Operation Opera

Then part two is military options, going all the way, invasion.

The Osirak option, that refers to airstrikes against Iraq in the past.

Number five is Leave it to Bibi, allowing or encouraging an Israeli military strike.

And they go through the rest of them.

Okay, that's because probably they're not allowed to have nuclear weapons for some reason.

Or because they know what happened to Iraq's nuclear reactor.

The Osirak incident in 1982.

Israel just went in and bombed it.

Most-- Well, therefore, I think everyone has to reason it and realize that there, uh, the, we're accepting responsibility either way, and that doing nothing is also a policy.

If the EU's talks with Iran don't go well, do you see Israel intervening unilaterally like they did, uh, in Iraq, in Osirak? And if so, what do you think, what effect do you think that'll have on the, the growing movement against the mullahs in Iran?

Well, it couldn't be unilateral, for one thing, because they'd have to cross Iraqi airspace, and no one would think that, um, that had happened without Iraqi or American permission.

So, uh, it, the, no one could say, "Uh, oh, that was the Israelis.

I've just forgotten the name of the reactor.

Uh, doesn't matter.

Um, or Osirak.

The Osirak, um.

if you keep.

This is like after Saddam Hussein was bombed by Israel at the Osirak reactor.

He didn't have a nuclear power program until the week after they bombed that reactor.

And he was like, oh, they're really worried about a nuclear program.

Would it be justified, in your opinion, for them to do the same in Iran?

What Israel did to the Osirak reactor was what the Iranians had tried to do, everyone forgets this, with their own air force a couple of months before.

The Iranians had a huge sigh of relief when the Israelis pulled off a raid they couldn't bring off themselves and disarmed Saddam Hussein.

There are a lot of people in the Sunni Arab world, believe you me, who hope that the Israelis take out the Iranian one in turn, but they can't say so in public any more than the Iranians could before.

And they had already done stuff supported by this doctrine earlier in Iraq.

Operation Opera, Operation Outside the Box is another iteration of this.

But Operation Opera got a lot of bad press.

Operation Outside the Box did not.

It is quite plausible that unless you have lived in some aspect of this world, geographically or in your profession, you would have not heard of this.

Then, three weeks before election day, Begin makes a dramatic move.

He greenlights Operation Opera, an air strike that destroys Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.

Osirak deserves much more than a sidebar, so the full story is linked in the show notes.

For our purposes, it gives Begin a real bump.

Security decisions added another dramatic chapter.

In June 1981, Begin ordered Israeli aircraft to destroy Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad.

The UN Security Council unanimously condemned the attack, but supporters later argued it prevented Saddam Hussein from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Begin articulated a doctrine that Israel would not allow an enemy seeking its destruction to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

This was the idea.

So there, there's, uh, attacks on the Iraqi Osirak reactor that I believe the French were helping out with [laughs] strangely enough-

Correct.

Correct.

So it was very much Menachem Begin with his own personal sense of the Holocaust that he witnessed himself.

You know, he ran away from, from Europe when he arrived to Palestine in the, after, during and after the World War II in '45, I believe.

Um, so it was he with, with the images of the Holocaust and Jewish children being, being, uh, being moved to, to Auschwitz that he authorized to take the action against Osirak in 1981.

You know, in 1991, it was the United States.

Interesting.

Uh, because he was, he was working on a, what brought him to New York University after he, you know, led the, uh, Osirak, uh, reactor attack, um, what they call I think Operation Babylon, uh, if I remember correctly, on the Israeli, uh, side.

The-

Mm