Part One:
Israel’s Relations with the United States
1956-1967……………………………………….……Page 3
Part Two:
Israel’s relations with the United States
1967–2007………………………………………………………….Page 9
Part Three:
The country’s nuclear quest and failed U.S. efforts to stop it.
1968–2023………………………………………… Page 19
Part Four:
Israel’s Timing Dilemma: Lessons Not Yet Learned……. Page 31
Part One:
Israel’s Relations with the United States, 1956-1967
This is the first of four articles covering the interlinked topics of Israel’s relations with the U.S., and the challenge posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Part One focuses on the Suez Crisis of 1956. Its outcome was to reshape the Mideast, and influence U.S. relations with key powers from then to the present, albeit in changing ways. Part Two will cover U.S-Israel relations from the 1967 Six Day War through the 2007 Israeli bombing of the Syrian nuclear reactor. Parts Three and Four will cover U.S. and Israeli relations with Iran, focusing on Iran’s nuclear program.
As Israel turns 75, it faces an acute existential crisis, in the form of an Iran bent on joining the nuclear weapon-state club. Compounding Israel’s peril is that its primary ally, the United States, sports an administration openly hostile to the Jewish state. Team Biden is obsessed with the desire to make a new accord with Iran akin to that made by former president Obama; it is equally obsessed with pressuring Israel to withdraw fully to its pre-1967 boundaries, which former foreign minister Abba Eban famously called “Auschwitz lines.” And with incredibly foolish perversity, it is intent on prioritizing its twin obsessions over the historic Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which made for the first “warm” peace between Arab and Jew in the 14 centuries since Islam first appeared on the world scene.
To better grasp the dynamic of the U.S.-Israel relationship in this context, it is useful to examine six elevated use-of-force crises that confronted Israel: the 1956 Suez Crisis; the 1967 Six-Day War; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the 1981 Israeli airstrike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor; the 1991 Gulf War; and the 2007 Israeli airstrike on Syria’s nuclear reactor. In each crisis, in different ways and at different levels of nuclear risk, the prospect of possible use of nuclear weapons played a role in crisis resolution, Iran’s nuclear quest and alliance relations. The prospective consequences of choices made by the players ranged from crisis resolved to calamitous conflict. Lessons that can be learned—albeit so far decidedly not learned by key players—may pave the way for ultimate adoption of a better strategy to prevent Iran from crossing the military nuclear threshold.
Suez 1956. The run-up to the pivotal events of late 1956 began with the 1952 overthrow of Egypt’s King Farouk by a group of Army officers in what became known as the Free Officers Coup. (A brief digression: Two leaders of that group later became president of the nascent Egyptian republic and world famous: Gamal Abdel Nasser, who dominated the Mideast from 1952 to his death in late 1970, mainly due to his triumph during the Suez Crisis; and Anwar el-Sadat, who altered the Mideast diplomatic landscape during his ascendancy, from 1972 until his assassination in 1981.
A landmark, extraordinary book by Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran, Ike’s Gamble:America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East (2016), provides a detailed narrative of the key events, players and the geopolitics surrounding Suez. Doran’s narrative contradicts on many points the conventional wisdom of six decades on Suez, i.e., that it was an American triumph that stood for international law and against arch-colonial powers.
In 1954, Nasser began negotiating for transfer of control over the Suez Canal, the major international waterway linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Arabian Sea; the former gave access to the Atlantic Ocean, the latter, to the Indian Ocean. Opened by France in 1869, it fell under British control when Britain assumed imperial rule over Egypt in 1882. British rule began to unravel in 1945, after the end of World War II; postwar idealism gave birth to decolonization movements in countries that had been colonized in the immediately preceding centuries by the great European powers, thus unleashing what British prime minster Harold Macmillan (1957-62) called “winds of change.” A seminal event was the conference of 29 “non-aligned” Asian and African nations—ostensibly diplomatically neutral but mostly tilting toward the Soviet Union—held in April 1955 at Bandung, Indonesia. Nasser emerged from the conference as the leading Mideast figure.
The United States was a staunch proponent of postwar decolonization under three presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower saw a geopolitical opportunity to win friends and influence people in the post-colonial era. In part they were motivated by principled opposition arising from America’s own break with colonial Britain. FDR also met with King Ibn Saud in 1945, seeking access to petroleum. Though Truman had been persuaded to recognize Israel upon its declaring independence in 1948, virtually the entire foreign policy establishment in both parties strongly opposed the decision, and saw America’s future interests in the Mideast aligned with the Arab nations. In 1954 Winston Churchill, midway through his final tenure as prime minister, warned Anthony Eden, who was to succeed him in 1955, about American power:
Up to July 1944, England had a considerable say in things; after that I was conscious that it was America who made the big decisions. She will make the big decisions now. . . . We do not yet realize her immeasurable power.
The Eisenhower administration ardently courted Nasser, believing that he could be coaxed into joining the Western alliance. The centerpiece of the Eisenhower plan for the Mideast was to create an alliance akin to NATO, based upon what they called the Northern Tier: thus they created the Baghdad Pact, centered upon French Syria and British Iraq. Ike’s minions even fantasized that Egypt would join the new alliance. To the contrary, it was anathema to Nasser’s pan-Arabist ambition to become the leader of the entire Arab Mideast.
Nasser dangled possible cooperation with the U.S. in constructing the Aswan High Dam, whilst getting to U.S. to press Britain for concessions over basing rights after conclusion of a Suez agreement. In 1955, Nasser made an a massive arms deal with Czechoslovakia, a member of the Warsaw Pact; the U.S. risibly assumed that because the Czechs had supplied Israel with arms in 1948 and Israel remained in the Western orbit, that Nasser’s Egypt would follow suit. Nasser also made a deal for construction of Aswan, ostensibly offered by the Soviets purely for commercial purposes. The U.S. had attached alliance and security goals to its proposal. Nasser persuaded the Americans that he was in a contest between hard-liners and moderates, with himself supporting the moderate faction. This ruse worked perfectly (as it was to do decades later when Americans sought “moderates” inside the Islamic Republic of Iran to curb the regime’s revolutionary goals.)
When concessions over British basing in the area did not materialize, on June 13, 1956, under pressure from Nasser, British troops ignominiously departed the Canal Zone, thus freeing Nasser to make his move. In August 1956 Nasser nationalized the Canal, triggering the three-month Suez Crisis.
Eisenhower was mesmerized by the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, under which the U.S., U.K. and France guaranteed to come to the aid of nations who they saw as victims of aggression. Saith Ike; “We must honor our pledge . . . we cannot be bound by our traditional alliances.” Ike saw the UN coming front and center to enforce world peace. Thus, he withheld economic aid to our allies, while Nasser sank ships in the Canal, and Syria cut a British oil pipeline. On October 30, Ike said that his allies would “boil in their own oil.” This decision predated the1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, under which the U.S. would defend its Mideast allies from (outside) Soviet and (local) Arab aggression.
Israel saw the Nasser arms deal as prelude to an eventual invasion of an Israel, then confined by the 1949 Armistice agreements, which confined Israel to the “Green” ceasefire lines reached after the 1947-48 War of Independence—during which Israel gained land beyond the 1947 Partition Resolution limits, but lost access to its most sacred sites in Jerusalem.
