By Joshua Muravchik
Wednesday,
September 16, 2020
In Iran, this
summer was a season of combustions. As fires and explosions followed hard upon
one another, the New York Times reported that
“for many Iranians, anticipating what will blow up next has become a kind of
parlor game.”
Some of these
conflagrations must have been natural occurrences: A string of forest fires
owed much to a period of intense heat. Some fires or blasts at industrial
facilities were likely the consequence of derelict maintenance due to foreign
sanctions or managerial incompetence. Others, however, were attributed to arson
or the detonation of bombs. The culprits may conceivably have been local:
militant Kurds, Arabs, or Baluchis, fighting for independence. Or they may have
been agents of the U.S. or Saudi Arabia or other Arab Gulf states.
But most
speculation understandably focused on Iran’s chosen main enemy, Israel. In May
Israeli officials had made little effort to conceal their responsibility for a
computer disaster at Bandar-Abbas, Iran’s main southern port, which caused long
delays of ships and trucks and severe disruption of operations. This was
generally recognized as retaliation for the foiled Iranian cyberattack on
Israeli water systems a few weeks before.
In general,
however, Israel claims credit for few of its attacks on foreign enemies. While
things were going bang in Iran, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared,
“Not every event that happens in Iran is connected to us.” But of course,
buried in this deflection of responsibility was an implicit acknowledgment that some such events
are indeed of Israel’s making. And Gantz’s predecessor, Avigdor Lieberman, took
to the floor of the Knesset shortly after to denounce an unnamed intelligence
official, understood to be Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, for leaking to the New York Times confirmation
that Israel was behind the most consequential of this summer’s explosions,
which destroyed a strategic factory at Natanz.
Natanz is the
center of Iran’s nuclear program, where thousands of centrifuges enrich
uranium. They have been placed in deep underground facilities to make them
difficult to attack. But most of these centrifuges are behind the times,
limited in speed and the degree of enrichment they can achieve and therefore in
their effectiveness for making nuclear bombs. Presumably to remedy this
deficit, Iran had set about manufacturing more modern centrifuges capable of
producing more bomb-quality enriched uranium faster. This factory sits above
ground. Or at least it did—until it was blown up this July.
This was not the
only facility of military significance to go up in flames this summer. A
missile-production site at Khojir in eastern Tehran Province was also destroyed
by an explosion. A power plant in Isfahan, delivering electricity to Natanz,
caught fire. And complete power blackouts in other locales were said to affect
military capabilities.
The implication, it
seemed, was that Israel had opened a new chapter in its efforts to prevent
Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Some observers speculated about Iran’s
possible retaliation—including against the U.S.—while others expressed alarm.
Indeed, ever since an Iranian opposition group laid bare Iran’s secret nuclear
program in 2002, much of the world has seemed as anxious about what Israel
might do to prevent an Iranian nuclear breakout as about Iran’s quest for the
bomb. Israel’s latest apparent tactic was “audacious and risky,” wrote a Washington Post columnist. It
amounted to “a dangerous gamble,” warned the head of the Rand Corporation’s
Middle East program.
Perhaps so:
Audacious and risky tactics, dangerous gambles, have been hallmarks of Israel’s
self-defense, which has enabled it to survive in the face of endless threats
that few other nations have had to face. It has emerged as the strongest and
most stable country in the Middle East, a reality that is recognized
universally by unbiased observers. What is less often acknowledged is that
actions taken in Israel’s self-defense have also redounded to the benefit of
America and, indeed, of the world.
Israel has refused
to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and is widely believed to possess a
nuclear arsenal, an inference it has steadfastly refused to confirm or deny and
for which it has often been criticized. Nonetheless, it has been
responsible for some of the world’s most important measures of what is called
“counterproliferation.”
***
The first was the destruction
of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. As early as 1974, Saddam Hussein,
who was not yet president of Iraq but was already the power behind the throne,
was named, or named himself, to head a three-member Strategic Development
Committee charged with generating weapons of mass destruction.
That year, France
agreed to sell Iraq a light-water “research reactor” together with uranium
fuel, after turning down a request for a graphite reactor deemed more conducive
to weapons manufacture. Italy provided equipment for recovering plutonium from
the reactor’s fuel. According to Iraqi scientist Khidhir Hamza, who worked on
the program, and David Albright, a former International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) inspector of Iraq’s nuclear programs, “Iraqi teams calculated that the
Osirak reactor could conservatively produce about 5 kilograms to 7 kilograms of
weapons-grade plutonium per year,” and possibly more, enough for a bomb.
