Barry Farber
Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2002

In 1981 Israel took off one night and destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb facility in the Iraqi city of Ozirak. What if they did it again?

Really. No joke. If Israel did an encore, one meager piece of Kleenex would be sufficient to absorb the tears of every decent person on earth.

Look what's going on. In his State of the Union address, President Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea the "axis of evil" in the world. And the statesmen of the world – the FREE world, mind you – all turn out to have lace on their drawers.

America is rotten-egg besplatted by Britain, France, Russia, China – heck, ALL of them – for being "arrogant," "over the top," "unilateral," "focusing on imaginary enemies instead of real ones," and even "rekindling its own ancient quarrels."

In my boyhood, decent people banded together to destroy evil. Now they band together to denounce any democracy that even CALLS it by its name.

Isn't aggression evil? And didn't North Korea invade South Korea in 1950? And didn't Iraq invade Kuwait in 1990? And didn't Iran invade American territory (that's what an embassy is) in 1979 and hold the entire staff hostage?

To get to the point more quickly, we'll not detail Iraq's use of poison gas against its own people, its stomp-down abrogation of its Desert Storm surrender pledge to cooperate with international weapons inspectors, and the intensity with which all three of those countries pursue the development of crowd-killing devices.

You can deny that President Bush was wise to say it out loud. You can deny that Iran and Iraq, who recently fought an eight-year war with each other, plus another country far away that conducts its own evil independently, constitute the classic geopolitical definition of an "axis."

But you can't deny that Iraq, Iran and North Korea are the world's varsity of evil. Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Cuba make up the scrub team.

How does the decent world explain its reluctance to see evil defeated? How do Russia, France and our other "allies" in the war against terror explain their insistence that America must prove Iraq complicit in 9-11 before they'll even consider approving any anti-Iraq action?

Isn't Iraq's refusal to live up to the agreement that ended Desert Storm enough to unite the good guys against them? If not, why not?

The answer, as usual, is money. Too many otherwise decent countries want to get their share of the Iraqi market and to hell with the weapons of mass destruction, which will almost certainly be unleashed against America instead of them anyway.

President Bush annuls a treaty with Russia ACCORDING TO THE TERMS OF THAT TREATY and gets a thousand times more denunciation than Saddam Hussein gets for outrightly stiff-arming the world.

So Saddam smiles, curled up cozily behind the dam of world public opinion he knows the United States dare not let break or even leak.

In 1991, a few days before Desert Storm, I joined some other Americans in an Israel that was full of anticipation but empty of tourists. We were invited to tour an Israeli Air Force base and our host was the youngest top-ranking general in a military branch known for young, high-ranking generals.

I remarked to one of the other visiting Americans that the general was, indeed, extraordinarily young-looking.

"Don't you know who he is?" asked the other American. I did not.

"He's the Israeli pilot who led the raid to take out Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb factory at Osirak in 1981."

At that time every country in the world, including America, denounced this "unwarranted attack upon another country." Nine years later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, every country, INCLUDING this one, found a way to pat Israel on the back and say, "Hey, we forgot to tell you – good work!"

Some Americans are rejoicing that, shortly after the "axis of evil" remark, Iraq set about initiating the wearisome game of approaching the United Nations to "discuss" the futile reincarnation of weapons inspections – a process calculated to take months and even years.

For America to sit still and wait for Saddam and his co-agenda mates to perfect their arsenals of destruction is suicide. And for America to nip him in the bulrushes is criminal. I've made MY choice. What's taking so many of you so long?

Saddam's dream of developing nuclear bombs gets daily closer and closer to achievement. I prefer MY dream: waking up one morning and learning that Israel did it again. Not America – ISRAEL!

What would Iraq – or the entire Arab world, for that matter – do to Israel that they wouldn't do anyhow if they could?

It probably wouldn't be as easy a job of take-out as Israel's 1981 strike; Saddam may have dispersed or concealed his sensitive sites since then. But Israel could take out enough in all categories – nuclear, chemical and biological – to make the point.

Let the prime minister of France foam at every visible orifice in a fit of Gallic rage. Let Vladimir Putin's tail go flying over the dashboard, and maybe bang a shoe on a wooden surface. Let Tony Blair rush to surgery to get the sand out of his gizzard.

Let Secretary of State Colin Powell lugubriously face the camera and denounce Israel's "utterly unwarranted and criminal attack." He could save some speechwriter-overtime pay by downloading America's denunciatory statement of Israel following the 1981 attack. It was well-crafted.

Maybe there'll be another young Israeli air force general shortly thereafter.

Is the world going to accuse Israel of being America's cat's-paw doing America's dirty-work bidding? Good luck, world. I don't think you're going to do much better than you did trying to spin away Israel's capture of the weapons ship with 50 (or maybe it was 80) tons of death-dealing devices headed for Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Does Israel really have to be "doing America's bidding" when it's been in Iraq's gun sights for annihilation – not, like America, just since Desert Storm (1991), but ever since 1948 when the State of Israel was established?

Our European allies love tough talk and tough actions every time we're liberating THEM.

If you are a humanitarian, a lover of peace and a supporter of democracy, there are more reasons for this Israeli attack to happen than for it not to happen. That goes ditto for all those who wish a better life for the people of Iraq. Such an attack might even be secretly constructed as an overture of the first well-planned and coordinated effort to depose Saddam Hussein.

Such a plan could succeed. The Iraqi army would not fight for Saddam Hussein. Read Norman Schwartzkopf. How much more evidence do you need?

The foregoing is a deed that must be done. And Israel is the only country that can do it without gaining a single new enemy!

Write a book, you want royalties. Produce a play, you want profits. Make a speech, you want a fee. I want nothing from Israel or the civilized world for this idle thought if they decide to put it into action.

Well, perhaps one little thing.

When CNN comes to the prime minister of Israel for comment, I want his spokesperson to say, "I can't bother any of them right now. They're too busy studying maps of Iran."

Barry Farber's daily radio program is heard on more than 65 stations across America on the Talk Radio Network.

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