Despite Israel’s military dominance over Iran, Netanyahu’s risky gambit might fail if Trump doesn’t play ball – Firstpost

Iran says Israel has started an unprovoked war. Israel says it has launched a preventive attack to preempt an existential crisis – Iran’s rapid march towards a nuclear bomb. Middle East (West Asia) has plunged into a catastrophic kinetic conflict between two sworn enemies. The threat of a wider regional war looms large, Donald Trump looks more like a piece-maker than a peacemaker, and an uneasy India doesn’t know how to respond as both countries with whom it enjoys good relations go at each other’s throat.

As I type this piece, it is more than 24 hours since Israel carried out a devastating attack inside Iran, through missiles, warplanes and smuggled drones in a shock and awe campaign that demonstrated the quality of Israeli intelligence, the fearsome capability of its military, the risk-taking ability of its political establishment and the incompetence of Iran.

Called Operation Rising Lion (Am Kelavi), Israel unleashed 200 fighter jets in opening strikes, dropping over 330 munitions on more than 100 targets, walloping nuclear sites and military targets across at least 15 locations including in Isfahan, Tabriz, Ilam, Lorestan, Borujerd, Qom, Arak, Urmia, Ghasre Shirin, Kermanshah, Hamedan and Shiraz, according to New York Times that quoted four Iranian officials. On Saturday, Israel expanded its attacks on the nerve centre of Iran’s economy, the energy industry and struck Iran’s largest natural gas field, forcing a partial suspension of operation.

A shell-shocked Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, vowed “severe punishment” while Israel claimed the assault was necessary to stop Iran from getting any closer to building a nuclear weapon. According to Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the targeted military operation would “continue for as many days as it takes” to “roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival”. Leave alone two weeks, just one day’s attacks brought Iran to its knees.

In one fateful Friday, Israel decapitated Iran’s entire military chain of command and top nuclear scientists with clinical precision through an assassination program featuring months of covert planning, frightening levels of intelligence infiltration, significant surveillance capabilities and tight cooperation between Israel’s air force and on-ground Mossad operatives.

Israel’s biggest-ever military strike consisted of a spate of missile launches, drones and precision-guided munitions that first took out Iran’s already weakened air defence system and radar network, degraded its offensive capabilities and eliminated the entire top brass of Iran’s national security establishment.

Those killed are some of the most powerful men in Iran, including Major General Hossein Salami, the head of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who reported directly to the Ayatollah, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC’s air force, and Ali Shamkhani, a former navy commander and a close aide to the Ayatollah who was overseeing the nuclear talks with the US. Shamkhani, one of Iran’s most influential politicians who was thought to be eyeing the Ayatollah’s post, was killed through a precision strike on his luxurious penthouse in Tehran.

Also killed are Major General Gholamali Rashid, head of the IRGC’s Khatam al Anbia headquarters and a former deputy COAS of Iranian armed forces, and nine of Iran’s top nuclear scientists and experts carrying forward the regime’s nuclear weapons program, who according to Israeli intelligence were given the responsibility to
obtain a weapon.

It is evident that Israel wants to not only degrade Iran’s capability of securing the bomb, but force Iran to abandon the very objective of attaining one. The attack on nuclear scientists is aimed at delaying the project but is equally a warning for experts who may take it up in the future.

Israel’s attacks effectively reduced the possibility of a ferocious Iranian response, putting the Ayatollah regime in extreme peril and faced with hard choices. Quite simply, the military men in Iran who would meet and decide on the next course of action were eliminated. This catastrophic blow to Iran’s chain of command – a rerun of the Hezbollah pager operation that took out the first and second rung of the Lebanon-based terrorist organization but only at a much bigger and more audacious scale – may explain why Tehran’s retaliation lacked teeth.

Iran’s plan was to fire thousands of ballistic missiles onto Israel’s airspace and overpower its air defence capabilities. Iran’s missile stockpile run into several thousands. In effect, the Iranians could launch only about 100 missiles during the first wave. As New York Times reports quoting IRGC guards, “Israel’s strikes on missile bases had made it impossible to move missiles quickly from storage and place them on launchpads.”

That Iran still retained the capability to launch retaliatory strikes consisting of multiple waves of ballistic missiles and drones, some of which slipped through Israel’s defences and landed on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, two biggest cities, destroying civilian infrastructure and residential neighbourhoods, is testimony to Iran’s resilience.

While the barrage of Iranian missiles lit up Israel’s night sky and sent people into bomb shelters, Netanyahu wouldn’t be deterred. In a short span of over 24 hours, Israel has achieved near total supremacy over Tehran airspace, launching wave after wave of attacks on Iran’s nuclear command and control centres, uranium enrichment facilities, air defense bases, military airports, ballistic missile warehouses, drone production facilities, missile launch pads and even the residential homes and secure complexes of Iranian military chiefs and IRGC leaders.