With a tiny population compared to Egypt, Israel decided to wage preventive war, before a strike became imminent. But Israel needed help, and it was clear that the U.S. would not provide it. So Israel approached Britain and France; the colonial powers hoped that toppling Nasser would possibly check the wave of anti-colonial sentiment. Nasser intensified his use of the Mideast’s most formidable radio broadcast network, built by the U.S. and aided by the CIA. He proved a charismatic propagandist. In this he benefitted from America’s ardently Arabist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who, driven by an obsession with Palestine, incredibly, saw in Nasser the leader who could peacefully resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel launched its invasion of the Sinai Peninsula on October 28, but the British and French did not carry out their military operations until November 4. By then, all hell had broken loose. Caught by surprise, Ike was furious. Compounding the furor was the November 4 uprising in Hungary, and Ike’s landslide re-election on November 5. The Soviet Union warned that if the war reached Cairo, it might also reach London and Paris; premier Nikolai Bulganin threatened all three countries with a nuclear strike. Ike refused to warn the Soviets not to do so. Britain and France withdrew their troops, and Israel surrendered its military gains after three months of negotiations, in return for a U.S. guarantee that its access to the Red Sea would not be blocked by Egypt. The upshot was that British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned, and Nasser was emboldened. Ike, for his part, saw through the nuclear saber-rattling; Ike’s worry—his military acumen being far better than his geopolitical judgment in Mideast matters—was that if the Canal were seized, Egypt would launch a Soviet-backed guerrilla war.
Eisenhower realized his mistake when on February 14, 1958, while America celebrated Valentine’s Day, Nasser announced the formation with Syria of the United Arab Republic, an arranged territorial marriage that was to last only three years. The colonial regimes in Damascus and Baghdad were violently overthrown by Arab radicals exactly five months later, to be replaced by pro-Soviet rulers. Meanwhile, King Saud withdrew his kingdom from its alliance with the U.S., in favor of neutrality. Thus, unlike Egypt, the Saudis emphatically did not tilt towards the Soviets. In response to the July 14 revolutions, Ike sent Marines to save Lebanon. But overall, the final result of Suez was an historic debacle for the U.S., Britain and France.
Years later—channeling Macbeth’s “If it were done, then ’tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly!”—during his retirement Ike said of the 1956 preventive war that “had they done it quickly, we would have accepted it.”
Bottom Line. Doran draws five lessons from Suez, of which two are paramount: (1) the U.S. should support its allies, and not propitiate its enemies; (2) the Palestine-Israeli conflict is not the “central strategic challenge” in the region, but rather a localized conflict. His three others are also worth noting: inter-Arab politics are critical; keep a “tragic” view of the Mideast; and without a clear view of the region, lots of trouble lies ahead.
The tragedy of Suez is that Eisenhower’s advisers, virtually to a man, were ardently pro-Arab, and thus convinced him that for both Egypt and the U.S., Suez was an anti-colonial war. In reality, it was a play by Nasser for pan-Arab geostrategic dominance. Had Nasser been overthrown, a charismatic successor of his caliber was highly unlikely to emerge. In such event, the lethal poison of pan-Arab radicalism might have proven far less influential in the region during the decades that followed.
Part Two:
Israel’s relations with the United States, 1967–2007
The Six-Day War, 1967
If the Suez Crisis was an exemplar of preventive war, the Six-Day War was a classic case of pre-emptive war. in the month run-up to the June 5 beginning of the conflict, Nasser issued a series of bloodcurdling threats calling upon his Arab allies to join him in a war of extermination against the Jewish state. He ordered UN peacekeeping forces, stationed in Sinai since 1956, to first pull back and then, to depart the Sinai. The secretary-general, U Thant of Burma, the first developing-country representative to hold that position, complied.
Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol had formed a solid friendship with president Lyndon Johnson — both were farmers, and LBJ, a Christadelphian (Brothers in Christ) worshipper, harbored a special feeling for Jerusalem. After Egypt imposed a blockade on the Straits of Tiran on May 22, Eshkol went to his friend asking for American assistance, based upon America’s 1957 post-Suez guarantee from freedom of Israel navigation through the Straits, and the expulsion of UN expeditionary forces in the Sinai.
But while the two heads of state were close, that was hardly the case at the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom. Mired ever more deeply in the Vietnam War, Defense had no appetite for getting involved in another major conflict. As for State, though less pro-Arab than during Israel’s early years, its Mideast desk still leaned strongly towards the Arabs. The State Department denied that it had guaranteed Israeli safe passage through the Straits after Suez. In Ike’s Gamble (1956), discussed in Part One, Michael Doran notes that it took a press conference called by former president Eisenhower, who reaffirmed that such a commitment had been made, to make State concede. LBJ asked for a fortnight to see if through diplomacy the Straits could be re-opened. Eshkol replied that he would delay as long as possible, but he could not guarantee that Israel could safely hold off a full fortnight.
When Israeli aircraft were returning from their surprise strike at Egypt’s air force, having destroyed some 90 percent of the force, Eshkol notified LBJ. Though LBJ did not agree that Israel had to act, he understood that Eshkol felt differently. Another factor that may have influenced LBJ to stand down: the CIA estimated that in event of war, Israel would win easily in a couple days. After two days, Egypt, and its allies, Syria and Iraq, were defeated, save for mop-up operations, with Israeli ground forces marching towards the Suez Canal. But then Jordan’s normally circumspect King Hussein, galvanized by false reports from Radio Cairo recounting a massive Egyptian victory — including destroying the Israeli Air Force — decided to jump in. The upshot was that Israel defeated the Jordanians, seized much of the area west of the Jordan River, and liberated Jerusalem, re-uniting the western and eastern halves after 19 years of separation. Hostilities ended June 11. Israel, in addition to reclaiming Jerusalem, had taken two-thirds of the Golan Heights in the north, eliminating Syria’s ability to shell northern Israel at will. (READ MORE: Six Days, and Forty Years)
Because the war ended with an Israeli triumph, there was no need for Israel to use the atomic bomb. Sources conflict to how many Israel had in 1967. A 2017 New York Times article based on an interview with a former Israeli official, asserts that Israel had only one A-bomb, to be used by exploding it in the Sinai as a warning to Arab adversaries to back off. But a 2013 compilation of global arsenals by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) shows Israel with two in 1967, 15 in 1973, 33 in 1991, and 80 for 2004-13. A Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS) 2007 compilation shows two for 1967 and 13 for 1973, with 20-kiloton yields. As of 2007, FAS offers a range of 70 to 400 for Israel, but adds that the most likely figure is close to the low end of the range. If the 1967 number of two is correct, and given a yield of 20 kilotons, roughly comparable to the Nagasaki bomb, their use could have been, in event of imminent total defeat, for the “Samson Option”: taking out Cairo and Damascus as Israel fell to Arab forces. The most recent estimate for Israel’s nuclear arsenal is 90 warheads.
At its founding, prime minister David Ben-Gurion decided to pursue nuclear weapons to prevent a possible second Holocaust. He secured technology from the French, and they built a nuclear reactor at Dimona, which can produce civilian-grade 3.5 percent enriched uranium, and enable extraction of plutonium by reprocessing spent fuel. In April 1963, when Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres met with JFK in the Oval Office, in response to JFK’s interrogation as to nuclear weapons, Peres improvised on the spot what remains Israel’s stated policy today: Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Defined narrowly, it means that Israel can produce weapons-grade fuel, but will not mate warheads to any bomb chassis, so long as the Middle East remains nuclear-free.
