Israelis Primed to Expect the Worst

Saddam Hussein didn’t win many victories during the first Gulf War, but he did win a critical round in his battle against Israel. It is now known that Israelis, fearful of an attack by nonconventional weapons, abandoned en masse the coastal Tel Aviv metropolis for days, even weeks after the first of 39 conventionally armed, not very deadly Scud missiles were unleashed upon the Jewish state.

Saddam Hussein was, in the end, deterred from using his nonconventional capability, against Israel or any of his other opponents. Nevertheless, the psychological value of his chemical weapons arsenal was on view before the entire world. What war planner, what politician, will forget how the mere threat of a nonconventional attack could trigger a modern-day exodus from a major city?

“Israelis have not dealt with this trauma of the Gulf War,” explained one young Israeli mother. “The smallest trigger is enough” to send Israelis once again queuing for gas masks and readying sealed rooms in anticipation of whatever surprise they fear Saddam Hussein may have in mind.

Iraq today poses far less of a threat, conventional or otherwise, to its neighbors than it did on the eve of the first Gulf War. That war and the inspection regime that followed successfully reduced Baghdad’s arsenal of chemical, nuclear and biological warfare capabilities to nonthreatening dimensions. Similar successes were recorded against its missile arsenal. Nevertheless, the long lines outside gas mask distribution centers and the increase in Israelis going abroad these days attest to a far different perception. And this perception has in effect created an Iraqi nonconventional capability where none in fact exists, forcing political and military leaders to confront and plan for a war for which they believe Saddam Hussein does not have the motivation or the capability to fight.

“The biological materials possessed by the Iraqis have not turned, in operative terms, into a weapon of mass destruction,” wrote military analyst Meir Stiglitz in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot on Feb. 4, “and any reference to them as a national threat leads to futile panic whose strategic and economic damage is great.”

The source of popular Israeli concern can be traced to the inflammatory statement made by Richard Butler, the chief of the U.N. inspection team, who told the New York Times last month that the Iraqis had enough biological material like anthrax or botulin toxins to “blow away Tel Aviv.”

Butler had first used the Tel Aviv reference in an earlier meeting with an American Jewish group, no doubt in an effort to build support for an aggressive U.S. policy on Iraqi noncompliance. Publication of his comments raised Iraq’s nonconventional chemical and biological capabilities from a long-term concern to an immediate strategic threat, and in the words of one Israeli commentator, “sent national morale to the brink of fear.”

The Israeli government believes that Iraq has never tested a warhead fitted with biological toxins, making the chance of a successful attack impossible. Its entire delivery capability consists of two or three Scud launchers hidden somewhere and some few missiles whose range is unknown and whose crews, if they still exist, haven’t mustered since 1991.

Nevertheless the power of public sentiment and the political need to be seen to be “doing something” forced the Israeli government to champion its plan for civil defense, including an emergency appropriation of almost $100 million for medicines and vaccines to counter a biological or chemical attack.

The public reaction also has strategic implications. For decades, Israeli leaders have debated how best to maximize the deterrent value of Israel’s large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal. For most of this period, ambiguity was preferred, a policy of veiled inference popularly known as “the bomb in the basement”--out of sight but impossible to ignore.

But as the missile and nonconventional capabilities of Israel’s antagonists have increased, so too has the pressure to brandish the nuclear option more clearly. In the current crisis, Iraqi statements have been conspicuous by their explicit denial of any hostile intent, nonconventional or otherwise, toward Israel. The Israeli Cabinet itself has determined that the situation is worrying but not dangerous. Analysts are almost unanimous in the belief that in this affair, Israel is “out of the game.” On Feb. 3, the director general of the defense ministry declared, “The actual threat from Iraq has decreased drastically since the Gulf War. Israel is powerful, and the chance that Iraq would try to harm us is very small.”

This assessment, however, has not prevented a number of Israeli leaders, placed on the defensive by public unease, from making what can only be described as undisciplined, gratuitous threats of retaliation. Unnamed sources were quoted in the Times of London as saying that if Iraq attacked Israel with nonconventional weapons, Israel would respond in kind, a repeat of the equation established during the first Gulf War. Israel’s President Ezer Weizman himself remarked that Iraq should know that if Israel was vulnerable to Iraqi missiles, Iraq also could be hit by Israeli missiles. “Suddenly,” wrote commentator Zeev Schiff, “the guns were yanked out of their holsters and the bullets that began to fly were direct and indirect threats of nuclear retaliation.”

These comments put at risk the maintenance of the “low profile” that Washington wishes Israel would keep. More important, given Iraq’s current inconsequential nonconventional capabilities, they risk devaluing the complex currency of Israel’s deterrent option.