La rhétorique d'Israël contre l’Iran

La rhétorique d'Israël contre l’Iran

En apparence, publiquement dans tous les cas, l’attitude israélienne concernant l’Iran et son potentiel nucléaire est radicale, extrême, voire hystérique pour certains (voir Buchanan). Une analyse de Gareth Porter, mise en ligne sur Atimes.com aujourd’hui, propose une autre lumière sur la position israélienne. Le verdict de Porter, historien et analyste de sécurité nationale, est que les Israéliens sont beaucoup plus réalistes qu’ils ne paraissent et sont prêts à éventuellement accepter un Iran nucléaire selon le principe de la dissuasion nucléaire, — une sorte de MAD (destruction mutuelle assurée) au niveau régional. Porter semble notamment penser que la doctrine israélienne au cas où l’Iran deviendrait une puissance nucléaire serait de rendre publiques les capacités nucléaires israéliennes pour en faire un instrument de dissuasion.

Voici un extrait du texte de Porter :

«The internal assessment by the Israeli national-security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate.

»Since Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a “second Holocaust” by using nuclear weapons.

»But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of Israeli national-security officials. In fact, Israelis began in the early 1990s to use the argument that Iran was irrational about Israel and could not be deterred from a nuclear attack if it ever acquired nuclear weapons, according to an account by independent analyst Trita Parsi on Iranian-Israeli strategic relations to be published in March. Meanwhile, the internal Israeli view of Iran, Parsi said in an interview, “is completely different”.

»Parsi, who interviewed many Israeli national-security officials for his book, said, “The Israelis know that Iran is a rational regime, and they have acted on that presumption.”

»His primary evidence of such an Israeli assessment is that the Israelis purchased Dolphin submarines from Germany in 1999 and 2004, which have been reported to be capable of carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles. It is generally recognized that the only purpose of such cruise-missile-equipped submarines could be to deter an enemy from trying to take out its nuclear weapons with a surprise attack by having a reliable second-strike capability.

»Despite the fact that Israel has long been known to possess at least 100 nuclear weapons, Israeli officials refuse to discuss their own nuclear capability and how it relates to deterring Iran.

»Retired US Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Francona, a former Pentagon official who visited Israel last November, recalls that Israeli officials uniformly told his group of eight US military analysts they believed Iran was “perfectly willing to launch a first strike against Israel” if it obtained nuclear weapons.

»But when they were asked about their own nuclear capabilities in general, and the potentially nuclear-armed submarine fleet in particular, Francona said, the Israelis would not comment.

»In fact, Israeli strategic specialists do discuss how to deter Iran among themselves. An article in the online journal of a hardline think-tank, the Ariel Center for Policy Research, in August 2004 revealed that “one of the options that [have] been considered should Iran publicly declare itself to have nuclear weapons is for Israel to put an end to what is called its policy of nuclear ambiguity or opacity”.

»The author, Shalom Freedman, said that in light of Israel's accumulation of “over 100 nuclear weapons” and its range of delivery systems for them, even if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons within a few years, the “tremendous disproportion between the strength of Israel and an emergent nuclear Iran should serve as a deterrent”.

»Even after Ahmadinejad's election in mid-2005, a prominent Israeli academic and military expert has insisted that Israel can still deter a nuclear Iran. In two essays published in September and October 2005, Dr Ephraim Kam, deputy head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former analyst for the Israel Defense Forces, wrote that Iran had to assume that any nuclear attack on Israel would result in very serious US retaliation.

»Therefore, even though he regarded a nuclear Iran as likely to be more aggressive, Kam concluded it was “doubtful whether Iran would actually exercise a nuclear bomb against Israel — or any other country — despite its basic rejection of Israel's existence”.»

Cette position israélienne est plus en conformité avec la politique habituelle réelle de ce pays, notamment vis-à-vis de ses voisins, marquée effectivement par le réalisme. La situation que décrit l’analyse de Porter est celle d’une rhétorique extrémiste utilisée contre l’Iran comme un moyen de dissuasion pour tenter d’empêcher ce pays de devenir une puissance nucléaire. Mais cette sorte de dissuasion est peut-être plus volatile que la dissuasion nucléaire dans la mesure où elle peut frapper et entraîner certaines psychologies, notamment celles d’hommes politiques, vers des positions radicales de confrontation complètement fermées. Les engagements publics deviennent dans ce cas des prisons.

Porter rappelle qu’une interview a été donnée en novembre dernier au Jerusalem Post par Ephraim Sneh, adjoint au ministre de la défense, expliquant que la vraie crainte d’Israël n’est pas une attaque nucléaire contre Israël mais le fait qu’un Iran nucléaire pourrait décourager l’émigration juive vers Israël et accélérer les départs d’Israéliens de leur pays («Ahmadinejad could kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs»). En un sens, c’est effectivement reconnaître d’une façon implicite que la rhétorique extrémiste d’Israël dépasse son but de dissuasion et piège ce pays dans une politique qui devrait être conforme à sa rhétorique. Ceux-là mêmes (Ephraim Sneh dans ce cas) qui activent cette rhétorique extrémiste comme dissuasion estiment que le public, lui, la prendrait pour du comptant au cas où l’Iran deviendrait nucléaire et choisirait son attitude vis-à-vis de l’immigration et de l’émigration en fonction de sa crainte d’une attaque iranienne.

Mis en ligne le 1er février 2007 à 05H41