young Likud politicians, Dan Meridor and Ehud Olmert, with whom I had become friendly. They, like me, were concerned about undermining the Americans’ military and diplomatic coalition.
Shamir mostly listened, until very near the end. He then asked Dan Meridor, Misha and me to join him in a separate room. He asked each of us for our views. Misha, even more strongly then in front of the full cabinet, argued that we could not allow night after night of missile attacks without responding. Meridor reiterated his opposition, stressing the damage we’d risk doing to the Americans’ war effort by possibly weakening Arab support for their attack on Saddam. When Shamir turned to me, I said that if the government did decide on military action, we were ready. From a purely military and security point-of- view, I said, an attack made absolute sense. Even if we didn’t succeed in destroying, or even finding, the mobile launch sites, putting a military force on the ground would almost surely lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of Scud launches. But, echoing Meridor, I added that a military response would carry a price in our relationship with the Americans. My view was that, at least for now, we should hold off.
When we rejoined the meeting, Shamir rapped his hand on the table. In the startled silence that followed, he said he shared many ministers’ urge to hit back against the Scuds. But he said: “At this stage, we’re not going to do anything. We bite our lips and wait.”
Three nights later, his resolve was stretched almost to breaking point. Missiles landed in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, and nearly 40 homes were damaged. A three-story house was flattened. In all, nearly 100 people were injured, and three elderly residents died of heart attacks. On the night of January 25, another seven Scuds hit. Nearly 150 apartments were badly damaged, and a 51-year-old man was killed. The pressure on Shamir was all the greater because the Ramat Gan attack had come within range of one of the Americans’ Patriot batteries. The Patriots had been originally designed not as anti-missile weapons, but to attack aircraft, and they seemed to have been ineffective. Nor were American air strikes in Iraq stopping the Scuds. Though American jets had taken out a few fixed launch sites, they were having no luck with finding and destroying mobile launch vehicles.
Even Shamir now felt that unless the Americans got the mobile launchers, we would have to attack military action. I was sent to Washington along with Misha and David Ivri, a former air force commander, to deliver that message to the Bush administration. From the first days after Saddam’s attack on Kuwait,
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