Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who has been accused of fabricating Israeli history in such a way as to promote the false idea that Israel was born in sin, which in turn has helped fuel Zionism phobia and the witch-hunt against Israel. Subsequently, his thinking about Israel’s current plight took a sharply different turn as he digested the shattering reality of the total absence of a genuine Palestinian interlocutor for peace. As result, he found himself in the unenviable position of coming under fire from all sides. Now, he has written an article born of the most intense despair, predicting a second holocaust of the Jews, this time at the hands of Iran. Strikingly, considering his own controversial record, he says this:

As with the first, the second Holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences — but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: ‘The Zionists\the Jews are the embodiment of evil’ and ‘Israel must be destroyed.’ And Westerners, more subtly, were instructed: ‘Israel is a racist oppressor state’ and ‘Israel, in this age of multi-culturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous’. Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.

Some may find this hard to take from this particular author. But it is true nevertheless, as is his chilling analysis of the messianic apocalypticism of Iran. He assumes, however, that this terrible prospect is inevitable. I do not. Iran poses a dire threat not just to Israel but to the west and to the rest of the Arab world, too. While many of these countries are themselves deeply compromised – in particular, by the economic ties between Iran and European countries such as Germany – there is a constituency which understands very well that the Iranian regime has to be defeated, preferably by helping the Iranians themselves to rid their country of this terrible scourge by every possible means including, in the last resort, military force. President Bush understands this. Many in Britain do not.

James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, outlined some of the many things short of war that can be done, if only there is the political will to do them, when he addressed the House Committee for Foreign Affairs on January 11. As he said:

…we should indeed engage, but with the Iranian people, not their oppressors. Along the lines of recommendations made a year ago by the Committee on the Present Danger (which I co-chair with former Secretary of State George Shultz), and by Iran experts such as Michael Ledeen, we should target sanctions – travel and financial – on the Iranian leadership, not on the Iranian people, and draw a sharp line between them. One possibility in this regard is to seek to bring charges against President Ahmadinejad in an international tribunal for violation of the Genocide Convention in calling publicly for the destruction of Israel . Our precedent would be the charges brought against Charles Taylor while President of Liberia for crimes against humanity before a special international tribunal in Sierra Leon . Iran ’s protectors in the United Nations would doubtless block the establishment of such a tribunal, but clarity and principle have a force of their own – Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents then in the Gulag have told us of the electrifying effect of President Reagan’s declaration that the USSR was an ‘evil empire’.

We should also engage in ways similar to those techniques we used in the 1980’s to engage with the Polish people and Solidarity — by communicating directly, now via the Web and modern communications technology, with Iranian student groups, labor unions, and other potential sources of resistance. We should abandon the approaches of Radio Farda and the Farsi Service of VOA and return to the approach that served us so well in the Cold War. Ion Pacepa, the most senior Soviet Bloc intelligence officer to defect during the Cold War (when he was Acting Director of Romanian Intelligence) recently wrote that two missiles brought down the Soviet Union : Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Our current broadcasting does not inform Iranians about what is happening in Iran, as RFE and RL did about matters in the Bloc.

Privately-financed Farsi broadcasts from the US follow the RFE-RL model to some extent, but exist on a shoestring. Instead we sponsor radio that principally broadcasts music and brief world news, and television that, I suppose seeking a bizarre version of balance, sometimes utilizes correspondents with remarkable views: one VOA correspondent, on another network, last year characterized the arrest in the UK of 21 individuals accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic airliners with liquid explosives as ‘a conspiracy against Islam’ by the US and alleged that the US and the UK fabricated the plot to deflect attention from ‘Hezbollah victories’. (Richard Benkin in Asian Tribune Aug. 12, 2006, vol. 6 no. 41.) Our current broadcasting is a far cry from RFE and RL’s marvelous programming of news, cultural programs, investigative reporting (in the Eastern Bloc), and satire…

Finally Iran’s economy is driven by oil exports. This leaves it open to several measures. Although Iran has reaped substantial financial rewards from today’s high oil prices we have begun to have some effect on its oil production by our campaign to dry up its oil and gas development. The Iranians are very worried about this. Deputy Oil Minister Mohammed Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian recently said in an interview that: ‘[i]f the government does not control the consumption of oil products in Iran . . . and at the same time, if the projects for increasing the capacity of the oil and protection of the oil wells will not happen, within ten years there will not be any oil for export.’ (Daneshjoo publishers, Current News, article 9303.) At the appropriate time we could move toward a step that, although drastic, is potentially very effective relatively quickly – namely cutting off Iran ’s imports of refined petroleum products ( Iran has built no refineries in many years and must import around 40 per cent of its gasoline and diesel fuel). And finally, by moving toward technology that can reduce substantially the role of oil in our own economy and that of the world’s other oil-importing states, we can help deprive oil exporters – Iran , Saudi Arabia , Russia , Venezuela , and others – of much of their leverage in international affairs.

Meanwhile, former US Special Forces lieutenant colonel Gordon Cucullu fleshes out the important insight that it’s essential that there’s a strategic change in the way the war in Iraq is being fought from conventional to unconventional warfare:

Use Operation Enduring Freedom, the liberation of Afghanistan from Taliban and al-Qaeda terror as an example. Once given the mission, SOCOM was able to use its varied internal resources supported by external conventional military units to bring down an enemy that had been described by former military officers, analysts, and the media as virtually invincible. And they accomplished it all in the midst of the ‘fierce Afghan winter’ against which our forces were deemed unsuited to prevail. Further, the mission was accomplished relying on a tactic that special operators alone bring to the table, a principle known as ‘economy of force.’ This means American spec ops troops use indigenous soldiers to do what conventionally-minded strategists would rely on American units to accomplish – better, cheaper, faster, and with fewer casualties…

Special operations forces are able to think more creatively, operate more freely, and use more flexibility than conventional forces that are tied to legalistic, unrealistic, and often self-defeating rules of engagement drawn up by Pentagon JAG lawyers or imposed timid unit commanders who wish, as Peters comments ‘to pretend we’re not at war’… The most important point is that this ‘War for the Free World’ is not a conventional war. This war, other than for brief interludes in which set-piece battles were fought and won as during the early weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a dark, shadowy war. It must be fought against an enemy adept at using a mixed-strategy of ideology, propaganda, terrorism, money-laundering, non-state combatants, rogue state sponsors, and irregular, conscience-less brutality to conduct operations against America.

By restricting ourselves to artificial, bureaucratic geographical division of responsibility, by thinking only in terms of conventional battlefields, and by relying on gentle, media-friendly tactics we are trying to fight our sworn enemies with unacceptable – indeed potentially fatal - mental and physical constraints. If victory is our objective then we must fight the war to win, using forces specially configured and trained to employ an effective strategy to defeat this terrible an enemy. Those forces are found in the special operations community and the sooner we call on them to take charge the better chance we have of winning this war.

Much, in other words, can be done. Everything depends, as ever, upon which happens first: the west waking from its narcoleptic torpor, or the mullahs getting the bomb; and whether the west will hold its nerve in Iraq or prove the truth of the Islamists’ galvanising analysis, that it no longer has the courage of its absence of convictions.