Memoir excerpt recounting 1991 appointment as Israeli Chief of Staff and concerns about Iran

Chapter Fifteen On the morning of April 1, 1991. I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from his desk in the kiryva to join the Sayeret Matkal attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Israel’s national military cemetery on Mount Herzl, we stood before the resting place of Nechemia Cohen, Yoni Netanyahu, Dado, and Avraham Arnan. From there, we went to the Prime Minister’s office. With Dan Shomron and his wife looking on, Shamir presented me with my third star and formally made me chief of staff. For years, I'd developed the habit of carrying around a notebook in which I’d jot down thoughts on things I thought that the Israeli military, and I as an officer, could have done better: errors, oversights, and how we might fix them. In the weeks before becoming ramatkal, I'd filled dozens of pages on issues large and small I hoped to address as the commander of the armed forces. A lot of them dealt with what I sensed was an erosion of cohesiveness in the army, and, since ours was a citizen military, a fraying of the relationship between the army and Israeli society. To some degree, this was inevitable in a country now nearly 45 years old: developed economically and free of the kind of existential threat we’d faced in the early years of the state. But the political divisions over the war in Lebanon, and morale-sapping need to quell the violence on the West Bank and in Gaza had further strained our unity of purpose. Militarily, we were now indisputably strong enough to defeat any of the Arab armies, even if they launched a joint attack as in 1973. Our most important overseas ally, the United States, was committed to helping us retain that position — what both we and they called Israel’s “qualitative edge” — in the interest of our security and their own. But we were facing a series of new, unconventional challenges. One of them, which had come on to Dan Shomron’s and my radar over the past year, was Iran. Though geographically distant, it was potentially the most serious in the longer run, as Dan himself warned Israelis in his final interview as chief of staff. Iran was likely to become even more assertive regionally now that the Gulf War had weakened its neighbor and rival, Iraq. We also knew, from our intelligence sources, that the Iranians were making preliminary efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. 241 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028089