“Oh bother,” said Pooh. Not that I’m a stuffed little fictional bear, but that’s nevertheless how I felt this morning. (Did you know that in his role as a young teacher, H.G. Wells had A.A. Milne for a student? Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it? And did you know that Wells is he first writer to predict “atomic bombs,” which he did in 1914? Never mind….) I had prepared a wonderful post for the final part of the extended Questions essay for today, but now I find that “events, my dear boy, events”—yes, some of you at least should recognize the source of that curt quotation—make it impossible for me to proceed with it in the face of what has happened between the time that I thought I completed it yesterday afternoon and this morning.
It’s just as well, I suppose, because the essay was not really quite finished and was already longer than desirable. So it can wait, absorb some more work, and be better for it in due course—possibly next Friday. In the meantime, let us reflect on the two main events, or clots of distraction, that have caused the delay: first, at some length, the newest Middle Eastern international war—one almost loses count, there have been so many in my lifetime…—and then far more briefly the incipient civil war in Los Angeles and environs.
Israel Attacks
In that aforementioned drafted essay that you will not yet see today or this weekend I speak about the irritations of having to analyze a moving target. Little did I know as I wrote earlier this week that I would be confronted with the same perplexities this morning on an entirely different subject. But that is inevitable when one looks to examine the implications of a major Israeli military attack on Iran that is still ongoing.
Let us delve into the matter in a question and answer format, for that at least keeps us within gawking distance of the theme of the Questions essay series. I’ll try to keep my answers short, but be warned: I may fail to do so to everyone’s satisfaction.
Q: Why did Israel attack now? Was it really a matter of “last resort,” and having waited as long as possible, as Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesmen are now telling everyone?
A: No, not exactly; but yes, sort of.
Part of the Israeli diplomatic brief of the moment depends on intelligence that is not generally available to everyone and that therefore may be honestly misread or less honestly misrepresented. I am not in a position to judge that distinction; I can only articulate it. But most likely the Israelis, who clearly have eyes and ears on the ground and in the sky in and over Iran—more on that anon—know more than we do, or at least more than U.S. officials are willing to ratify and discuss publicly.
What is known is that the Iranian regime’s scientists and technicians have been working hard and deviously in recent months, as a recent (March, to be specific) accusatory IAEA statement concerning their many misdeeds clearly indicated: “Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% U-235 has increased to 275 kg. up from 182 kg. in the past quarter. Iran is the only non-nuclear weapon State enriching to that level.” Then on Thursday the IAEA board of governors issued a definitive judgment that Iran has been seriously derelict in its obligations to the NPT and the IAEA.
Why have the Iranians been accelerating their efforts? Perhaps because the major geopolitical setbacks of recent months—the fall of Asad in Syria and the evacuation of the Russian base at Tartus along with it; the defenestration of Hizballah in Lebanon; the rather too partial pounding of the Houthis in Yemen; the mauling of Hamas in Gaza—have left them feeling a bit more exposed to danger. Whatever the reasons, if the IAEA noticed and spoke up about what the Iranians have been doing, on Thursday in such a direct and uncharacteristic way, it’s a certainty that Israeli, U.S., and other intelligence services have also been aware of what was going on. 60% enriched U-235 can be turned into weapons grade 90% enriched fairly easily and quickly: Have the Iranians been doing that, too? No. Could they have? Yes, anytime they chose….before Friday. But not now.
So you see the ambiguity inherent in calculating the distance Iran is from an operational nuclear weapons capacity. It is therefore a matter of judgment matched to the judge’s circumstances as to how much progress is too much progress to justify “rectification.” The more progress, so to speak, the more onerous militarily and otherwise any rectification would need to be. At a certain point Israel would not be able to sufficiently, if not completely, rectify the situation without partners in assistance. So the longer the wait, and the denser and more advanced Iranian efforts become, the larger the looming questions for Israel: “Can we do it?” and “Can we do it well enough for it to be worth the risks and costs?”
