27 Israeli Air Force to destroy Iraq’s nuclear reactor and then declared that “Israel has nothing to apologize for. In simple logic, we decided to act now, before it is too late. We shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal.” One sometimes hears the argument that if Iran can live with an Israeli bomb, why can’t Israel live with an Iranian bomb? The answer is that no Israeli leader has ever threatened to eradicate Iran. Iran is a large country, but Israel is a tiny one, smaller than New Jersey. At its narrowest point, it is only nine miles wide. Israel’s nuclear arsenal can deter its enemies only if they have the wisdom and the sanity to be deterred. During the Cold War, the Russians and the Americans operated under a political and military doctrine known as MAD, for mutual assured destruction. The doctrine assumed that no matter how bad things got between the Soviet Union and the United States—the 1962 Cuban missile crisis being a case in point— neither side would risk annihilation. The leaders of Iran do not think that way. They reason as follows: “We have 70 million people, and Israel has 7 million. If we attack the Zionists with nuclear bombs, they will respond in kind. If they are lucky, they will kill half of us, but if Allah wills it, we shall kill all of them, and there will still be 35 million of us left.” We humans may enjoy periods of peace—sometimes for a long time— but we shall never entirely rid ourselves of war because we are “wired” to fight over pieces of land. Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus (the man who coined the Latin phrase Si vis pacem para bellum) are correct. So, too, is Max Boot, the American author and military historian. He rejects the “sunny, if ahistorical, Enlightenment faith that peace is the natural order of things and war a temporary aberration.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023543