‘You don’t win one by bombing a country, then forcing it to negotiate a settlement, or urging regime change and plunging a country into civil war.’
SOMEONE wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and it is not Benjamin Netanyahu.
Not because Israeli leaders are never worthy of a Peace Prize; on the contrary, a handful of Netanyahu’s predecessors were co-winners of the Prize because they vigorously fought to establish peace in the Middle East. And we all know that this is not an easy task, so much so that Yitzhak Rabin lost his life to an ultranationalist assassin in the process of fighting for the Oslo Peace Accords.
But it doesn’t seem to be an aspiration of Netanyahu’s anyway to win the prize and the $1 million that goes with it. Instead, what is clear since the 1990s is that Netanyahu has been hell bent on making sure that Iran’s nuclear program – what he has been saying since the 1990s was just six months or six weeks away from producing a bomb – would be stopped cold and never have a chance of turning Iran into a nuclear power.
Netanyahu also did that to Iraq, whose efforts to establish a reactor were bombed to smithereens during the time of Saddam Hussein.
I suspect that if Pakistan were only in the infancy stages of its nuclear program, Netanyahu would find a reason to argue that even that Muslim-dominated country cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons, as that would pose an existential threat to Israel.
But Pakistan already is a nuclear power.
Where does that put the Philippines? Could we ever build a reactor far bigger than that? That little egg I’ve always stared at in Diliman, when, as a grade school student at UP, I was first told that it was an actual nuclear reactor run by PAEC, the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission.
Would Netanyahu attack that, too?
Then again, this time around, Netanyahu needed someone else’s help to deal the Iranian nuclear efforts a severe (spectacular?) blow, in the form of special
bunker-busting bombs that could penetrate through mountains and concrete to damage an underground nuclear facility. Israel didn’t have such a bomb, but the United States did.
And only the United States has that special aircraft, powerful enough and sophisticated enough to carry such a payload, in the B2 stealth bombers that escape radar detection. It was these very aircraft that flew to Iran from US bases outside the Middle East carrying the payload meant to write finis to Iranian nuclear aspirations in such a spectacular fashion.
Americans were proud of their power, but in truth their ability to drop those bombs without fear of interception was all thanks to 10 days of attacks and bombardments by Israel that crippled Iran’s Air Force and air defense systems.
We must not forget that when Donald Trump sought the White House for the third time in 2024, he ran on a platform of being a peacemaker. Whether it was peace between Russia and Ukraine or between Israel and the Palestinians, it mattered a lot to Trump to be able to bring people to the table and hammer out a deal. Wasn’t being a deal maker his claim to fame?
But now that part of the Trump campaign promise – and his image – has suffered a major setback. Because bombing Iran without any provocation from the latter is so contrary to all that he puffed himself up to be. And while he has tried to use the bombing to force Iran to the negotiation table, it seems he will fail because he has made it known that, like Netanyahu, stopping Iran’s nuclear program was just a first goal; regime change is the ultimate one. And if we are to go with the example of every country in which the Americans have ushered in regime change – Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria – what follows is civil war. Protracted civil war.
Theodore Roosevelt received the Prize. Woodrow Wilson received the Prize. Jimmy Carter received the Prize. Barack Obama received the Prize.
You don’t win one by bombing a country, then forcing it to negotiate a settlement, or urging regime change and plunging a country into civil war.