And it is not just about how much uranium refining capability the Iranians have—though the very recent revelation of a third site near Tehran, announced by the regime after the IAEA censure, that had gone previously undisclosed hit keen observers as a whistle blown very loudly in that respect. That the Iranians would defy the IAEA by throwing an undisclosed site in its face just a day or two later very much resembled a chest bump that essentially said, “Rafael Mariano Rossi and company: Go f____ yourselves.” Tone matters in these sorts of set-tos, and the Iranians have been uncharacteristically tone deaf lately.
No, it’s not just the uranium enrichment piece. No one can build a nuclear weapon with just piles of enriched uranium, only crude radiological explosives that are heavy and hard to deliver and lack much lethal punch. Metallurgical and other engineering skills are needed to make a weapon, and then there is the challenge of marrying the ordnance to the “bus.” In the Iranian case, the “bus” has almost certainly to be a missile—and before yesterday Iran had about 3,000 of various sizes and ranges—since Iran doesn’t really have a serious air force. No government, not even the one in Moscow, has been willing to sell the Iranians a modern air force since 1979. So Iran’s missile force is in functional effect its air force.
Then one faces the task of miniaturizing the weapon or weapons to the extent that the available missiles can carry them to their assigned targets. And of course the missiles carrying the weapons, which will be few and precious, must be accurate enough to hit the target. If we combine these several requirements, all of them more than a little difficult to master but all of them subject to being worked on simultaneously, the best conclusion is that Iran was not as of yesterday within weeks or even months of having an offensively capable nuclear weapons capability that could effectively target Israel or any other country.
Still, as noted, a “point of no return” in the Iranian effort, from the Israeli point of view, reasonably and logically would be set well before the Iranians are ready to roll a missile with a nuke out to its launch pad. No doubt experts in Israel have debated where that point is for a long while now. It is a fairly esoteric matter from a technical perspective. It is certainly no simple thing since, again, the longer the wait the risker and chancier the demands of rectification.
All that said, other reasons—we’ll mention three, with others left unspoken—better explain the timing than the one the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been declaiming for the past 36 or so hours.
First, Thursday’s IAEA censure of Iran gave Israel about as good an internationally blessed pretext as it could ever expect to have. Probably, however, that was just good luck, since an initial attack on more than 100 targets carried out by around 200 aircraft cannot have been set in motion in a mere week or even a few months. We now know that specific updated planning for the air attack goes back about eight months.
Second, in the current situation one can never rule out Israeli domestic politics. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu finally had to testify and subject himself to cross-examination recently to answer to all the corruption charges he has struggled under for years. It did not go so well for him. That buoyed the opposition, and recent polls show former PM Naftali Bennett now surpassing Netanyahu’s political muscle. Just as Netanyahu has repeatedly used the “forever war” in Gaza—a war whose October 7, 2023 origins implicate his own massive strategic misjudgments and operational incompetence—and the foray into Lebanon this past autumn, as a way to dodge political collapse, putting his personal interests above those of his country and his people, he may well have picked this Friday the 13th to serve that same selfish purpose. Anyone who thinks that too cynical an interpretation just doesn’t know this man well enough.
But third, it seems to me that the developing character of U.S. policy likely had the greatest impact on the Israeli choice of timing. To put the matter succinctly, the Israelis—political echelon, intelligence, and IDF elites all alike—concluded that Trump’s risk-aversion means that the United States would not be a partner with Israel for a necessary attack on Iran. This reckoning is a very big deal for two reasons.
For many years now the Israelis have assumed that if push ever came to necessary shove the United States would join with Israel to do the deed, thus allowing Israel to wait longer since by itself its rectification capabilities are limited. That endowed U.S. policy with a large dollop of control over Israeli actions, which, given multiple U.S. equities in the region, was rightly judged a good thing in Washington.
So successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican, have pledged as much privately and joint planning has proceeded with that assumption in mind, again now for years. (Just by the way, too, the fact that Israel flies a U.S.-made air force has over the years involved Israeli experts reporting back to U.S. officials and military industry experts in confidence on how its equipment performs over time, in combat and not, and those equipment net-assessment reports have been valuable to the United States.) That assumption of partnership in battle certainly, in my view, would have remained the case in a second Biden or a Harris Administration, she with, insofar as it matters, a Jewish husband, a Jewish national security advisor, and a Jewish deputy national security advisor. A lot of bubbleheaded New York and Israeli Jews—Orthodox and otherwise—somehow came to the conclusion that Trump would be a more trustworthy partner in a war against Iran than Biden or Harris. This proves, once and for all, that the Jewish reputation for intelligence has strict limits.
So reaching the conclusion that Israel, now experiencing the fallout of another rendition of the TACO two-step, would have to go it alone is very likely what advanced the “go” date.
If that were not all—it wasn’t—there is the closely related matter of the recent U.S.-Iran negotiations over a new nuclear “deal.” The Israelis privately judged the likely outcome of those negotiations to be either “no deal” or a deal that would be as bad or even worse than the one Trump walked out of during his first term. Either way, but especially the signing of a new JCPOA to replace the 2015 original negotiated by the Obama Administration, would serve diplomatically as advantageous cover for the Iranian program to progress further and faster. It would in particular likely drill multiple holes in the secondary sanctions regime that has made it harder, even despite the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement, for the Iranians to import the stuff they need to best advance the program.
As is well known, the public U.S. position in the negotiations insisted that Iran give up all its uranium enrichment capabilities, just as the Israelis have insisted, and turn over its enriched uranium stockpile, as well. The Iranian answer was “no way,” and the Iranians argued correctly that under the NPT, which Iran signed (and Israel has not), they have a right to uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes. That is correct, even though the recent IAEA censure puts paid to Iranian disingenuousness on that score. Several commentators have claimed that since Iran does have that legal right, U.S. policy therefore has evinced a desire to force Iran to accept a restriction that ran against the grain of its national interest. And so said Iranian negotiators and leaders. But the Israelis did not buy that assessment, and with another round of talks set for Sunday in Oman, led on the U.S. side by the clueless Steve Witkoff, they feared that they would be witness to yet another U.S. reversal resulting in, maybe, a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump but an even worse JCPOA deal for Israel.
Remember: This is an Israeli government that has already endured a U.S. decision to meet directly with Hamas in Doha back in early March without being forewarned, after which the Israelis were assaulted by U.S. envoy Adam Boehler’s bizarre performance in which he publicly took Hamas’ side in the ongoing talks and mixed up who started the fighting and whether Israelis held in Gaza or Palestinians jailed in Israel were the real hostages. (Boehler must have thought Netanyahu deserved the same funhouse mirror treatment then very recently visited on Vlodomir Zelensky….oops!).
Now, had U.S. and Iranian diplomats rushed to sign something in Oman this weekend or soon thereafter, something equal parts vague and bad, then the diplomatic onus for any subsequent Israeli attack, no matter how bad the deal for the Israeli position, would have fallen squarely on Jerusalem. Not good. The easiest way to obviate that significant problem was to strike before the fountain pens were unsheathed.
So, summing these three factors together, we arrive at a conclusion that could be construed as over-determined. It seems to me that the third ensemble of factors concerning U.S. policy is the most important, meaning that Donald Trump is in the main responsible for the timing of the Israeli attack, but the others are hardly trivial. We may one day find out what the mix actually was in Israel’s calculations, or not.
If indeed the withdrawal of a reliable U.S. pledge to join Israel in an ultimately necessary attack to foil Iranian nuclear aspirations is the key driver here of the Israeli decision, it would be quite ironic. Why? Because the Iranian nuclear program, while dating back to the Shah (Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, remember him?), really gained motivation during the Iran-Iraq War, from September 1980 through August 1988. Saddam’s Iraq was clearly trying to build a bomb, and the Iranians would have been both irresponsible and even mad to just sit on their thumbs and watch him do it. Well, in March 2003 the Bush 43 Administration solved Iran’s problem in that regard, now didn’t it? So the Iranians could relax a bit, and they did.
