Don't bomb Iran.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Comment

An Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran would be devasting. Though the Obama Administration, for now, seems to be holding back from such a move, the threat isn't over yet. The White House commitment to a diplomatic solution is still in question. The Israeli government is chomping at the bit. And Benjamin Netanyahu's allies in this country are trying to force U.S. policymakers into belligerence.

A January cover story in The New York Times Magazine concluded that Israel will attack Iran's nuclear facilities this year.

"We have an expression in Hebrew: 'Hold me back,'" writer Ronen Bergman said in a web interview with the Times. "Like in a street fight: Hold me back so I don't hit that other guy. Israel is trying to send a message like this to the United States and Europe: 'Do something to Iran otherwise we will do it.'"

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta affirmed Bergman's assessment, telling The Washington Post that he also thought Israel would likely launch military action before this spring was out.

For the sake of all of us, I hope Bergman and Panetta are wrong.

There have been recent glimmers of hope. The Obama Administration has tried to tamp down the war talk. And the April negotiations in Istanbul went more smoothly than a lot of people imagined.

But not everyone is cheering.

"My initial impression is that Iran has been given a freebie," Prime Minister Netanyahu said. "It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition."

A few days later, Netanyahu invoked the ultimate horror.

"People say it is diminishing the memory of the Holocaust to speak of Iran in these terms," Netanyahu said at a the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. "I disagree strongly with this. It is my obligation to speak of the threat."

Meanwhile, top Israeli officials are downplaying the human toll of a strike on Iran. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has predicted, for instance, that "maybe not even 500 civilians" would be killed. But, as Iranian dissidents Ramin Jahanbegloo and R. N. Khatami point out, Israel's 2006 shelling of Lebanon killed 1,200 people and its 2009 assault on the Gaza Strip killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. A long-range bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities would likely result in many more deaths.

The damage that Israel would cause itself would also be tremendous.

"For Israel, those costs would certainly include heavy retaliatory rocket and missile strikes by Hezbollah and Hamas against Israeli civilians, a wave of popular...