy to feel confident, group together, and then you annihilate the entire region from the face of the Earth now that you have them in one location and they aren’t intermingled with Israelis.
Retreat if not combined with a counter-attack, means nothing. Nothing positive that is. Israel should always start their retreats and start their attacks, NEVER portraying themselves as attacking or retreating as a result of Pales attacks.
If they want to attack, they should make sure that it is on their terms, and that even if the Palestinians stopped rocket attacks, the attacks still would occur.
But the international media has the Israelis trained, and so has the elites in israel have jews trained there. They have them trained to think that it is bad to attack the Palestinians and never let up, never give truces, never warn the civilians, and so forth. They have them trained that it is a Nazi thing to annihilate whole geographic swatches of regions. And this is the result.
Book, the US has the power to blockade the Straits and 100% starve Iran’s economy, while at the same time reducing Iran’s naval strength to zero through combined Naval, Army, Marines, and Air Force strikes against Iranian docks and facilities, ships and whatever else they got in their arsenal.
Even the credible threat of this would make businesses get out of Iran, Book. But!! You know, it won’t work, either as a threat or as an attack, if nobody believes you are going to do it. And Bush doesn’t believe he will do it because… he won’t do it. So there is that.
Does anyone have a sense of which companies are investing in Iran?
An Iranian friend of mine who fled the country in 1979 and has been unable to go back is forever carping about the Europeans. I am sure he is correct and that the Europeans are some of the major investors in Iran but I have never heard actual names of companies.
And maybe I am not remembering this correctly but wasn’t there some sort of discovery a couple of years back that some U.S. companies had violated the law and invested in Iran anyway?
Deana