They also seemed then, or perhaps earlier, to arrive at the conclusion that having an active program, but letting it be known that it would stop short of actually deploying a weapon unless provoked, was the best posture available. Why? Because the barely veiled program conferred much useful diplomatic status and burnished the Islamic regime’s domestic standing, but at the same time did not put Iran squarely onto the targeting maps of India, Israel, Pakistan, and other nuclear powers—as would be the norm in such matters. This was the rough Persian equivalent of getting to have one’s kuku sabzi and eat it, too. Assuming that this posture has remained the mullah’s first choice, it is not an exaggeration to claim, as both Iranian and U.S. official have recently stated, that Iran is not now seeking a rapid nuclear breakout.
So in 2003 U.S. policy solved Iran’s Iraq nuke problem, but had the effect of buying the Iranians time enough to lately become Israel’s problem….and then in just the past few months U.S. policy exacerbated Israel’s problem by pulling the rug out from under the core utility of the special relationship. So U.S. policy absentmindedly helped Iran in 2003 and then twenty-some years later absentmindedly hurt it. You have to therefore pardon the Iranians, they of a 4,000-year long tradition of statecraft going back to Safavid, Sassanid, and Achaemenid times, for asking “What the hell do these damned Americans think they’re doing……?”) One, indeed, has to wonder sometimes if senior U.S. policymakers, the political types who manage to get elected or appointed at Cabinet level ever really know what they’re doing. Alas, the people “in the room,” lately at least, rarely know much about these places or understand how the mechanics of politico-military and diplomatic tactics really work. Yes: “Oh, bother,” over and over again.
The irony here is actually richer and older than that. Early in the Iran-Iraq War, on June 7, 1981, Israel attacked and destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Nice; but that did not solve any problem, merely caused it to metathesize over time. The Iraqis built back better and bigger, which we found to our frightened surprise in the immediate wake of the 1991 Gulf War. So an Iraq problem the Israelis tried to solve but didn’t—leaving that task ultimately to the United States—looks like it could be a precursor to the Iran problem the Israelis are trying to solve now—and may again put the United States in the position of having to finish the job if the Iranians get a chance also to build back better and bigger. That, of course, remains to be seen, for these are still early days in this new war.
If you like irony you will also appreciate this one: The United States not only inadvertently helped the Iranian program and regime in March 2003, but also when President Trump in his first term walked the United States out of the JCPOA in May 2018. If he had not done that the Iranian program would not have advanced as far as it since has, reaching a point to trigger both voluble IAEA condemnation and Israeli action, which in turn is convoluting U.S.-Israeli relations and confronting Trump with a series of decisions he would rather not have to deal with right now. No good deed goes unpunished? Yes, but a lot of foolish deeds get punished, too. It’s only fair.
Q: What has been achieved by the first pulse of Israeli attack, and what remains to be achieved as far as a plausible plan of attack goes?
A: It’s early to conclude anything definitive, but the attack, insofar as it focused partly on Iranian human capital, has been quite successful. For obituary details you can refer to the usually reliable print-media sources; you’ll stay away from the talking-heads screen infotainment circus if you know what’s good for you.
Insofar as Israeli forces have focused on hitting nuclear program-related “stuff,” the fat lady has yet to sing. I at least have not seen any reliable BDA data, but that is normal since that information should not be in the public domain yet, because it could alert Iranian officials to the likeliest points of follow-on attacks. Natanz has been attacked, but Fordow has not—at least not as of 13:00 EDT today. Maybe soon: It would be standard best-practice to first attack the easier-to-penetrate site and then watch the movements at the other site for intelligence hints on how best to hit it.
More interesting to military experts, Israel managed to get agents into the country that have sabotaged Iranian air defenses, and again—as before during Israel’s limited October 2024 attacks—also smuggled exploding drones into the country. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah was killed by such techniques on August 4, 2024 at a Tehran guesthouse, remember? Well, the Israelis accomplished similar deeds this time around, as well.
