Fighting Nukes With Bibi

Middle East: Choosing Barack Obama as president is supposed to change the world, but it may be another election that averts Islamist nuclear terror. Bibi Netanyahu as Israeli leader might just neutralize Iran.

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In two weeks, Israel will pick a new government. Likud Party leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have a comfortable lead. His main rival, Tzipi Livni, the ruling Kadima party's foreign minister, has been sounding an alarm that hard-liner Bibi won't get along with President Obama.

Netanyahu: No illusions in 1996, and none apparently in 2008.

That actually might not be such a bad thing. As Tehran's Islamofascist regime continues on its path toward becoming a nuclear-armed power, a strong dose of tough realism in the Middle East may be just what the doctor ordered — if not in the U.S., then in Israel.

"Bibi" is the younger brother of Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, the slain hero of Israel's Operation Entebbe. The raid saved over 100 Israeli and French Jewish hostages after the hijacking by Palestinian and German terrorists of an Air France flight out of Tel Aviv in 1976.

But in spite of his hawkish reputation, Netanyahu's time in power was known for pragmatism, not just a commitment to security.

He negotiated with the late PLO head Yasser Arafat, and gave most of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank and the second-holiest site in Judaism, to Palestine. As he said after meeting with Arafat at the White House in October of 1996:

"The path to peace is through negotiations and not through violence . . . It's our hope for our children and for the children of the Palestinians as well. We know that such a peace is inextricably bound with security and that peace can progress as long as security holds."

In words that could easily have referred to the free world's present threat from Iran, Netanyahu continued: "I don't have any illusions whatsoever about the difficulties ahead. It's a very tense period, fraught with dangers right now."

When it comes to the fanatical mullahs who've ruled Iran since President Carter let the Shah be overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist revolutionaries, Bibi sees things with clarity.

"It's 1938, and Iran is Germany . . . racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told the United Jewish Communities General Assembly in 2006. Those words of warning came in the aftermath of the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly calling on Israel to be wiped off the map.

Netanyahu has contended that Ahmadinejad has been "preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state" and that stopping him "is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."

Moreover, Ahmadinejad's intentions go "way beyond the destruction of Israel." According to Netanyahu, "Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran's tour of destruction. But at the planned production rate of 25 nuclear bombs a year," Iranian nukes, possibly carried by its long-range Shahab-3 missiles, "will be directed against 'the big Satan,' the U.S., and the 'moderate Satan,' Europe."

The Bush administration apparently assured current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the U.S. is somehow covertly sabotaging Iran's nuclear program with defective components.

But can the world depend on a spy operation that could easily end up botched — like so many CIA covert actions have been over the agency's long history?

Or will it take a unilateral attack by Israel against Iran's nuclear sites?

Some see Netanyahu as a kind of Winston Churchill, a warrior waiting for his moment to answer destiny's call.

Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, no fan of pre-emptive war against Muslim states, takes issue with the widely-held view of Churchill as the 20th century's most laudable historic figure.

In "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," published last year, Buchanan depicts the cigar-chomping wartime British leader as lusting for, as Churchill once called it, "glorious, delicious war" against Germany. Yet, Buchanan asserts, "At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill gave moral legitimacy to Stalin's control of half of Europe by signing a 'Declaration on Liberated Europe.' "

Buchanan's attitude toward Churchill seems similar to many Israelis' feelings about Bibi Netanyahu. He inexplicably gave away too much to his country's enemies at the negotiating table; but faced with war, who better to have in the driver's seat?