Relief
Many people around the world, including Israelis and Jews everywhere, breathe a bit easier this morning after the US military struck Iran’s three leading nuclear bomb development sites, thus making a concrete contribution to Israel’s ten-day-long defensive war effort against Iran.
Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, appropriately put it this way: “A nuclear Iran would pose a grave threat to Western civilization and global security. It is my hope that today’s historic operation by the United States has brought an end to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions once and for all. I applaud President Trump and his administration for having the courage to act decisively, and for lending critical American support to Israel’s effort to build a safer and more stable Middle East. By halting Iran’s march toward the bomb, the United States and Israel have taken a meaningful step toward securing peace. Over the past year, Israel has dismantled Iran’s once-vast proxy network and reshaped the regional security landscape. Now, with the nuclear threat off the table, people from Tel Aviv to Tehran can begin to imagine a safer and more hopeful future.”
Strategic Importance
The importance of the US strike on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – Iran’s three main uranium enrichment and bomb development facilities, built in Iranian contravention of every agreement and convention with Western powers and in violation of every UN resolution and treaty – is threefold.
First is removal of a specific, acute threat to regional, even global, peace and security, which also presented an explicitly existential threat to Israel.
Second is restoration of some meaning to the international community’s long-standing but long-abandoned commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, and to America’s often-repeated commitment to deny nuclear weapons to regimes like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran which have hegemonic, even genocidal intentions against its neighbours and beyond.
Third is renewal of America’s global leadership and credibility in foreign and defense affairs, something that has momentous and positive repercussions for many other looming confrontations of the West against hostile actors, especially Russia and China.
For Israel, the American strike on Iran is clearly a great blessing; almost a Godsend. It also is an important turning point in Israel’s pre-emptive war against Iran. It comes after several years of intensive deliberations with the US military and more recently with Trump administration leadership. See here and here for detailed examinations of the methodological Israel-US move toward this moment.
What Might Happen Next?
How and in what way might Iran respond? President Trump offered Iran a way out the war, including economic and political partnership with the US, if Iran decides to accept that its nuclear and ballistic missile programs must now end and cannot be reconstituted, and if Iran refrains from retaliating against the US and its regional allies.
The assessment here in Israel is that Iranian leadership (that leadership which is still in place despite Israel’s decapitation of many key Iranian military and intelligence officers) will reject America’s outstretched hand for peace – for reasons of Islamic radical theology, revolutionary ideology, and national pride.
Israel further assesses that the US can deter, or repel, and defend against, whatever retaliation Iran attempts. This could range from Iranian terrorist attacks around the globe to hostage taking and cyber-attacks, all the way to direct Iranian strikes on US bases in the Mideast (that have some 40,000 US personnel) and on the assets of US allies in the region (such as Saudi oil fields). If Iran is truly self-destructive and suicidal, it could also mine and block the Straits of Hormuz, the passageway for oil shipping out of the Arabian Gulf.
In this event, the US explicitly has threatened to, and easily could, strike at Iran’s main oil refining and export facilities as well as at elements of regime command and control. Assassination of Iranian leadership would certainly be on the agenda for both America and Israel. (Recall that Iran twice attempted to assassinate President Trump.)
Iran’s Choices
Here is an apt metaphor: Iran has to decide whether to adopt the “Hezbollah model” or the “Hamas model.”
After being crushed by Israeli strikes last year on its top ranks and missile inventories, the surviving leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, an Iranian proxy organization, seems to have decided (at least for now) to withdraw from confrontation. It has not re-entered the fray against Israel and slowly is being dismantled by the Lebanese Army and by occasional additional Israeli strikes.
The other Iranian proxy army, Hamas in Gaza, has adopted the opposite approach, which is a suicidal battle to the death against Israel. This is sort of a Biblical ‘Let me die with the Philistines’ resignation to go down fighting to certain death – as long as Hamas manages to take additional Israelis to their deaths too – including Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for more than 600 days now. (Note that today Israeli commandos managed to locate and retrieve the bodies of three Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.) If Iran adopts this approach (again, for reasons of Islamic radical theology, revolutionary ideology, or national pride), American, Israel, and the world could be facing months or even years ahead of warfare against Iran.
Iran’s Remaining Strength
Some analysts see Iran exposed as a paper tiger. Its vaunted air defenses have been disabled by Israel and otherwise failed spectacularly. Its military and intelligence has been gutted or otherwise has gone into hiding, weakening its command and control structures. The “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei is said to be depressed and in isolation. Global media reported yesterday that Khamenei has appointed three clerics to succeed him, based on the apparent fear that he too will be eliminated. So it possible that Iran will be too weakened to mount significant retaliation in the near term.
On the other side of the ledger, analysts in Western media with a known anti-Trump bent (like reporters and opinion writers of The New York Times) are warning that the US strike on Iran only will add to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and accelerate its bomb program. See here and here.)
As of noon in Israel today, Iran has not embarked on any attacks on the US or US allies, other than reverting to additional ballistic missile attacks on Israel.