The Yom Kippur War, 1973
In The Two O’ Clock War: The 1973 Yom Kippur Conflict and the Airlift That Saved Israel (2002), authors Walter J. Boyne and Fred Smith show in harrowing detail how close to destruction Israel found itself, before rallying with U.S. aid to save the day. Egypt and Syria turned the tables, striking the first blow and achieving strategic surprise by attacking on Yom Kippur — coincidentally also the first date of the month of Ramadan — which fell on October 6 that year. As the Arabs were marshaling forces, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir went to the U.S. for prewar aid, only to be told that if she wanted to receive U.S. assistance, Israel must not strike first. Reluctantly she complied. Israel did not order mobilization in advance, difficult in a society far less populous than many Arab countries. Thus, unlike Egypt, Israel is unable to maintain a full-time standing army. (READ MORE: The Yom Kippur War and the Righteous Richard Nixon)
Israel intelligence, usually first-rate, proved catastrophically wrong in 1973, in grossly underestimating the military prowess of its adversaries. Had the war been fought without Israel having the buffer of territory acquired in 1967, the Jewish state would have ceased to exist. Not only did the Arabs fight effectively; they also had amassed from their Russian suppliers thousands of modern “Sagger” wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and thousands of surface-to-air missiles, some portable, all deadly. Over the first fortnight of the three-week conflict, the Israeli airfare and armor suffered heavy losses.
Worse, enmeshed in a protracted, desperate fight for survival, Israeli forces consumed munitions at a far higher rate than anticipated, and began asking the U.S. for resupply after one week. The second week saw the first shipments, but it was not until the third week that the full weight of massive U.S. aid enabled Israel to decisively turn the tide. Even that was made possible by the narrowest of margins: all European countries save Portugal were dependent upon Arab oil, and early in the conflict Saudi Arabia imposed an oil embargo on Europe. As Portugal imported its petroleum needs from its colony, Angola, it was willing to offer its NATO base in the Azore Islands for American shipments. Without this base America’s military transports would have needed to fly 6,000 miles direct, which would have drastically reduced the per-trip cargo load that its nonpareil jet transports, the C-5A Galaxy and C-141 Starlifter, could carry. The shortfall would have to have been made up by many more flights, and thus the time to fully resupply Israel with vital supplies would have been longer. Likely the intense and growing outside pressure to end the military phase and employ diplomacy would have precluded full recovery by Israel of ground lost since Oct. 6.
As noted above, in 1973 Israel had an estimated 13 Nagasaki-yield atomic bombs that it was prepared to use to avoid total defeat. Though no public threat was made it is believed that Israel made it known to its Arab adversaries that it would do so if need be; this may explain why Syrian forces halted after retaking the Golan (which Israel would reconquer before hostilities ended). It is unclear if Egyptian president Sadat intended to retake the entire Sinai, and then invade Israel proper.
The specter of nuclear conflict was also raised in the closing days of the war. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was chief of naval operations at the time, recalled in his memoir, On Watch (1976), that the Sixth Fleet was in a more tense situation vis-a-vis the Soviets than at any time since World War II. In his book Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises (2003), Henry Kissinger, who served as national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon years, recounts that after the 1973 war, president Nixon told him that the superpowers had been “close to a nuclear confrontation.”
Israel Bombs Osirak, 1981
Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin confronted a different problem in his dealings with the Americans. President Reagan was personally sympathetic to Israel. But the Middle East was peripheral to his overall foreign policy goal: to win the Cold War. Towards that end he selected his national security team with an eye to their views on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Only one member of his cabinet, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, was passionately committed to siding with Israel in the Middle East. Yet she was selected by Reagan because of an article she published in 1979, stating that human rights abuses were far more pervasive in totalitarian countries, than in mere authoritarian regimes.
Begin sought U.S. approval for a planned raid on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s “Osirak” nuclear reactor at Tammuz (named for the Babylonian counterpart to the Egyptian god Osiris), which France had built to secure access to Iraqi petroleum. Astonishingly, author Roger W. Claire recounts in Raid on the Sun (2004) on Sept. 8, 1975, two days before Saddam flew to France to sign the agreement, one calling for construction of a nuclear research reactor, he let the cat out of the proverbial bag at a press conference:
The search for a reactor with military potential was a reaction to Israel’s nuclear armament, and the [Franco-Iraqi] agreement was the first actual step in the production of an Arab atomic weapon, despite the fact that the declared purpose for the establishment of the reactor is not for the production of atomic weapons. (Emphasis in original.)
If that were not enough, in 1978 the French developed a new reactor fuel, “Caramel” (so-named for its color), which they planned to test in the Osirak reactor. Instead of loading 93 percent enriched uranium, they would have been using fuel enriched to seven or eight percent, yet capable of carrying out nuclear research. The Iraqis adamantly rejected the idea.
To Begin’s dismay, the administration insisted that diplomacy, which never had stopped a nuclear proliferator, should be used instead of military force. Under what has been called the Begin Doctrine, Israel will not allow any Middle Eastern enemy to cross the nuclear threshold, in order to ensure that no one can perpetrate a Second Holocaust. In Iraq’s case, this would, in Israel’s view, come when an adversary has enough enriched uranium (or reprocessed plutonium) to build a bomb. Once a reactor “goes critical” – begins operation — any strike would release highly radioactive material, which atmospheric winds can carry for hundreds of miles.
In his book, First Strike: The Exclusive Story of How Israel Foiled Iraq’s Attempt to Get the Bomb (1987), author Shalom Nakdimon presents a “what if” alternate scenario, set in 1985: A Boeing 727 commercial jetliner is spotted approaching Tel Aviv from the Mediterranean Sea. It disregards repeated warnings from Israeli jets to change course. A call to Israeli prime minister Begin gets a temporizing response, as Begin recalls Israel’s 1972 shooting down of a Libyan airliner. (The plane, carrying 108 passengers, had accidentally flown over an Israeli military base.) One jet fires an air-to-air missile as an object falls from the plane’s belly. The plane escapes, just as the unknown object explodes over Tel Aviv. It is an Iraqi atom bomb.
On June 7, 1981 the Israeli Air Force carried out a successful strike that destroyed the reactor before it went critical, which at that time was expected within weeks. Further angering the U.S. was that in late June Israel was holding elections, and that its timing would likely help Begin win. Exactly how close Iraq was then could not be pinpointed precisely.
The U.S. reaction was instantaneous and furious. Then-defense secretary Caspar Weinberger wanted an end to U.S. aid and for Israeli leaders to be prosecuted for violating international law. Other senior members of the administration settled on strong condemnation and a delay in sending requested military assets. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was tasked with drafting the UN Security Council resolution condemning the raid; she did her best to limit the harshness of UN Sec. Resolution 487 which was adopted on June 19, 1981.
The Gulf War, 1991
President George H.W. Bush forced Israel to the sidelines, lest the coalition lose Arab countries, whose participation removed any taint of Western imperialism. Israel, which had resolved never to subcontract its security to any country, found itself absorbing “Scud” short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) strikes launched by Iraq; nor was Israel allowed to help hunt for Scud launchers inside Iraq. (SRBM denotes ballistic missiles with a range less than 1,000 km./625 mi.)
