Why The War Needed To Happen Now

No matter what you think of Trump

It’s been surprising and rather disappointing to see how many people outside of Israel are opposed to this war. In some cases it’s because people reflexively oppose anything done by someone they hate. In other cases it’s perhaps due to a lack of understanding of the importance and urgency of the matter.

I’ve never been a fan of Trump, but I (along with pretty much everyone in Israel) am extremely glad that he was in power to do this. Here are two pictures which, in conjunction, should explain why it was important to start a war, regardless of whether Congress would approve, and why it was important to happen as quickly as possible.

The first picture, from three days ago, is of an area that includes what used to be a synagogue atop a bomb shelter in my home city of Beit Shemesh:

That’s what happens when a ballistic missile is not intercepted. Even a bomb shelter doesn’t protect against the impact. Nine people died and many more were injured.

Why wasn’t the missile intercepted? It’s not clear, but what is clear is that Israel very much limits the firing of intercepters. The reason is that there simply aren’t enough.

The second picture is a chart which shows the rate of production of ballistic missiles, compared with the rate of production of missile interceptors, taken from an excellent article on the topic:

As can be seen, the rate of missile accumulation was sharply increasing, while the rate of interceptor production could not keep up. Pretty soon, any war with Iran would result in massive, unstoppable devastation to Israel and to US bases and other countries. And that’s even before they get nuclear warheads, which they were steadily working towards.

This was why it was essential to start this war (or rather, to fight back strongly against Iran’s 47-year war against Israel and America), and to do so as soon as possible. It’s not a certainty that it will result in regime change. But it is a certainty that it takes advantage of a fast-dwindling opportunity to massively degrade Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, along with a movement in Iran for regime change. And it is likely to create a situation where they will either be dissuaded from rebuilding the ballistic missile stockpile or prevented from doing so (via destroying the manufacturing plants, disrupting the supplies from China, etc.). And it’s certainly infinitely better than the previous situation, in which they were rapidly advancing to becoming untouchable and unstoppable.

That is why NATO chief Mark Rutte says there is broad backing among US European allies for Trump’s military campaign against Iran. The entire world, and especially Israel, is extremely fortunate to have a US president who (no matter what his reasons) was willing to join forces with Israel on this.

To quote Secretary of State Marco Rubio, from a speech that was widely distorted by having snippets quoted out of context:

“Was the US forced to strike because of an impending Israeli action?”
Rubio: “No... No matter what, ultimately, this operation needed to happen — that's the question of 'why now?' But this operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage. Look at the damage they're doing now — and this is a weakened Iran. Imagine a year from now. So, that had to happen. Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it — but this had to happen no matter what.”

Since so many people do not grasp this point, please share this post with others.