Israel Launches Attacks Against Iran; Iran Begins Retaliation
Alastair Crooke had said that Israel regarded June as the critical time frame for acting against Iran, because after that, it would not be possible to trigger the snapback provisions in the JCPOA and have the process come to resolution before the snapback expired in October. The Israel attack on Iran proves that assessment to be correct. However, the status of Iran’s nuclear program is simply a pretext. Most experts agree that Israel is seeking regime change.
Nevertheless, Israel is pretending to observe forms, asserting that it had new intelligence that said that Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Various YouTubers (at a minimum Larry Johnson and Sayed Mohammed Marandi) have been saying that for over 20 years, so why is now so special? Well, aside from the fact that Bibi is in very hot water?
Simplicius cites sources in Israel on its ambitions for this campaign, which Israel officials say will persist for weeks:
Hebrew sources: Air force attacks on Iran are divided into three main missions:
The nuclear project
Destruction of missile launch platforms
Elimination of senior regime officialsIsraeli news:
Israeli Channel 14 citing an Israeli official: “We have a long and broad offensive plan for the days ahead – complex days lie ahead. The Iranians will respond, if the public is disciplined, there will be few casualties. We are at war.”
Since Iran is widely believed to have a large stockpile of missiles, including an estimated 3,000 to as many as 6,000 cruise missiles, in sites so deep underground as to be highly resistant even to a nuclear strike, one wonders how Israel thinks it can destroy “missile launch platforms” unless it means air defense launchers.
As we’ll see below. the US posture is that it did not support this operation. It unlikely that this “uninvolved” posture will hold if the expected Iran retaliation exacts a high toll on Israel. Iran is already correctly pointing fingers at the US. A Guardian headline from yesterday: Trump warns of ‘massive conflict’ soon if Iran nuclear talks break down. Mike Hampton points out that the US evacuation of personnel in the region has a guilty look. And the Trump dodge was not artful:
Oh, and Bibi pinned the tail on the US donkey:
The BBC headline, Israel targets Iran’s nuclear sites and military commanders in major attack, is typical, even though most knowledgeable commentators contend that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is far too deep underground to be vulnerable to air strikes. From the story:
Israel has carried out strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, the IDF has said, with blasts heard in Tehran
The strikes were part of Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu says, adding Iran was a threat to “Israel’s very survival”
Israel has declared a state of emergency, saying the country expected counter-attacks “in the immediate future”
Iranian state TV said residential areas in Tehran were hit and civilians were among those killed – including children – though this could not be independently verified
Iranian state media also reported that Revolutionary Guard chief Hossein Salami was killed in a strike
Iran has accused the US of supporting Israel’s attack, which US strongly denies.US President Trump told Fox News he was aware of the strikes beforehand but emphasised that the US played no part
The Wall Street Journal (as of 5:00 AM EDT) reports that Iran has already started its retaliation, with 100 drones. Recall that in its earlier pre-negotiated retaliation against Israel’s assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrallah, Iran used drones to deplete and get information about air defenses, so it seems likely that a bigger punch is yet to come.
The Financial Times reports that Israel says it killed two Iranian commanders and struck the Natanz nuclear site. . Both the BBC and the pink paper said that the operation could continue for two weeks. The current New York Times headline strikes me as celebratory: Israel Wipes Out Iran’s Top Chain of Command
The pink paper added:
After massive explosions rocked Tehran at about 3.30am local time on Friday, state television also showed smoke rising from the main command headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s most powerful military force, in eastern Tehran.
Iran’s state news agency said several senior military figures, including Major General Hossein Salami, head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, were killed, as well as Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a prominent physics professor, and Fereydoon Abbasi, a former head of Iran’s atomic organisation.
Preliminary evidence suggests that the claim that Israel it targeting only military figures is serving as a pretext to strike civilians:
Scott Ritter added to the hit list:
Initial reports suggest that, in addition to the decapitation strikes, Israel struck air defense and communications facilities, nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Firdos, ballistic missile production facilities at Parchin, a ballistic missile operations base at Piranshahr, and other facilities of a similar nature.