During the war, American aircraft destroyed the nuclear facilities Saddam had begun constructing after the loss of Osirak. After the war, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney thanked Gen. David Ivry, who had been ground commander for the 1981 IDF airstrike that took out Osirak. He sent Ivry a post-attack photo of the Osirak reactor, inscribed, “With thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job you did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm.” Indeed, there might never have been a Desert Storm in 1991; but for the 1981 airstrike, Saddam likely would have gone nuclear before the Gulf War, and thus also avoided later being toppled in 2003.
Syria, 2007
The story of the 2007 raid is told in Yaakov Katz’s Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (2019). Israel confronted a situation roughly similar to what it faced in 1981: a rogue nation on the verge of starting operation of a nuclear reactor. The facility was a clone of the reactor built by North Korea at Yongbyon, which in 1994 had become the subject of an “Agreed Framework” under which the North Koreans would enrich uranium for civilian purposes only. But in 2006 it openly violated the accord by testing an atomic bomb. The Israelis were certain that the reactor, outside al-Kibar, a small town far from major urban centers, situated by the Euphrates River, was not part of any civilian electric grid.
In April 2007, prime minister Ehud Olmert sent Mossad chief Meir Dagan to brief the Bush 43 administration. In the wake of the Iraqi WMD fiasco, Bush wanted to be absolutely sure that the reactor was in fact intended for military purposes. Intelligence analysts told the administration senior leaders that the facility very likely was so intended. Bush’s senior advisers were split on whether to take action; Olmert met with Bush and asked him to use American planes to destroy the facility. He also told Bush that if 35 Syrian planes took off for Israel, with two of them carrying nuclear bombs, given direct southward flight time to Israel of one minute, the Israeli Air force would not be able to destroy all the planes. One or both jets with nuclear bombs could well penetrate Israel’s defenses to drop them.
Ensnared in the Iraqi insurgency, Bush demurred. But without specifically giving Olmert a green light, he told Olmert that the U.S. would not attempt to block Israel from striking. Olmert sent in planes to destroy the reactor on Sept. 6, having sent in a clandestine advance party to collect updated soil samples and take new site photographs. The U.S. and Israel maintained strict silence afterward, as did the Syrians — the latter likely to avoid embarrassment at having failed to prevent destruction of the reactor. The only country to react negatively was Turkey, as one of the returning aircraft had dropped an empty fuel tank that drifted across the Turkish border with Syria. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded, and received a public apology from Israel; but Israel told the world that a mishap had occurred during a training flight when one fuel tank landed astray.
The Bottom Line
In the six use-of-force crises spanning five decades that Israel faced, it never received full cooperation from Washington. The degree to which their perceived geostrategic interests were mutual varied considerably. Israel’s leaders concluded that it could mitigate adverse American reaction by avoiding completely surprising the Americans as it did in 1956. American leaders generally found greater stakes elsewhere, and relegated Israel’s concerns to second-tier status. As a result, Israel nearly perished in 1973, and nearly faced a nuclear-armed, hostile Iraq ruled by a Stalinist tyrant.
Part Three:
The country’s nuclear quest and failed U.S. efforts to stop it, 1968–2023
Iran’s Nuclear Quest
Iran’s quest to join the nuclear club can be divided into three phases: (1) its civilian nuclear program (1968–1988); (2) its military nuclear program (1988–2014); and (3) the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA (2015–2023).
On July 1, 1968, the text of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was put out for signature. First-day signatories included the U.S. and Iran, the latter then under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The NPT formally went into effect on March 5, 1970. There are 191 states that are party to the NPT, with five states — U.S., Russia, U.K., France, and China — labeled “nuclear weapon” due to their having manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or device prior to Jan. 1, 1967. The NPT incorporated, in broad brushstrokes, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s idealistic “Atoms for Peace” proposal, presented to the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953.
Mohammed Reza commenced a civilian nuclear program in 1975, planning to only go military if rival nations did so; in 1975, he told the New York Times:
I am not really thinking of nuclear arms, [b]ut if 20 or 30 ridiculous little countries are going to develop nuclear weapons, then I may have to revise my policies. Even Libya is talking about trying to manufacture atomic weapons.
So long as the shah remained in power, America faced no nuclear risk. However, American policymakers abandoned the shah in 1978 as the Islamic Revolution picked up steam. Carter administration policymakers were unwilling to prop up a leader whom they believed had been installed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953. As Iran scholar Ray Takeyh, in a just-published op-ed, explains, the CIA’s role was marginal at best. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh, who had been appointed prime minister by the shah, wanted to nationalize British Petroleum’s extensive petroleum assets without offering compensation. Mossadegh asked President Harry Truman to broker a compromise; serial efforts by Truman and Eisenhower seeking some compensation for BP were adamantly rejected by Mossadegh. The Brits imposed an oil embargo, economically ruinous for an Iran heavily dependent on oil revenues. Mossadegh soon faced opposition across a broad spectrum of society — the military, students, merchants, and, significantly, the clergy. Eisenhower sent CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup, but, in fact, the military had already done the heavy lifting.
Mossadegh sought to exercise total power as if he, and not Mohammed Reza, were the supreme ruler. A vacillating shah, who had been driven into exile, was brought back and his spine stiffened by the military — not the CIA. The shah exercised his constitutional power to fire Mossadegh. These decisive actions caught the CIA flatfooted.
Upon the shah’s overthrow in February 1979, the nuclear program was suspended. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was preoccupied with seizing total power, which entailed first replacing the provisional government, a task begun in earnest on Nov. 4, 1979, by taking American diplomats hostage. The seizure rallied Iranian students to support the creation of an Islamic regime. Formally named the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was, in fact, a totalitarian clerical fascist regime. Its position was further solidified by America’s April 1980 abysmal failed hostage rescue attempt.
On Sept. 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. In 1985, Saddam Hussein began firing at Iran ballistic missiles armed with chemical warheads. In Revolution & Aftermath: Forging a New Strategy toward Iran, co-authors Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh note that upon the Aug. 20, 1988, negotiated end to the war, Khomeini decided to resurrect the shah’s nuclear program, this time with nuclear weapons in mind. The regime’s military nuclear program survived Khomeini’s 1989 passing. In 1992, Israel’s then–prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, became the first Israeli leader to publicly describe Iran’s nuclear program — then known to be a civilian program — as an “existential” threat. The Clinton administration refused to call a civilian nuclear program a threat; in this, it followed prior U.S. administrations. Israel, needless to say, stood its ground.
Per Edelman and Takeyh, throughout the 1990s, Iran simultaneously pursued domestic reform (economic reform, anti-corruption efforts — the latter exempting regime power players from investigation). Left unchallenged were Iran’s clandestine pursuit of nuclear military capability, its use of transnational terror against regime opponents, and its worldwide promotion of revolutionary Islamist ideology. In August 2002, the National Council of Resistance on Iran, the political wing of the alleged terrorist group Mujahideen e-Khalq (MeK), publicly outed Iran’s nuclear quest.
The U.S., preoccupied with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, did nothing. In 2006, the CIA detected the construction of new underground nuclear facilities, yet, in 2007, it issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) asserting that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003. The Bush administration again did nothing. The finding by the CIA was risible: Israel had taken out clandestine nuclear reactors shielded from inspection. But a true civilian program can be verified by regular monitoring operations of the reactor; Israel could be assured that a strike was not necessary unless a sudden transition brought another Saddam or Assad to power. For such an event, Israel could rely on contingency plans. For a civilian program, Iran would have no need to bury the facility underground — and deny access to it.