This known
potentiality led to its being attacked—by Iran. That was in 1980 at the outset
of the war between Iraq and Iran. The Iranians damaged some of the facilities
at Osirak but not the reactor. In protest, an Iraqi government newspaper
addressed the Iranians rhetorically:
We ask Khomeini and
his gang, “Who would derive benefit from damaging the Iraqi nuclear reactor,
Iran or the Zionist entity?” It does not stand to reason that this reactor
would constitute a danger to Iran, because Iraq sees the Iranian people with a
brotherly regard. It is the Zionist entity which is afraid of the Iraqi nuclear
reactor … because it constitutes a great danger to Israel.
And so it seemed, too, to
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The following year, as Iraq was
preparing to feed fuel into the reactor, making it “hot,” meaning that its
destruction would have released radioactivity into the air that might have
killed thousands, Begin ordered it destroyed.
The airstrike
constituted a remarkable feat of aeronautics. The round trip from Israel to the
reactor site was longer than the normal fuel range of Israel’s F-16 bombers. It
entailed overflying Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and western Iraq, forcing the planes
to extremely low altitude to evade radar, and meaning the pilots had no safe
place for an emergency landing or to parachute into. Yet all eight planes
returned safely, seven having succeeded in hitting the target, destroying it
completely. A French technician working there was quoted in the press, saying,
“If [the Iraqis] want to resume work, they will have to flatten
everything and start from scratch.”
The world responded
with indignation. The New York Times delivered
this pronouncement in a lead editorial: “Israel’s sneak attack… was an act of
inexcusable and short-sighted aggression… . Prime Minister Begin embraces
the…code of terror.” Few eyebrows were raised when Moscow branded the attack
“barbarous,” but even Israel’s friends were condemnatory. Margaret Thatcher
called the strike “a grave breach of international law.” Secretary of State
Alexander Haig deemed it “reckless.” UN Representative Jeane Kirkpatrick said
it was “shocking.” With U.S. assent, the UN Security Council voted to “strongly
condemn” Israel and called upon it “urgently” to place its own nuclear program
under IAEA safeguards. As a sanction, the Reagan administration delayed
delivery of more F-16s to Israel.
In reality, the
attack was highly beneficial, and the first to benefit, ironically, was Iran,
which Saddam had invaded in 1980, taking advantage of the chaos created by the
overthrow of the shah. In the latter half of 1981, Iranian forces reversed the
tide, and by late 1982, the war shifted to Iraqi soil. Losing, Iraq reverted to
chemical weapons. Starting in 1983, it used mustard gas, sarin, and another
nerve agent, Tabun, inflicting thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of
injuries.
Had Israel not
destroyed the reactor, Iraq might have had a nuclear weapon by this time, or a
few of them. The likelihood would have increased after a couple more years,
say, by 1985 when the two sides began to fire indiscriminately on each other’s
population centers in what was dubbed “the war of cities.” If he had had them,
what would have restrained Saddam from using them? Mercy? Prudence? He was a
ruler notorious for exhibiting none of the first and too little of the second.
Had technical
factors delayed Iraq’s acquisition of the bomb until it was too late to use
against Iran, then almost surely it would have had one—or rather, several—by
1990 when Iraq invaded and swallowed Kuwait. Would the U.S. and the coalition
it assembled to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty have been able to operate in the
shadow of Iraqi nuclear weapons? Not that Saddam could have easily attacked the
United States with them, but they might have been deployed against massed U.S.
and allied forces.
With international
intervention held at bay, Saudi Arabia, too, would have come under threat.
Saudi oil fields lie to the eastern edge of that country, just beyond Kuwait,
within easy reach of Saddam’s forces once Kuwait had been incorporated as the
19th province of Iraq. Whether or not the impulsive Iraqi ruler would have
helped himself to any territory beyond Kuwait, the Saudi and other monarchies
of the Gulf would have felt compelled to accept a subservient relationship with
a nuclear-armed Iraq, propitiating it with cash and political support. Saddam would
have been well on his way to the role he coveted: kingpin of the Arab world.
The geopolitical and humanitarian consequences would have been grim.
