Opinion: Israel answers Iran. These three questions about war in the Mideast remain
Israel’s multi-wave strike against an assortment of Iranian military bases on Friday was anything but a surprise. From the moment Tehran launched around 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel in retaliation for the Israeli assassinations of Hamas Politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing for a response. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was emphatic: “Our strike will be lethal, precise and above all, surprising. They won’t understand what happened and how. They will see the results.”
The question, therefore, wasn’t if Israel would take military action against Iran but rather when and how. We have the answer: with a relatively restrained operation from the air in the dead of night. According to reports, at least 100 Israeli aircraft took part in the operation, which involved three bombing runs against Iranian military facilities in at least three provinces. An S-300 air defense system at the Imam Khomeini International Airport was taken out of service; missile manufacturing plants were struck as well; Iran reported four soldiers killed. The entire mission lasted several hours.
Even so, Iranian, Israeli, Arab and U.S. officials are still facing a torrent of questions — none of which are fully resolved.
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First and foremost, is this the end of the spat between Israel and Iran? The Biden administration certainly hopes so. Hours after the Israelis concluded their strikes, a senior U.S. administration official made the point that from Washington’s perspective, this should be the end of the story. The U.S., of course, said practically the same thing back in April, the first time Iran and Israel traded fire. The pause lasted six months, only for a second round to occur in October. The United States may be the most powerful country on the planet, but it can’t control, let alone dictate to, states in the region — particularly when one of those states, Israel, is fully invested in using its superior conventional strength to degrade Iran’s network of proxy militias in the region. The more Israel continues to prosecute that campaign, the weaker Iran’s deterrent becomes and the more likely the Iranian government will feel compelled to save what’s left of it. Additional Israel-Iran spats are possible as long as the wars in Gaza and Lebanon churn on.
Next question: Is it time for the U.S. to get a bit sterner with Netanyahu’s government? For many regional analysts, Democrats and general observers, the answer is a strongly worded yes given the humanitarian calamity in Gaza (and now Lebanon). The situation has gotten so bad in northern Gaza, for instance, that U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III sent a letter to their Israeli counterparts suggesting a cutoff of U.S. military aid was possible if more aid trucks didn’t reach the Palestinian population there.
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Yet for the most part, the Biden administration has stuck with its bear-hug approach — while Biden is clearly irked by Netanyahu’s war and negotiation strategy, he has repeatedly ruled out the kinds of overtly punitive actions that could pressure Netanyahu into ditching his maximalist demands.
The fact that it took Israel nearly a month to respond to Tehran’s Oct. 1 missile attack, though, is an indication that some honest but tough conversations between U.S. and Israeli officials occurred behind the scenes. Biden made it abundantly clear early on that Washington would not support Israeli strikes on Iran’s energy or nuclear facilities, the former because it would heighten oil prices during an election year and the latter because such action could push Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei into making the decision to weaponize Tehran’s nuclear program.
Netanyahu has made it a habit to ignore Washington’s advice as it pertains to the wars in Gaza and Lebanon — in one of the more infamous cases, the Israeli premier rejected a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire plan in Lebanon shortly after it was unveiled. But he appears to have taken Biden’s concerns seriously on Iran.
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Oil infrastructure, centrifuge plants and nuclear research facilities were left off the target list, a welcome relief for the Biden administration, whose overall objective throughout the last year has been to stop the war in Gaza from snowballing into a regional conflagration. Whether Netanyahu refrained out of concern about how the Iranians would respond or whether he did so out of fear of how the Americans would react is difficult to say. But the White House may very well have come to the belated conclusion that unconditionality hasn’t worked in leading to the regional deescalation it ostensibly wants.
Third and finally, will Iran respond? Weeks earlier, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was warning Israel that any attack on Iranian soil would result in even stronger retaliation. Today, the general response to the Israeli strikes on Iranian state media is underwhelming. There is a concerted effort to downplay the extent of the Israeli operation, either to save itself the embarrassment of admitting that major military bases were damaged or to provide the leadership in Tehran with an offramp to deescalate. Khamenei may be a zealot, but he also isn’t stupid; he recognizes that Israel holds escalation dominance and that a direct war with Israel — which could possibly draw in the United States — isn’t exactly a smart strategy at a time when the Iranian economy is already struggling.
While the risks of escalation must always be considered, Israel’s operation against Iran was designed to thread a needle: do enough to ensure the Iranians respect Israeli military power but not so much that it forces Iran to retaliate with another wave of attacks. At this early stage, it looks like those two objectives were accomplished.
DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
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