A golden opportunity for the U.S. and its Western allies came in early 2009, when a manifestly rigged “election” — restricted to candidates approved by the regime — reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president. Protesters took to the streets in huge numbers. American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin notes that the regime’s “elections” have always been fraudulent, as the regime “eliminate[s] more than 90 percent of the candidates.”
The Green Movement caught the regime off guard. Edelman and Takeyh show just how far off-guard it was by quoting a 2013 statement by Ali Khamenei, successor as Supreme Guide to Khomeini, admitting that the regime had been “on the edge of a cliff.” Gen. Muhammad Ali Jafari, who commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps from 2007 to 2013, said that the 2009 election that spawned the Green Movement ushered in “greater danger” for the Islamic Republic than that during the Iraq–Iran War: “We went to the brink of overthrow in this sedition.”
But Khomeini had a friend in Washington, D.C., the recently sworn-in president, Barack Hussein Obama. Obama sided with the regime and deflated the 2009 protest movement. Edelman and Takeyh point out that protests resurfaced in 2018 across a broader spectrum than did the 2009 protests.
In September 2022, a renewed mass protest movement began over the regime forcing women to wear Islamic dress; it spread nationwide but currently appears in remission. This time, unlike earlier, the students, fed up with life under clerical fascism, joined the protests. Many mosques were empty as worshippers joined the street uprising. For the first time, all elements of Iranian society opposed the regime.
Failed Efforts to Stop Iran
Every American administration sought to identify genuine moderates but only succeeded in finding the pseudo-variety. The apogee of such efforts, prior to the ascension of Obama, had come during President Ronald Reagan’s second term. The 1986–87 Iran hostage negotiations ended — Reagan’s contrary intentions notwithstanding — as an arms-for-hostages swap. The upshot was that America delivered Hawk surface-to-air missiles, which Iran used against Iraq; Iran showed its gratitude by taking more Americans hostage. As was memorably put by several Washington wits, “A moderate Iranian is one who has run out of ammunition.”
A final effort came from Israel when, serially in 2010, 2011, and 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade his cabinet to authorize an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But only former Prime Minister Ehud Barak — who had defeated Bibi in the 1999 election — would go along.
Life Under the JCPOA: From the Cliff to the Cusp
Obama managed to get Congress by a simple majority to endorse JCPOA as an executive agreement, bypassing the Constitution’s two-thirds supermajority treaty-ratification requirement. In May 2018, President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, calling it “one of the most incompetently drawn deals I’ve ever seen.” That year, the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had identified Iran’s unexplained activities.
Trump imposed strict economic sanctions, but our European allies continued to ignore them so as to gain access to Iranian oil. They also are largely ignoring Iran’s growing ballistic missile threat to Europe.
On Jan. 20, 2021, President Joe Biden began occupying the Oval Office. He promptly sought to revive the JCPOA and began negotiations with Iran to get it to reenter an accord that the regime never intended to honor in the first place. In mid-2023, Iran stands on the cusp of nuclear-club membership, having enriched uranium to 60 percent — with some fragments even enriched to 83.7 percent. Estimates earlier this year were that Iran has enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) to make several A-bombs, according to sources of the U.N. (several, no time specified), the U.S. (one in 12 days), and Israel (5 bombs), in a matter of weeks. A more recent and detailed estimate was issued by the Institute for Science and International Security. It concluded that Iran, using its stocks of 60 percent, 20 percent, and 5 percent low-enriched uranium (LEU), could make enough weapons-grade uranium (WGU) to fuel one A-bomb in 12 days, four more within the first month, two more in a second month, and one more in a third month — in all, a total of eight. Intelligence estimates add several months for Iran to fabricate WGU into nuclear warheads. Iran’s near-total lack of cooperation with the IAEA makes definitive verification of these timetables impossible.
But Iran has yet to mate a nuclear warhead to a missile, by far the most feasible delivery system, and how close it is is not clear to analysts. According to Iran Watch, which posts a database of Iran’s extant ballistic missiles, Iran has fielded four missiles with a range of at least 1,600 kilometers. Matching this missile-range table to distances from Iran to Israel shows that Iran’s IRBM arsenal can cover all of Israel. But Iran’s IRBM warhead is much smaller than that of an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and hence requires more warhead miniaturization.
Nuclear Proliferation: Successes and Failures
Success in stemming the tide of nuclear proliferation has always involved a measure of voluntary conduct. South Africa scrapped its small arsenal (six A-bombs) in 1989, signed the NPT in 1991, and was certified by the IAEA to have completed dismantling its program in 1994. Its decision can be considered semi-voluntary, as sanctions against South Africa were imposed before any knowledge of its atomic program. The benefit derived by South Africa was an end to its pariah-nation status — due primarily to its ending apartheid and the accession of Nelson Mandela as prime minister.
As indicated in Part Two, Iraq’s second nuclear quest was stopped by American airstrikes during the 1991 Gulf War. The year 1994 saw the final withdrawal of Russia from Eastern Europe and the consolidation of all nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan and Belarus sent their nuclear arsenals to the Russian Federation, and Ukraine did so in exchange for the Budapest Memorandum, under which the U.S., Russia, and Great Britain guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. A final success came in 2004 with the voluntary ending of Libya’s program. Col. Muammar Qaddafi saw the U.S. dismantle Saddam’s regime in 2003 and feared Libya would be next on the list.
Failures fall into several categories. Among U.S. allies, three countries decided to deploy nuclear arsenals: Britain in 1952, France in 1960, and Israel in 1967. The U.S. withheld promised technology sharing, but Britain had learned enough from British scientists working with the Manhattan Project. France developed its own indigenous nuclear program. Israel, pressed hard in 1963 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy to abandon its program, forged ahead nonetheless.
Among U.S. adversaries, the former Soviet Union stole the blueprints for the “implosion” bomb from the Manhattan Project and tested its first bomb in 1949. China initially received help from the Soviets, but after they halted assistance in 1959, China continued its program, detonating its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. The soviets considered using nuclear weapons against China’s then-sparse nuclear facilities during the border clashes along the Ussuri River in March 1969. They approached the U.S. through back channels to find out how the Nixon administration felt about it and were told we’d disapprove. The Soviets did not wish to scupper their U.S. détente quest and scrapped attack plans.
Officially neutral but tilting toward the Soviet Union, India conducted its “peaceful” atomic “Smiling Buddha” test in 1974. Pakistan, a sometimes ally of the U.S. that played a double game, began its nuclear Islamic Bomb program after mortal enemy India’s test. U.S. intelligence judged by the late 1980s that Pakistan had joined the nuclear club, but it was not until Pakistan conducted a series of atomic tests in 1998 that its status was confirmed. (Both India and Pakistan, like Israel, declined to join the NPT.) Rogue North Korea signed the “Agreed Framework” accord with the U.S. in 1994, then clandestinely pursued its nuclear quest. In 2002, it withdrew from the NPT, but the U.S. did not consider North Korea to have joined the charmed circle until it actually tested a bomb in 2006.
