Stephen Walt noticed a blatant falsehood in Amos Yadlin’s op-ed on “Israel’s last chance” to attack Iran:

“After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed.”

This claim is at best deeply misleading and at worst simply false. It’s technically true that there hasn’t been a resumption of either the Iraqi or Syrian programs since 2007, but what about there the twenty-six year gap between the Osirak raid in 1981 and the raid on Syria? What happened during those intervening years? As Malfrid Hegghammer, Daniel Reiter, and Richard Betts have all shown, the destruction of Osirak led to an elite consensus that Iraq needed its own deterrent, and led Saddam Hussein to order a redoubling of Iraq’s nuclear program in a more clandestine fashion. This effort was so successful that the UN inspectors who entered Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War were surprised by how extensive the program was and how close it had come to producing a bomb. Indeed, if Saddam had been smart enough to wait a few more years, he might have crossed the nuclear finish line.

As Pillar commented last year on Braut-Hegghammer’s findings, the Osirak attack made Iraq under Hussein much more determined to acquire a nuclear weapon:

The resulting clandestine program to build nuclear weapons using enriched uranium as the fissile material accelerated through the 1980s and brought Iraq much closer to a nuclear-weapons capability than could have been projected from anything Iraq was doing prior to the Israeli attack.

“Preventive” attacks of this sort are bound to encourage an intensified effort to acquire the weapons that the attacking state was trying to keep out of the other regime’s hands. Attacking Iran is the quickest and most direct way to push the Iranian government to make a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Attacking Iran does not serve the cause of non-proliferation, but rather hastens the day when the non-proliferation regime completely collapses.