These operations have been very effective and they have an infrequently mentioned shadow effect on Iranian behavior. If Israel can pull off operations inside Iran like that, it means that the precision with which it has hit human and basing targets—and avoided almost entirely any civilian casualties—likely allows Israel to target Iran’s highest clerical leadership at will. So why hasn’t it done so already, if not last year then yesterday? It has been a textbook shock-and-awe operation, much more successful than the U.S. attempt at one against Iraq in March 2003, so why leave the Supreme Leader and his band of would-be heaven-bound shadidis alone?
Two possibilities come to mind. One is that Israeli officials do not want to disrupt the main source of Iranian misgovernance, incompetence, and confusion. The other is that fear of attack might eventually persuade the Iranian leadership to give in to Israeli (and U.S.) demands, and that is the preferred way to handle the problem. And if the latter hope goes unrequited for a time, there remains the option of targeting some of the remaining political cadre leadership to make the case more persuasive to the survivors. We don’t know. We’ll see how things develop. One thing is for sure, however: If the Iranian leadership ultimately decides to capitulate, the diplomatic mediation of the United States will be involved—and Trump might get his Nobel after all.
Q: If Israel again managed to smuggle exploding drones into strategic positions in Iran, including in Tehran, long before the onset of the attack, does this suggest that Israel is now taking advantage of the newly kinetic situation to insert more stealth resources for attack into Iran for possible future use?
A: Of course. The Israelis know that this current campaign, even if it lasts for a few weeks—because Israel alone does not have enough attack aircraft to have done the job in just one attack pulse—will probably not destroy the Iranian nuclear program entirely or collapse the regime. Unless Israel catches a huge break in this attack, they assume there will be another round, and possibly another after that. So yes, it would be passing strange if they did not use current disruptions of daily life in Iran to prep the future. Remember how long—many, many months—the lead-time was for the pager attack against Hizballah in Lebanon back in September? You get the point and so, probably, does Ayatollah Khamenei….for all that he can do about it, it seems.
Q: What options does Iran have for retaliation, and from what we have seen so far how effective will those retaliations be?
A: Iranian leaders have two kinds of options: direct attacks on Israel, and terrorist attacks on Israeli and perhaps other supportive countries’ targets of opportunity worldwide. So far, as in October 2024, Iranian direct counterattacks on Israel have been feeble. It has helped that some of its capabilities have been pre-sabotaged, as with its air defenses. U.S. officials, both the President and the Secretary of State, have warned Iran not to retaliate against either Israel—a highly unrealistic demand under the circumstances—or the United States. It will be interesting to see if the Iranians go after U.S. assets in the region or not. If they want to keep any of their navy afloat, or their oil infrastructure on Kharg island untouched, they had better bite their lip and bide their time.
Q: The Trump Administration has sought volubly now for at least a week or two to distance itself from any Israeli attacks, and, as just noted, has publicly warned Iran not to retaliate against the United States on that account. More than that, it in effect gave Iran some pre-warning of the Israeli attack by openly evacuating some U.S. personnel from the area. This was not a friendly gesture to Israel from a putative ally. On the other hand, Trump attached no “or elses” to his admonitions that Israel not attack, which the Israelis interpreted as at least a yellow light. Why did the Trump Administration do this, and how will it likely affect Iranian decisions going forward?
A: The most likely reason for Trump Administration actions may be hard to believe, if you are going by standard and traditional measures. But if you really understand these people, you’ll not be too surprised. Wars in the Middle East always lead to major spikes in oil prices, partly because of heightened insurance costs to transporters, but also because the spot market tends to react to incipient supply reductions should the fighting spread. The U.S economy is experiencing significant inflationary pressure and stands at the edge of a recession, both of which are and would make an increasingly unpopular President even more unpopular. This Administration is roundly incompetent, so has thereby gotten itself knotted into political trouble, and will do most anything it can to avoid making matters worse. That’s it; no further explanation is needed.