Political Taxonomy: Identifying True Moderates
As if determined to learn nothing from prior bad misjudgments, seven U.S. administrations abjectly failed to find genuine moderates. As noted earlier, each U.S. president doubled down, looking for moderates within clerical fascist Iran’s governing structure; each failed to grasp that “reformers” left the regime’s revolutionary aspirations untouched, used transnational terror to target enemies of the regime, and engaged in clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons.
No Iranian moderates were even permitted to run for office or be appointed to high office. Any true moderates would have been purged by the regime.
Evidence-Based Assessments: Avoiding Einstein’s Trap
Albert Einstein famously quipped that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Five interwar examples stand out.
In 1935, Hitler and Mussolini began a series of aggressive moves: Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia; Hitler’s troops moved into the Rhineland in 1936; the Luftwaffe tested warplanes over Guernica, Spain, in 1937; the Anschluss (“connection”) saw the Germans occupy Austria in 1938; and, finally, the Germans got the Allies later that year to surrender the Sudeten province of Czechoslovakia by March 15, 1939.
This final European surrender was the bitter fruit of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich parley with Hitler, after which he declared upon returning home that he had achieved “peace in our time.” His illusions became a cropper on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Then there are three historic monumental failures by U.S. intelligence, as first documented (familial pride #1!) by Roberta Wohlstetter in her 1962 Bancroft Prize–winning Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In the 11 days prior to the Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s fleet sailed north of commercial shipping lanes and turned south toward its airstrike launch point. On Saturday night, the Japanese broke off diplomatic negotiations. On Sunday, they planned to deliver a note in Washington at 1 p.m. EST, breaking off diplomatic relations, with no mention of a sneak attack. At that point, the lead Japanese planes would be in the air one hour, halfway to Pearl Harbor. Due to communications problems, the note was not delivered until 2:05 p.m. — 10 minutes after the first planes began their attack at 7:55 a.m. local time. Roberta’s path-breaking book was the first to identify the root causes of the massive intelligence failure: A combination of convenient assumptions and departmental “stovepiping” created background noise that obscured signals that Japan would attack. This was true even though U.S. cryptanalysts had cracked the Japanese secret diplomatic code and intercepted the coded message “east wind, rain” that indicated a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent.
The second failure was the CIA’s consistent underestimating of Soviet incremental ICBM deployments for 11 years (1962–72) as documented (familial pride #2!) by Albert Wohlstetter in his seminal 1976 article “Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back?” in the book Defending America. Traumatized by an initial, late-1950s overestimation of the rate at which the Soviets could deploy ICBMs, the agency overcorrected for an entire decade, consistently underestimating ICBM deployment as well as MRBM and IRBM deployments — strictly speaking, launchers were counted as actual missile arsenals could not be verified. By 1963, our overestimation of Soviet ICBM launchers was roughly offset by our underestimation of MRBM and IRBM launchers. (The latter two missile types were the ones placed in Cuba in 1962.)
Of 51 CIA-specific estimates of Soviet ICBM deployment in this period — which included multiple estimates within each year — the high number topped actual deployment only twice. The lows never exceeded actual deployments, and the highs were reached only nine times. Errors of underestimation were “substantial,” and the average of the “highs” was under the actual deployments.
Far from learning from its underestimates, the CIA’s errors grow worse over time. In all, the Soviet ICBM buildup ran from 1961 through 1986. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, who had been a physicist with the Manhattan Project and was highly informed about nuclear matters, told Congress, “When we build, they build; when we cut, they build.”
The intelligence community’s third mega-failure was its belief that Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003. It was thinly sourced, as it was thought inconceivable that Saddam would surrender his WMD stocks. Saddam could have saved his regime by letting inspectors in, but rather than accept such humiliation, he sacrificed his regime and, eventually, his own life. The intelligence community took a waterline hit to its reputation that will linger for decades.
Bottom Line: Three Harsh Lessons from Iran’s Nuclear Quest
First, diplomacy alone cannot stop determined nuclear proliferators with the resources to develop nuclear weapons.
Second, the political taxonomy of free countries does not conform to the taxonomy of totalitarian nations; moderates as we know them in Western societies simply are not permitted to exist in absolute dictatorships.
Third, policymakers must not persist — let alone double down — on policies whose desired results are repeatedly contradicted by the weight of inconvenient empirical evidence.
Part Four:
Israel’s Timing Dilemma; Lessons Not Yet Learned
Having covered Iran’s nuclear quest and failed efforts to stop its program, we turn in Part 4 to how vulnerable Israel is, how it might resolve its timing dilemma, and what enduring lessons should be learned.
Israel’s Extreme Nuclear-Attack Vulnerability. Begin with the full measure of Israel’s vulnerability if its conflict with Iran goes nuclear.
In event a nuclear Iran strikes Israel, a nuclear retaliatory strike would surely be launched by Israel. A 2007 estimate by Anthony Cordesman of CSIS estimated that in the first 21 days, Israel would suffer 200,000 to 800,000 killed, while Iran would lose 16 to 28 million. Israel, Cordesman writes, would survive, but Iran would cease to exist as a functioning society.
Two key factors should influence such earlier estimates: (a) Israel’s multi-layer ballistic missile defense may destroy many warheads before they land; (b) Israel’s arsenal includes weapons that yield one megaton, vastly greater in destructive power than the estimated 100 kilotons for prospective Iranian warheads.
A grave concern arises out of a Dec. 14, 2001 sermon delivered on Al-Quds Day (the last day of the month of Ramadan) by the late Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then a former president of the Islamic Republic. In the version published by the regime, Rafsanjani said at least this of an Israel-Iran nuclear exchange:
Muslims must surround colonialism and force them [the colonialists] to see whether Israel is beneficial to them or not. If one day, the world of Islam comes to possess the [nuclear] weapons currently in Israel’s possession, on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
A quotation that emerged later, not in the official transcript, has Rafsanjani stating that in a nuclear exchange, Iran might lose 15 million and Israel 5 million, but Israel would be destroyed whilst Iran would survive as a country. This unconfirmed quotation is fully consistent with the thrust of Rafsanjani’s officially published remarks.
This view, that Iran would survive and Israel be extinguished, is opposite to the calculations made by Anthony Cordesman noted above. Cordesman knows a lot more about nuclear arsenals than Rafsanjani did. But if today’s Iranian leaders believe as did Rafsanjani that an exchange would “leave nothing on the ground” in Israel, but would “only damage the world of Islam,” they might launch an attack, with catastrophic consequences for both countries, the region and the wider world.
In addition, there is the vast difference geography portends for geostrategic vulnerability to a nuclear strike. Consider these projected world area, population and population density figures, as of July, from the U.S. Census Bureau’s U.S. and World Population Clock (for U.S. figures) and UN population division data (for international figures) reported by Worldometer: Israel is almost exactly the size of New Jersey, into which its 9.1 million people (100th among all nations) are crammed; NJ has 9.3 million. The U.S., population, ranked third, behind China and India, is now 335 million, 37 times that for Israel. Iran ranks 18th worldwide, with 84 million, roughly 9 times Israel’s.