However, this apparent Israeli battlefield supremacy over Iran hides a risky gambit. At its core the Israeli strategy of targeting Iran, assassinating its senior military commanders, top scientists and all officials associated with Iran’s nuclear weapons program in one fell swoop is aimed at permanently dissuading Iran from getting to the nuclear device, which Israeli leadership deems to be a strong possibility.

Israel believes, as The Economist points out, that “having accelerated its production of enriched uranium, Iran now has enough for 15 bombs… Netanyahu claimed to have evidence that Iran is weaponising its technology, saying that it may be close to a device. His officials believe that, in talks with America about a deal that would halt the nuclear programme, Iran has been creating a smokescreen behind which its scientists were in reality pressing rapidly ahead.”

While this explains the logic behind Netanyahu’s actions, paradoxically he might end up accelerating Iran’s nuclear program. This is because unlike Iraq or Syria, where Israel intervened in the past to disrupt their nuclear ambitions, Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities are larger, more complex, more dispersed and buried in cavernous locations that might be beyond Israel’s offensive capabilities. If Israel fails to inflict irreversible damage on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Iran will retain the capacity to produce a weapon and unshackled from all non-proliferation promises, it will openly race to acquire the device.

On Saturday, Iran declared that it will henceforth limit its cooperation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and criticized it for its silence over Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, reports The Times of Israel. The newspaper quotes Iranian deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi, as saying that “Iran will no longer cooperate with the agency… as it once did.”

For Israel, the clock is ticking. Among the Iranian nuclear facilities that it targeted through a series of blistering attacks so far are three key ones at Natanz, the main uranium enrichment plant, and smaller enrichment and research facilities in Fordow and Isfahan. The nuclear reactor at Natanz, some 220km southeast of Tehran, has been hit the hardest with Associated Press reporting that the above-ground section has been completely decimated, resulting in loss of electrical infrastructure and power generation capabilities.

Crucially, while the loss of power generation may have affected the nuclear reactors used to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade quality, this is not a lasting damage. The centrifuges buried deep underground at Natanz remain unaffected.

Washington Post quotes an analyst who specializes in satellite imagery, as saying that while Israel has “disabled the facility by destroying the power substation, but they haven’t destroyed the facility in a way that would impact Iran’s long-term breakout… They need to actually destroy the centrifuges to do that.”

The situation at Fordow, located outside the city of Qom about 100 miles south of Tehran, is even tougher where thousands of centrifuges are buried deep underground below a mountain.

This makes all the difference. The Jewish state has made destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability the central point of its military campaign and Tehran’s nuclear program its existential crisis. To achieve the complete annihilation of Iran’s nuclear sites, and that too at a hardened and heavily fortified location such as Fordow that houses advanced centrifuges used to enrich uranium nearly up to 90% purity, Israel needs bunker bluster bombs and strategic bombers.

Israel lacks both, and is solely dependent on America that possesses ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrator’, a 30,000 pound precision-guided bomb capable of destroying the subterranean plant, reports Washington Post, that quotes the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association as saying that “Israel can damage key Iranian nuclear facilities, but Israel can’t destroy hardened sites like Fordow without US military assistance.”

If Fordow remains operational, then for all its escalation dominance and military superiority, Israel will barely be able to slow down Iran’s nuclear quest, and “elimination” could turn out to be a “sprint”. Iran could simply carry on with its program, withdraw from the NPT and declare its open intention of building the bomb as an insurance against further attacks.

Israel understands the crisis. As its ambassador to US Yechiel Leiter told Fox News, “The entire operation… really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow.”

The trouble for Israel is that it is critically dependent on a mercurial American president who pivots on a dime, remains thoroughly unpredictable, carries a fragile ego and suffers from a chronic inability to look beyond immediate interests.

Trump doesn’t want Iran to get the bomb but has so far played coy and his administration has spoken in contradictory terms. While the American president has backed Israel’s military campaign against Iran – and has indicated that he was aware of Netanyahu’s plan all along – Trump has also repeatedly said that he would rather strike a deal with Tehran.

Squaring this round hole is Israel’s biggest puzzle. While there are indications that Trump may consider
striking the subterranean nuclear reactor at Fordow to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear device, a White House official has told American media outlet Axios that the “US currently has no intention of getting directly involved.”

This is therefore a moment of truth for Netanyahu, who is keen to leave a legacy by obliterating Iran’s nuclear ambition even through violent destruction. He has launched a military campaign to exploit a strategic window of opportunity before Iran races to the bomb, but his and Israel’s fate rests on the fickle mood of a vainglorious, whimsical American president.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.