What if MAD Doesn’t Work?

There have been a couple of questions that have been bothering me since the start of the Hamas war.  One is why Hamas actually started their war, what was their end game.  More important, what did Yahya  Sinwar think that Israel was going to do? Did he really imagine that Israel would simply agree to a cease-fire, prisoner release (and probably 100 other conditions he would demand in return for the hostages), and that would be it? Or that there would be just “one more round of fighting,” at most a glorified Oferet Yitzuka (Cast Lead)?

The above scenario is entirely possible. Just as Prime Minister Netanyahu completely misjudged Sinwar and Hamas, it is possible that Yahya Sinwar completely misjudged Israel. He spoke an excellent Hebrew, kept up to date about Israeli news, and fancied himself an expert on Israel. Sinwar may have thought that he knew how Israel would respond to the Al-Aqsa Flood and was sure that Gaza and, more importantly, Hamas (and its allies) would come out OK.

But there is another possibility: maybe Sinwar understood perfectly well that the response to a massive invasion of Israel and slaughter of Israelis would mean that Gaza will be destroyed, that tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Gazans will be killed, crippled, or injured. Maybe he even understood that his life was over. Given the way Israel responded to the 2006 Hezbollah attack on Israel (a much smaller attack than 7/10), there is no way that Israel would respond with anything but massive force to a much greater attack. Sinwar must have known that.

If Sinwar was perfectly aware of the above possibility and even felt that it was the probable response, that means that he simply didn’t care. Whatever his end game was, the cost of Gaza being turned into rubble was a fair price to pay.

Israel’s idea of deterrence is based on a very simple idea: “Don’t attack us because a) we are ready for any attack (not always true as October 7th showed us), b) the price you pay will be much worse than what we pay. What happens when the other side says, “I don’t care about ‘b.’ I hate you so much, I want you destroyed so badly that I am willing to pay any price.”? Then deterrence becomes meaningless.

Since Trump ordered the attack on Fordo (and even before the attack), I have seen on social media various forms of the following message: “MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) works. The Russians and Americans don’t attack each other, the North Koreans haven’t attacked anyone. We have no reason to believe that Iran would attack Israel if Iran had the bomb. Whether or not Iran wants a bomb or was close to making a bomb is irrelevant. They wouldn’t use it because Iran doesn’t want to be wiped out.”

That idea works great when neither side wants to be exterminated.  But what happens when one side doesn’t care about the consequences?

Iran is an evil regime, no questions asked. Anyone who doubts this assertion, do some research about the Iran-Iraq War, about Iranian intervention in the Syrian Civil War, about what they did in Yemen, and about how they treat their own people. To say that “obviously the Iranians will adhere to the MAD norms” is simple madness. I know that it is hard for many people to accept, but there are billions of people on this planet, and they don’t all have the same basic goals in life. Not everyone believes that life comes before everything else. It is the most common of mistakes to assume that the other guy “thinks like me.”

Iran can’t have the bomb for one very simple reason: There is no reason to believe that they won’t use it. None. This isn’t Islamophobia. This is simply choosing to believe Iran.