Comparative areas (in square kilometers) are 9.1 million for the U.S., 1.6 million for Iran, 22,600 for NJ, and 21,640 for Israel. Iran’s area is 99.4 percent of the combined areas for France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. Population densities per square kilometer are 36/sq. km for the U.S., 52/sq. km. for Iran and 400/sq. km for Israel; Israel’s population density is thus roughly 8 times Iran’s and 11 times America’s. Thus, Israel—far smaller, and far more densely populated—is vastly more vulnerable to nuclear attack. Put into national security terms, it lacks spatial—i.e., geostrategic—depth.
Israel’s Dilemma: Attack Before 11/3/24 or Await U.S. Election Result. Israel faces two possible ways Iran can trip a redline: (a) miniaturization becomes small enough to mate a warhead to a deliverable device; (b) Russia deploys the S-400 system to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities and key regime sites. If Israel decides to go, it will have to go it alone, as Team Biden is pantingly eager to make some sort of JPCOA-2 deal. Thus, as with Suez in 1956, Israel will have to keep the Americans in the dark as to the actual launch date, details and duration of the mission, else Team Biden will surely tip off the Iranians. (In 2012, when Biden was vice-president, the U.S. leaked Israel’s efforts to gain access for a refueling stopover in Azerbaijan, thus killing the idea.
The Biden administration assessment by Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released July 10, finds that Iran hasn’t carried out “the key nuclear weapons development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” Yet ODNI notes that “Iran has emphasized improving the accuracy, lethality and reliability of its missiles.”
But ODI arrived at its conclusions by using what nuclear expert David Albright, founder of the Institute of Science and International Security, called a “defective, overly defensive definition”:
It is a matter of how Europeans define a nuclear weapon program vs. USA intelligence community’s definition, combined with a serious post-Iraqi WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] analytical paralysis. It is amazing that U.S. intelligence community is still digging its heels in and using the defective, overly defensive 2007 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] framework.
Especially significant is the timing of Iran’s efforts. Iran essentially halted its nuclear program after then-president Donald Trump exited the JCPOA in 2018; Iran then resumed its efforts immediately after the 2020 election of Joe Biden.
Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has denied that his country is making nuclear weapons, but added to his disclaimer a boast:
We’re not pursuing nuclear weapons due to our Islamic principles. Otherwise, if we had wished too pursue them, no one would have been able to stop us, just as they haven’t been able to stop our nuclear development up until now and won’t be able do so in the future.
RAND analyst Gregory S. Jones published a mini-paper on March 16, concluding that 82.5 percent enriched HEU suffices as weapons-grade material; he notes that South Africa’s nuclear bombs were enriched to 80 percent. Jones flatly stated that Iran’s 83.7 percent enriched HEU is weapons-grade. According to European intelligence sources, Iran is working assiduously to shorten the breakout time to be able to test a nuclear device.
In 2019 the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps stated that Iran’s “strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map.” On June 5, the director of the IAEA said that, contrary to a March 4 agreement with the IAEA, Iran’s compliance per the agreement is limited to a “fraction” of its commitments. Iran is constructing a new facility near the Zagros Mountains in central Iran, likely to be buried 80 to 100 meters underground (260 to 328 feet).
Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles is by far the largest in the region. It is the only country on the planet to have developed a 2,000 km. (1,250 mi.) range ballistic missile, without a nuclear warhead yet ready for it to carry. Named the Shahab-3, it is a liquid-fueled, road-mobile medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM, denotes ballistic missiles with a range between 1,000 and 3,000 km., equal to between 625 and 1,875 mi.).
Against these growing threats, Israel has a vast array of weaponry it did not have a decade ago: vastly superior air, land and sea assets, plus entirely new drones, etc. Iran’s military capability is far inferior. Islamic Jihad’s May 2023 fusillade of rockets was thwarted by the three-layer missile defense Israel has deployed: Iron-Dome for short-range intercept,, which has a 96 percent intercept success rate; David’s-Sling for medium-range; and Arrow 2 and 3 for long-range. Israel’s defense minister says these defenses can intercept Iran’s alleged hypersonic missile. And coming soon is Iron-Beam, a laser system that not only will intercept missiles, but also artillery shells, drones, etc., made by Rafael Advance Systems, its chairman states that the system will be deployed partially in 2024 and full-scale as soon as 2025. Moreover, Israel has become a leading worldwide supplier of advanced air-, land- and sea-based weapons for Western countries.
A senior Israeli official has stated that “Iran knows that breaking out to 90 percent purity in uranium enrichment will result in an Israeli strike.” Iran to date has yet to advance miniaturization for a warhead, and has not yet mastered all aspects the complex nuclear detonation initiation sequence.
Can Israel destroy all Iran’s nuclear facilities? There is every reason to conclude that Israel can do so. Israel has matchless ground intelligence, most recently evidenced by the Mossad capturing and interrogating—inside Iran—the mastermind who was planning a terror attack aimed at Cyprus. Add in the remote machine-gun assassination of Iran’s master terror planner, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020. A few years ago Israel extricated ten scientists and their families; and the top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fahkrizadeh, was also assassinated. In 2018 Israel took a huge cache of incriminating documents that proved to the IAEA that Iran had been cheating on the JCPOA. The 2010 Stuxnet worm showed that Israel can deeply penetrate Iran’s cyber networks.
Responses to an Israeli Strike. Any Israeli attack will to a certitude be treated as an act of war by the regime. The upshot very likely will be a multi-front war, with Hezbollah from the north, via Syria and Lebanon; Iran-backed terror squads from the West Bank; and to the south, Hamas terror attacks from Gaza. For his part, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu says that Israel can fight on multiple fronts, and prevail.
This would take place against a backdrop of an America that placates its enemies and oft undermines its foremost Mideast ally, Israel. Europe, in economic thrall to energy from the Mideast will condemn any raid. Greater diplomatic leverage will accrue to Turkey, Iran, China and Russia. In sum, the vacuum created by U.S. lassitude will be occupied by other powers.
The Gatestone Institute’s Col. Richard Kemp, a counter-terrorism expert, exposed the full extent of Team Biden’s appeasement of Iran and Russia: (a) jettisoning most sanctions imposed by president Trump; (b) doing nothing while Iran’s uranium enrichment, confined to 3.67 percent by the JCPOA, skyrocketed to 60 percent overall, with some enrichment to 83.7 percent; (c) having war-criminal Vladimir Putin’s Russia serve as proxy in negotiations with Iran; (d) initial release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian regime assets—this list was complied before Team Biden unfroze $6 billion to secure the release of five hostages; (e) a U.S. commitment not to impose sanctions, and not to bring Iran’s conduct to the UN Security Council—where, unlike in the General Assembly, the U.S. posses a veto; (f) preparing to attempt a bypass of Congressional legislation if a new deal, or understating, is reached with Iran.
Kemp notes that the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) specifically requires that any agreement or understanding, formal or informal, be submitted to Congress for review. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) sent a June 15, 2023 letter to President Biden, reminding him of this. Kemp attributes Biden’s efforts to a desire for (a) a perceived foreign policy triumph in the run-up to the 2024 election; (b) a desire to complicate Israeli plans for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and (c) an abiding belief that containment of a nuclear-armed Iran can be made to work by appeasing the Islamist regime.