Q: What if Iran does attack any of the bases the United States has in the Middle East, which host something like 40,000 American troops in a group of countries?
A: The United States refused to join Israel in the initial attack, but it has, as before, helped Israel to deal with Iranian retaliation efforts. So by the way has Jordan: Look at the map, and you can easily see which way Israeli aircraft must fly to attack Iranian sites, over a thousand miles away, and look at the air corridor Iranian missiles have to fly to reach Israel…..without Jordanian and U.S. personnel tracking those missiles over Jordanian territory, Israel’s Iron Dome area defense system would not be able to shoot down nearly all those missiles, as it has again done.
If U.S. military assets are attacked by Iran the U.S. military may end doing a lot more than merely helping Israel defend itself. Direct attacks on Iran are possible but unlikely; other options include a naval blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, thus choking off Iran’s oil exports. We could destroy Iranian oil facilities, too—indeed, just one ship, the USS Georgia, could do that. But for reasons already laid out, President Trump will probably be loath to take so much Iranian oil off the international market for so long a time—and he probably won’t like it if Israel does that deed instead as a way to increase its odds of collapsing the regime.
We certainly have the means and the plans in readiness to do any or all of these things. If we do any of them in response to Iranian attacks the situation will veritably drip with irony. Trump has no choice politically but to stand by Israel lest he be seen as in effect pro-Iranian, so if U.S. bases and troops are attacked Trump will probably argue that he, as a big-brained genius, planned it that way all along. (You know, like the Liberation Day tariffs that were at first about one thing, then about another, then….well, who knows?) It will be a lie, but it may well have a use Trump doesn’t even understand: U.S. participation in the war against Iran, later if not sooner, would make the President more welcome and respected in Riyadh, not less. Trump does seem, after all, to care a lot about what MBS thinks of him.
Q: How will the Israeli attack affect the course of the war with Hamas?
A: That is unclear. It may have little impact on the ground. The ordnance used to attack Iran and the military resources relevant to Gaza do not overlap much, if at all. Contrary to some views, too, Hamas has not really relied much lately on Iranian support. Thanks to Netanyahu’s foolishness, for years now Qatari money has been allowed to flow to Hamas instead. The joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza makes it hard for any state to smuggle much stuff into Gaza these days, and the Iranians in any case will have little time or patience for helping the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood—a Sunni organization—with Shi’a resources that they would rather give to the Houthis who are in a better position to molest American ships and other ships en route to Eilat. So if the Israeli attack on Iran affects the Gaza war, it may be because Hamas will wither in far less than splendid isolation before a redoubled Israeli offensive while most of the world’s attention shifts to the Iranian theater. Again, we’ll have to wait and see.
Q: Anything else worth noting at this early stage?
A: Plenty, but this is enough for now. Let us only note that Israeli techniques of smuggling drones for military purposes into Iran resembles somewhat the modus operandi of the recent June 1 Ukrainian attack on the Russian strategic bomber fleet. So maybe quiet cooperation between Israeli and Ukrainian officials exists that to some extent might explain the success of these operations. If so, American intelligence officials might be aware of this cooperation, one way or another, or not. I wish I knew, but I don’t. I can, however, pose the question.
California Dreading
I agree with those who have warned that the route from Ft. Bragg on Tuesday through southern California to the obscenity of Trump’s birthday military parade on Constitution Avenue tomorrow could produce the worst day in American history. If U.S. soldiers shoot and kill peaceably protesting civilians, we will have crossed a border from civility to madness, from a republic to a budding authoritarian monstrosity, and from a state that cares about “the opinion of mankind” to one that racially profiles entire nations.
In the face of this fraught moment, I have but one remark to offer, not of my own making but only of my own choosing. It is of a much older vintage than anything I could have come up with. Here it is, in a kind of picture, below, and I will leave to the reader to solve the puzzle of what it is and what it says…..apart from those few who will know it immediately.