Twenty-five Iran missiles were fired this morning into heavily populated civilian areas in Israel, causing massive destruction to home and businesses in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Nes Ziona, and wounding some 30 Israelis. Israeli jets then struck at the Iranian missile launchers and at additional Iranian military bases.
Alas, Israel has been forced to once again tighten emergency regulations on the home front, scuttling what might have been the scaling down this week of restrictions on the workplace, schools, airports, etc. Since the beginning the war, Iran has fired approximately 500 heavy ordnance ballistic missiles into Israel plus another 500 killer drones – UAVs.
Israel’s Options
Some Israeli analysts believe that now is the time to end the war with Iran, at least the current round, given that Israel’s main declared goals have been achieved. These include interdiction of the Iranian nuclear program, interdiction of Iran’s ballistic missile production facilities and missile inventories, and significant weakening of Iran’s ability to arm and fund its proxy armies around the region. Israel also has impressively restored its deterrent reputation by conducting what is universally considered to be a brilliant military and intelligence operation.
But of course, this depends mainly on how Iran decides to respond. There is a concern in Israel that Iran will refrain from attacking US bases and Arab allies of the US, and instead focus only on intensification of its war again Israel. This will force Israel escalate its attacks on Iran – including Iranian economic (oil) infrastructure and nodes of Iranian regime control. And this will scuttle any Western aspirations for a new deal with Iran or the restoration of stability to the region.
In this way, Iran could create friction between Israel and Western nations – who will understand Israel’s need to strike even harder against Iran but nevertheless will agitate for ceasefire – against Israel’s wishes.
Regime Change
Many have expressed the hope that the Iranian people will take advantage of the regime’s current weakness to rebel against the ayatollahs, leading to regime change. Some analysts believe that this should be an explicit goal of the American and/or Israeli war effort. But this has not been defined as an explicit war aim nor has either country thus far operated in this direction.
Currently, it does not seem that the multiple levels of military and clerical repression in Iran are collapsing. Just the opposite. Tehran is arresting thousands of people viewed as threat to the regime and cutting off most Iranians from the internet – a powerful crackdown. Moreover, there does not seem to be an identifiable defined opposition leader or group of leaders who might coalesce as a cohort to lead Iran in a post-clerical era.
Nevertheless, as historians have noted, the rise and fall of dictatorial regimes, indeed of empires, are notoriously hard to predict. (Consider the unforeseen, almost overnight, collapse of the sixty-year-strong Assad regime in Syria several months ago.) Some Western analysts view Iran as “a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years.” (See Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, quoted in The NYTimes.)
Israel Wakes the Western World
Concluding today’s briefing, I wish to draw attention to the overwhelming, prevailing sentiment in Israel. Israelis are not only confident about the strategic necessity of Israel’s assault on Iran and proud of Israel’s successes, but also indignant about the way in which most world leaders have responded, with only tremulous support for Israel (President Trump excepted).
In fact, Israelis are resentful of the fact that over the last thirty years the UN Security Council and world powers themselves failed interdict the Iranian nuclear bomb and missile programs – as they should have!
In my op-ed column in this weekend’s Israeli newspapers, I wrote that in countering Iran “Israel is this generation’s great generator of moral purpose and strategic clarity.”
Unfortunately, Western leaders has shown “no ideological comprehension, no awareness of the grand sociopolitical and religious challenge that Iran poses to the free world.”
“After all, radical Islam long has declared civilizational war on the West, with America as the hated ‘Great Satan,’ Europe as the ridiculed ‘Middle Satan,’ and Israel as the devious ‘Little Satan.’ Radical Islam, ideologically fueled, funded, and armed by Shiite Iran and by radical Sunni movements (such as Al Qaeda), seeks the cultural and political submission of these Satans and the annihilation of Israel.”
“Accordingly, the current war is about far more than regional security or the Fordow uranium enrichment facility. It is about far more than breaking up the axis of tyrannical, anti-Western powers that is backing up Iran. It is, again, about a seismic ideological assault on the West – on the values of democracy and human and civil rights, with Israel at the forefront of this contest.”
“What is all this nonsense that Israel’s airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear juggernaut are ‘not our war’? This absolutely is the West’s war, and the West should at least acknowledge this, if not assist Israel in winning the battle!”
“Alas, the West seems to have difficulty distinguishing between good and evil, between victim and perpetrator, between necessary ‘escalation’ and all-out civilizational collapse.”
“The State of Israel is awakening the West from suicidal slumber, from dangerous cultural and strategic malaise. The West must defend itself against the worst radical Islamic actors such as Iran, beginning with vigorous support for the State of Israel’s vanguard war against it.”
“Thus, Israel’s principled leadership should be celebrated and lauded, not dismissed (as did the G-7) with mealymouthed mutterings about Israel’s ‘right’ to defend ‘itself’ and feeble murmurs about de-escalation.”
Read my full text here or here.
(Note that ex post facto, some Western leaders like former British prime minister Rishi Sunak today tried to jump on the winning bandwagon by congratulating Israel and the US for acting decisively “against the Iranian threat to world security. This effort deserves our support and is worthy of our thanks,” Sunak said.)