We’ll presumably have Israel skeptics opine in due course as to how severely these targets were damaged. These assets should have been well protected, so if Israel was reasonably as opposed to randomly successful that would suggest Iran’s air defenses were not up to snuff.
Some preliminary takes from that peanut gallery suggest the Israel salvo so far has not done all that much harm, save perhaps for the senior level deaths:
From the body of the tweet:
An Israeli attempt to decapitate the Iranian military leadership also appears to have largely failed, with only one reasonably confirmed senior casualty at this time – GEN Salami, commander of the IRGC since 2019. I’ve seen a report that he was quite ill and thus remained in his home unlike the rest of the Iranian senior leadership….
Two or three people connected to the Iranian nuclear program also seem to have been assassinated, but in real terms this isn’t going to affect a program that is already largely – if not entirely – complete. The Iranians don’t need a lot of theory work at this point to develop a bomb if they don’t already have one.
The most likely course of events over the next few days, I believe is for the Iranians to launch another large-scale missile raid on Israel and the parties to go back to staring angrily at each other.
A Wall Street Journal map of the targets:
More detail on the strikes and responses:
However:
Note that Natanz was only 40-50 meters underground, which is a much shallower depth than has been claimed for key assets in Iran’s nuclear program.
The UN atomic watchdog says there are no signs of increased radiation at Iran’s main enrichment site.
That would seem to suggest Natanz was not that severely damaged and/or that Iran had moved its critical enrichment operations and materiel much further underground.
DropSite is not so optimistic about the direction of travel:
Although the stated goal of Israel’s operation is to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts, there are reasons to be skeptical about this objective. Long before the current wave of strikes, U.S. intelligence officials and other analysts had pointed to the limited ability of Israeli strikes to destroy or meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program. Unlike nuclear facilities that Israel has struck in the past in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian program is more advanced, fortified, and distributed across a far greater territory. Key Iranian nuclear facilities like Natanz and Fordow are also built under layers of fortified concrete and granite—in some cases literally built into mountains—rendering them impossible to destroy by any known conventional Israeli military capacity.
The likely inability of Israel to fully destroy the program, despite being able to strike at various targets inside Iran, has led some military experts to conclude that the real goal of any attack is simply to fire the starting gun for a larger regional war with no determined endpoint. Such a war would potentially drag the U.S. in as a participant, including to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, even at a time when segments of the Trump administration and its domestic political base are expressing intense frustration over fighting continued conflicts in the Middle East.
That aim would suggest that Israel, assuming it can deplete or damage Iran’s air defenses, will focus on hitting civilian residences, as it did in Beirut, to stoke internal opposition and facilitate a revolt. But as we know, wars typically increase internal cohesion.
Consistent with DropSite, Simplicius contends that top Israel officials are united in that view that desperately needs to eliminate Iran, when “Iran as a threat” is mainly a very successful Israel propaganda operation. At this point, Israel is the big threat to Israel. Larry Wilkerson has regularly banged on about how desperate things are in Israel, from flagging economic performance to civil-war-in-the-making political chasms to self-created international isolation. Others, including yours truly, have gone through a similar litany.
But the urgency for Israel, aside from needing to greatly bolster long-standing bugaboo of Iran as as a threat to Israel’s survival, is that support for Israel in the US was already in decline even before the genocide. Peter Beinart wrote in the early 2000s about how young Jews, unlike their elders, did not identify with Israel and were not deeply invested in how it fared.
From Simplicius:
Israel duly is at a crossroads, which I have described before: the country is in a downward spiral and has only one remaining chance to seize history to secure its survival. Why? The reasons are almost too long to list in this one brief article alone, but they include demographics, as well as the decline of Zionism and rise of “noticing” in the West which means in a generation or two, support for Israel may dwindle to the point where it will be engulfed by regional enemies.
