Bomb Bomb Iran?

Iran gave the IAEA the finger today. There's really no reason to expect the Iranians will give up their nuclear program. There's no political constituency that would prefer cooperating with Israel to producing their own nukes. By continuing the program, Ahmadinejad risks an air strike by Israel, but this would probably be a net positive for him, as it would completely eliminate the domestic protest movement.

The ball is really in Israel's court -- they will need to decide whether air strikes will be worth the retaliation. Their decision will depend on how effective they believe the air strikes would be. If it were an Osirak situation, where an air strike effectively ended the Iraqi nuclear program, I think Israel would do it in a second. Iran's program is much more distributed and protected. Whether a strike will seriously set back their nuclear ambitions has to do with a lot of technical factors that civilians don't know about.

Would Israel really suffer that much in retaliation? Their neighbors have hated them for 50 years already. They fought a proxy war against Iran-sponsored Hezballah a few years ago. After the way Iran has negotiated in bad faith, and made it clear they will never bargain away their nukes, I think the US and Europe would not judge Israel too harshly. An air strike would disrupt progress with the Palestinians, but Prime Minister Netanyahu is conservative and is probably not eager to actually reach any real agreement.

Obviously such a thing is not done lightly, but if China and Russia do not support sanctions against Iran, Israel will probably follow its own self interest and bomb Iran.