But the greatest danger to Israel—and, correspondingly, boon to the Iranian regime—is most fully explained by Hudson scholar Michael Doran in a recent article, “Biden’s Ties That Bind,” showing how Team Biden’s embrace of Israel is intended too suffocate those in Israel who would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Doran sees four tracks Biden pursues: (1) express strong rhetorical support for Israel; (2) sponsor joint military exercises; (3) sponsor close coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, via Israel’s incorporation into CENTCOM (the U.S. command covering the Mideast); and (4) promoting normalization with Saudi Arabia. Collectively, these actions, each individually superficially plausible, entrap not Iran but Israel.
(A recent webinar (34:17) by the bipartisan Mideast Forum credits Team Biden with providing the protesters with cyber-circumvention tools to afford online access to 30 million Iranians, more than one-third of the population. This is one of the few things the U.S. has done to help those protesting the regime’s suppression of dissent.)
The sheer vacuity of these four tracks was exposed when Sen. Tom Cotton questioned SecDef Lloyd Austin at a recent Senate hearing. Cotton noted that Iran had used force against Americans 83 times since Biden took office, and that Biden had retaliated only four times. Doran calls this not a loving embrace, but rather as a “bear hug” designed to prevent independent Israeli military action. Biden’s strategy also targets fissures in Israeli society, among the military, and the Knesset and the voting public. Central to this is demonizing Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving and most successful prime minister since founding father David Ben-Gurion.
Biden’s overarching goal is to kick the Iran issue last the November 2024 elections, advertising a breakthrough that is in fact an win for Iran. Doran writes that any failure will be placed on the lack of concessions to Palestinian statehood. He sees the controversy in Israel over judicial reform as literally a godsend, a trifecta for the administration. First, Biden can disguise his fight to destroy Netanyahu under cover of a fight for “democratic values.” Second, American Jews are distracted from the grave, growing threat Iran’s nuclear quest poses. Third, and most importantly, the judicial reform controversy drives a wedge between the senior Israeli military and the political leadership.
According to Doran, Netanyahu shows signs of caving, allowing a 60 percent enrichment threshold for Iran, playing for time until after the 2024 elections. As American appeasement and Iranian enrichment grow with each passing day, Doran concludes: “The Biden administration says it is protecting Israel and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. It is doing the exact opposite.”
There is one final cautionary tale that Israel no doubt keeps in mind when weighing Advice offered by U.S. administrations. Officials from several prior administrations have admitted having given Israel bad advice. Thus, in 2009, Dennis Ross, a longtime promoted of Israel making concession to Arabs, advised the Israelis to send cement—600,000 tons—to Gaza to be used, so he thought, for commercial constructions; he disregarded warnings from the Israelis that the concrete would be diverted to military use; Hamas used the concrete—surprise!—to construct terror tunnels.
Ross and other officials also advised then-president Obama to be low-key as to the Green Movement protests against the regime’s fixed 2009 election, fearing that the U.S. would be blamed for outside interference. The protests were crushed, and with it the best chance missed to topple the clerical fascist regime and end its nuclear program.
Earlier, during the Clinton administration’s second term, Mideast adviser Aaron David Miller suggested—NOT making this up—inviting Palestine Authority terrorist leader Yasser Arafat to visit the Holocaust Museum, in hope that he would offer sympathy and thus propitiate Israelis. Arafat, to his credit, spurned the offer. Fast forward to 2023: Team Biden wants Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians to get the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords. Yet the Saudis are fed up with Palestinian maximal aims—no Jewish state—and stubborn refusal to make concessions for peace. These efforts by Americans to “save Israel from itself” are patronizing exercises: Do we really understand Israel’s national interests better than Israelis do?
All this comes as pressure on Iran over its brutal suppression of protests mounts. This May, 108 former world leaders signed a letter endorsing regime change in Iran. One prominent former American official, John Bolton, UN ambassador under Bush 43 and national security adviser to Donald Trump, said that the death of Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei could cause the collapse of the clerical fascist regime.
Finally, Iran experts Ruel Marc-Gerecht and Ray Takeyh opine that were “Little Satan” Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear arsenal, it would prove a far graver blow to the regime than were the “Great Satan” U.S. to do so. They add that Iranians have a long history and culture different form the Arabs; they would not rally to the hated regime because Israel destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities. In the event, the regime’s appeal, they write, is not to Persian nationalism, which could “rally ‘round the flag” after an attack, but rather to an extreme religious ideology the broader public no longer shares.
Bottom Line. Since Iran’s program was revealed in 2002, the Israelis and Americans have been unwilling to, either individually or together, carry out operations that would end Iran’s nuclear program. That Iran is pursuing a military capability has been clear since 2002. The proverbial can has been kicked again and again down the road. Diplomatic efforts continue despite a near-zero record of success; only Trump managed to induce caution in Iran’s rulers. Per the famed quip of 18th century monarch Frederick the Great, “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” Western countries will be ululating lamentations, if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold and predictably escalates its multi-front war against the West. With the military option on hold, it falls to the courageous protest movement inside Iran to do our work for us. Absent regime change, the odds are that Iran joins the nuclear-weapon state club.
Iran is determined to join the N-club. The U.S., under both former president Obama and President Biden, has been determined to prevent an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel, for its part, has concluded that its geographic limits make it exceptionally vulnerable to a nuclear strike, far more so than larger Western nations, especially, the United States. Thus, Israel cannot depend upon deterrence, but must instead follow the path chosen by Israel in 1981 and 2007. It is a path fraught with peril, but less perilous than absorbing a nuclear strike.
We persist in declining to permanently learn from experience as indicated above. Our national security, economic well-being, and civilizational survival are a tripartite warning. We must learn these elemental, enduring history lessons before catastrophe strikes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Wohlstetter
Senior Fellow
John Wohlstetter is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (beg. 2001) and the Gold Institute for International Strategy (beg. 2021); he held a similar position at the London Center for Policy Research (2013-2018). His primary areas of expertise are national security and foreign policy, and the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He is author of Sleepwalking With The Bomb (2nd ed. 2014), and The Long War Ahead and the Short War Upon Us (2008). He was founder and editor of the issues blog Letter From The Capitol (2005-2015). He has authored numerous articles in publications, including The American Spectator, National Review Online, The Wall Street Journal, Human Events, The Daily Caller, PJ Media and The Washington Times.
He gave over 1,000 radio interviews (2008-2015), many on nationwide programs, and guest-hosted the August 14, 2013 Dennis Miller Show. He worked on the foreign trading desks at Goldman Sachs (1969-73) & Drexel Burnham Lambert (1973-74). He was an attorney for Contel Corporation (1978-91), practicing general corporate and communications law; he shifted to strategic assessment, a task he also performed at GTE Corporation (1991-2000) and Verizon (2000); he retired in 2000. During his tenure at Contel he served as senior adviser to The Committee on Review of Switching, Synchronization and Network Control in National Security Telecommunications.
The Committee, created by the National Research Council, published its final report, Growing Vulnerability of the Public Switched Networks: Implications for National Security Emergency Preparedness (1989). He holds degrees from the University of Miami (B.B.A., 1969, Finance major, Art History minor); Fordham University School of Law (J.D., 1977); and The George Washington University (Public Policy/Telecommunications, 1985). He is a National Trustee of the National Symphony Orchestra (beg. 2014), and served on the NSO Board of Directors (1992-2014). He is a trustee of the Billy Rose Foundation (beg. 1996). He served as a trustee of MyFace (1980-2016), the Washington Bach Consort (2002-2018), and the London Center for Policy Research (2013-2018). He is an amateur concert pianist.