The other major reason: nascent technologies have created parity between Israel and its foes, where groups like Hamas and Hezbollah can use cheap but highly technologically effective weapons to deal accurate, disabling damage to Israel’s most critical and sensitive infrastructure. The same goes for Iran: the country has come of age and mastered rocketry and newfangled drone warfare to the point where the numbers simply do not work in Israel’s favor in any future war.
Israel once had the backing of the world’s most dominant ‘superpower’ alliance of Western nations, now the tides of history have simply shifted against Israel’s favor.
By contrast, Scott Ritter contends that Iran, by enriching uranium to 60%, one cycle below what it would take to get to the 92% for a weapon, and then having officials say that the fatwa against nuclear weapons development could be reversed if Iran faced an existential threat, has put itself in a position where it has to move forward:
The escalation genie, unfortunately, is out of the bottle.
Iran is now in a “use it or lose it” reality, where the nuclear weapons threshold capacity it has acquired will either need to be rapidly converted into a viable nuclear weapons capability, or else it will be diminished and/or eliminated through the ongoing attrition of Israeli strikes.
Having promised that it would withdraw from the NPT if its nuclear facilities were attacked, Iran has no choice but to now follow through on this threat.
Failure to do so would be seen as an act of surrender by the Iranian regime, something which could serve as the predicate for regime change.
Keep in mind that some of the grim forecasts come from war profiteers:
The Financial Times recounts that the US is trying to play innocent while Iran regards them as guilty and hence fair game, indeed perhaps required game, in a retaliation:
Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz said Israel expected Iran to retaliate with “a missile and drone attack” as Israel closed its airspace and banned most non-essential gatherings.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel “should expect a severe punishment”….
Iranian officials also said they held the US responsible for the assault. Earlier this week Tehran reiterated warnings that the republic could also target American bases across the region if it was attacked.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said in a statement Washington was “not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region”.
“Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence,” Rubio added. “Let me be clear: Iran should not target US interests or personnel.”
This “they told us but we are not to blame” flies afoul of the principle, Qui tacet consentire videtur, or silence is assent. If memory serves me correctly, Israel and the US were working on a strike package in May which Trump nixed, much to Netanyahu’s ire. Unless the US was informed only immediately before the campaign, it’s hard to see the joined-at-the-hip US as not being at least somewhat culpable.
And we have plenty of Trump belligerence on record, such as:
The neighbors are Not Happy:
Nor is Mr. Market, but he has not yet retreated to a fainting couch. From Bloomberg:
Crude oil jumped the most in more than three years, stocks slid and haven assets including government bonds and gold rose after Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear program sites in a major escalation of tensions in the Middle East.
Oil surged as much as 13%, the biggest intraday jump since March 2022, before paring gains. Contracts for the S&P 500 index retreated 1.4% and those for European stocks slumped 1.5%. Gold rose 1.1% and Treasuries advanced, with the 10-year yield falling three basis points to 4.33%. Asian stocks dropped the most in two months.
We are very much in fog of war terrain, so any initial pictures can well shift as more information comes in.
However, I would have expected Israel to have delivered its most formidable attack on military and nuclear enrichment assets in the first wave, unless it was pinning a lot of hope on wrecking Iran’s air defenses first and then going after key targets.
And the US and Israel will find themselves a bit hoist on their propaganda petards. Both will need to minimize claims of damage to Israel by Iran (unless it is impossible to deny and/or catastrophic) and tout the effectiveness of Israel attacks on Iran. At the margin, Israel being perceived to be holding up against Iran salvo undercuts the case for US involvement.
One might think that both Iran and Israel have devastating threats, Israel in unleashing its nukes on Iran, Iran in a supposed “dead hand” strike capacity, that will send conventional missiles at Middle Eastern oil assets, both sending prices oil to the moon and unleashing an environmental disaster.
But Iran has sufficiently impressed upon the West that it has that capability in the event of an existential threat?
At 9:50, from Dr. Strangelove: The whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Why didn’t you tell the world?
It would be nice to think that cooler heads might prevail. But Norman Finkelstein has called Israel “a crazy state.” And as a friend often days, “If you want a happy ending, watch a Disney movie.”