worth noting that the conflict remained conventional. Iran was different. Only the

/ BARAK / 139 worth noting that the conflict remained conventional. Iran was different. Only the most naive observer would exclude the possibility that if the Iranians did get a nuclear weapon, they might use it. And even if they didn’t, the entire strategic picture would change, with the need to find a response not just to a nuclear Iran, but potentially a nuclear Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I was not about to lecture President Obama on this. While Bibi liked to portray him variously as weak, naive or tone-deaf to interests and security of Israel, I knew from our previous meetings that he was none of these things. Yet I did, ina deliberately non-didactic way, raise the issue of our different perspectives on the Iranians’ getting nuclear arms. “You see it in the context of the whole world,” I told the President. “If Iran, in spite of all our efforts, gets a nuclear weapon, yes, it will be bad. But for you, it’s just one more nuclear state. It won’t dramatically change the situation for America. For us, it can turn into a real, existential threat.” He agreed that we inevitably looked at the situation differently. But after pausing a few seconds, he said: “Ehud, think of it this way. You get to school in the morning and there’s this big, nasty bully. You can take him on, maybe give him a black eye. But you have this bigger, stronger friend, who can knock him out cold. The only problem is that your friend won’t be there until the afternoon.” I would have liked nothing more than to wait for our “bigger, stronger” friend, especially since I knew through my contacts in the American military and intelligence establishment how much bigger and stronger an American attack would be. During the first couple of years that Israel was working on acquiring the capability for a military strike, the Americans had been no more ready than we were. They did have the tanker aircraft and the heavy bombs. But their plan —a kind of Iraq-style shock and awe — was so obviously prone to lead to a wider conflict that it would never have received the go-ahead from President Obama, or probably any president. I used to joke with colleagues in the Pentagon that while Israel’s idea of a “surgical operation” was the equivalent of a scalpel, they seemed to favor a chisel and a ten-pound hammer. By the time I met the President in 2012, that had changed. Under Gates and then Panetta, an intensive research-and- development effort and enormously improved planning and training had yielded results. The Americans now had high-precision heavy munitions we couldn’t dream of, and stealth air-attack capabilities we also lacked. They had an operational plan which, within a period of hours, could push the Iranian nuclear 425 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011896