“The vilification of Israel serves a subversive progressivist agenda, aiming to undermine the legitimacy of a nation defending itself, in order to discourage other Western countries from adopting a similar stance when confronted with internal or external threats to their survival”.
Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute who posted these words on X a week before Israel attacked Iran’s central strategic nuclear uranium facilities in Natanz and Fordow and assassinated key figures in its atomic program and regime, may have a point.
Young Britons have never been less inclined to serve in a war, Germany—after completely dissolving mandatory military service in 2011—spends less than 1% of its GDP on defense, France’s youth’s enthusiasm for its army is nothing short of a joke, and Japan’s jieitai (self-defense forces) have been kept in check by their Chinese and Korean neighbors since the end of the Great Asian War (1937-1945). Who, then, is going to defend the security of these countries if something comes up—which with the sheer velocity with which “history happens” currently has become more likely?
And it’s not as though certain regimes in the Middle East—and by certain regimes, I mean one specific non-Arabic Islamist theocracy at the Gulf of Persia, though belligerents need not be limited to national states: see ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah—have not declared war on the US and Israel, and the West at large, at the very day of their inauguration. Today, in Tehran’s Felestin Square, a public clock, rather similar to the billboard of a cheap car dealership, counts down the days to “Israel’s destruction” (allegedly on September 9, 2040).
Today, a public clock in Tehran’s Felestin Square counts down the days to “Israel’s destruction” (allegedly on September 9, 2040).
The brazenness with which the Mullahs in Tehran have expressed their eliminatory fantasies since 1979, may be comical to the states it has been comparing, comic-strip like, to the “Great Satan and the Small Satan”, but it certainly isn’t to the families and friends of the 1,500 men and women who were slaughtered by the IRGC and affiliated militia in November 2018 on the streets of Tehran, branding them “traitors” and “Western spies”.
Of course, it is not comical to Israel either. Even after Obama’s nuclear deal, Tehran has not taken the peaceful use of nuclear energy very seriously, to put it mildly. The chants for Israel’s “annihilation” have been accompanied by an aggressive nuclear program.
As the US’s Defence Intelligence Agency stated in a 45-page document in May, “since 2019, Iran has conducted activities that exceed previous limits set by the 2015 Obama administration-negotiated deal, including increasing the size and enrichment levels of its uranium stockpile, producing small quantities of uranium metal, restricting International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring to pre-[Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] levels, and expanding uranium enrichment at its Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant”.
In other words: enrichment levels have moved beyond the agreed upon scale for peaceful use. This is not something you do when you have no plans to build nuclear weapons.
Two things should be distinguished here, though they intersect:
First, of course, the idea is not that Iran—if it had The Bomb—is going to strike Denver or Detroit (which would have given a new tinge to Gil Scott-Heron’s classic “We Almost Lost Detroit”). The idea is rather that if the Iranian regime had The Bomb, they would use it as a bargaining asset: not unlike Putin, who knows exactly that NATO will never attack Russia directly simply because Russia has The Bomb, and Putin, therefore, has done as he pleases with Ukraine (and the West has begun to leave Ukraine to its own devices, pace civilian death and destruction). While it is therefore unlikely that Iran will strike Detroit with nukes, its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) (asks yourself why Iran wants long-distance rockets) may come in handy: there would simply not be the same kind of retaliation to Iranian aggression by the US military if Tehran sat on The Bomb.
The idea is that if the Iranian regime had The Bomb, they would use it as a bargaining asset: not unlike Putin, who knows exactly that NATO will never attack Russia directly simply because Russia has The Bomb—and Putin can do as he pleases.
The second, more unsettling, consequence of Iran’s bomb possession would be this: unchecked military advance towards Israel, secured by the Putin effect, to which the October 7 genocidal massacre would have been but a macabre foreplay. And Israel, understandably, doesn’t like that.
Indeed, since June 13, Israel strikes back. For decades, Iran has been waging a proxy war against Israel’s civilian population via Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Gaza’s Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis. With the additional immediate nuclear threat, Israel’s timing was excellent: Hamas is currently dealing with several new adversaries on the scene— Palestinian rioters, rival gangs, the Israel-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation —, and is severely weakened, and the Houthis are militarily too sluggish: add a growing restlessness in the Iranian population towards their brutal and oppressive regime, and Iran not quite yet having the bomb. But there is another aspect to the operation: knowledge, or—since we’re not strictly dealing with an epistemological problem—intelligence.
The constellation— Tehran with its years-long rampant threats to Israel and simultaneous development of their nuclear program—also shows why the idea that self-defense can only take place within one’s national borders is ridiculous. But here, intel is key. Israel’s self-defense has always strongly relied on Mossad infiltration. In the case of the Natanz and Fordow facilities, this included going underground (literally), and being able to “trick some top commanders of Iran’s air force into gathering for a meeting before they were targeted” —including including General Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard; Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the country’s military; Gholam Ali Rashid, head of Iran’s emergency command; and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace force. The New York Post: “It wasn’t immediately clear how Israel managed to lure the Iranian officials together”. In contrast, Mission:Impossible looks like an Atari C-64 game with a bad color map.
The constellation— Tehran with its years-long rampant threats to Israel and simultaneous development of their nuclear program—also shows why the idea that self-defense can only take place within one’s national borders is ridiculous.
Self-defense, backed by sufficient intelligence, can be the best means of preventing a larger war. Before December 7, 1941, US intelligence on Japanese plans to strike US homeland targets was as good as non-existent. Hostilities had been exchanged, but when, how, and where Japan would strike, and what capabilities it had to do so, were all but obscure to the US administration. Launching one of the deadliest parts of World War 2, the Pacific War (1941-1945), which ended with the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan declared war on the US when the kamikaze pilots heading for Pearl Harbor were already in the air. Perhaps all of this—including the horrible deaths of 200,000 Japanese civilians—could have been prevented with a more Mossad-like state of mind on the part of the FDR administration.
While the open, hot phase of the war between Israel and Iran may continue for the moment, and the future of Iran’s leadership is unclear, it is unlikely that anything beyond a short-lived wildfire emerges. One thing I am certain of, though: mass casualties were prevented with Israel’s precision strikes (which, because of Hamas’s re-vamping of schools and hospitals into legitimate military targets has been so difficult in Gaza). Israel has already achieved the main part of its self-defense goals: crippling Iran’s nuclear program. Whether it can manage regime change on its own, remains to be seen (even if “Operation Rising Lion” is not exactly subtle). But we will not see footage of IDF soldiers tearing down statues of Khamenei, like we did in 2003, when US Marines toppled Saddam’s statue in Baghdad. Instead, Iranian protestors have already begun to tear Khameini’s plastered heads off, emboldened by the regime’s new military weakness.
We will not see footage of IDF soldiers tearing down statues of Khamenei, like we did in 2003, when US Marines toppled Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.
To be in a position to launch its strikes, Israel was acting on its intel: with precision and a clear understanding that the Iranian regime cannot be dissuaded from its course by debating clubs and court-holding. Decades of military aggression against Israel’s civil population by Iranian proxies have sobered any illusions on that.
The West that calls on “restraint” (Keir Starmer) in dealing with a mortal enemy should, perhaps, take a leaf from Israel’s book in knowing its own time to act to prevent a larger war and larger devastation. Such dangers may be, currently, on hold. But fostering the West’s self-illusion of safety will not be helpful.