When U.S.-led
forces completed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Dick Cheney, then secretary
of defense, in effect withdrew America’s criticism of Israel’s actions a decade
earlier. He sent an aerial photo of the destroyed Osirak reactor to the man who
had commanded the Israeli mission, inscribed: “For Gen. David Ivry, with thanks
and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program in
1981—which made our job much easier in Desert Storm.” Nor was this a partisan
judgment. Bill Clinton, who had to struggle the length of his presidency with
trying to root out what was left after Desert Storm of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons
program, said later: “What the Israelis did at Osirak, in 1981, … I think, in
retrospect, was a really good thing.”
This is disputed by
some scholars who claim that the Osirak attack was unnecessary, arguing
variously that international inspections by the IAEA and France would have
impeded Iraq’s bomb development, that other technological challenges would
still have taken Iraq time to overcome, and that Iraq responded to Osirak’s
destruction by redirecting its pursuit of nuclear weapons along a different,
clandestine path. But none of these claims is convincing. First, Hamza and
Albright write, “the Iraqis believed that the safeguards on the reactor, which
would have included periodic inspections and surveillance cameras, could have
been defeated” by various subterfuges. Second, while no doubt it would have
taken Iraq time to produce a weapon, amassing the requisite nuclear
material—plutonium or highly enriched uranium—is the critical step. With that
in hand, it might have taken a year or two or five to form it into a bomb, but
eventually that would have been achieved.
As for the third
point of the skeptics, it is true that Saddam continued his nuclear program by
other means. When coalition forces defeated Iraq in 1991, they were surprised
to discover how far along toward a bomb Iraq had come since Osirak. Estimates
varied but seemed to center on the guess that Iraq would have had a bomb in
three years, that is, by 1994. That is surely many years later than it would
have happened had Osirak been left unmolested in 1981. Of course, Israel’s
action only forestalled Iraq’s nuclear-weapon status and did not prevent it for
all time. But that postponement was crucial. Iraq never got the bomb; and with
Saddam Hussein gone, there is no reason to suppose it will ever try again.
***
The second Israeli act of
counterproliferation that made the world safer was its September 2007 bombing
of a secret nuclear reactor recently built at al-Kibar, a remote corner of
northeastern Syria. In 2006, Israeli intelligence analysts were viewing with
growing suspicion satellite photos showing a large square building just west of
the Euphrates with little else nearby. They dubbed the mysterious structure
“the cube,” and some suspected nuclear activity, however surprising this seemed.
When one of Syria’s
top nuclear experts attended a meeting of the IAEA in Vienna, Mossad took the
opportunity to sneak into his hotel room and introduce a “trojan” into his
laptop that rendered its contents visible to Israel. On it, they found a series
of photographs of the interior of the building, showing that it harbored a
reactor. To boot, a few of them showed Syrian functionaries together with some
from North Korea, including a known official of Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
“The cube” turned out to be a replica of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon—a
type of reactor that had been made nowhere else in the previous 35 years.
Top Israeli
officials traveled to Washington to show these photos to Vice President Dick Cheney
and other U.S. officials. By phone, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked President
George W. Bush whether the U.S. would destroy the reactor. With the U.S. mired
in Iraq and the administration profoundly embarrassed by the erroneous
information it had touted about Iraq’s nuclear program, all senior officials
except Cheney counseled against military action in Syria, and Bush followed
their advice.
Disappointed,
Olmert determined that Israel would do the job itself. Available intelligence
indicated that the reactor could soon go hot, so time was of the essence. But
first, Israel took an extraordinary step to further verify the nature of the
facility. A team of agents from the special unit that operates in Arab
territory was fitted out with Syrian military uniforms and Syrian weapons and
even Syrian-type jeeps. It was delivered by helicopter to the vicinity of “the
cube,” where it recovered soil and plant samples. (“Audacious and risky”
indeed.) These samples reconfirmed that it housed a reactor.
The bombing of
al-Kibar was easier than that of Osirak simply because it was much nearer to
Israel. Still, it entailed remarkable military execution. Israel did not want a
war with Syria and designed its operation for complete secrecy—not merely
beforehand, which of course was necessary, but even after the mission was
accomplished. No doubt, the Syrian regime would understand at once what had
happened, but how would it react? Israeli leaders calculated that Syrian
President Bashar Assad might feel compelled to strike at Israel to save face,
even knowing he would lose a war. If, however, no one other than high officials
of the two countries and the personnel directly involved discovered what had
happened, then no one would lose face. Both sides might be able to go on as if
nothing had happened.
Israel used a small
number of planes. Flying low and maintaining radio silence, the pilots were
instructed even to avoid dogfights should they encounter enemy aircraft.
Mission accomplished, the bombers were back at their base within four hours.
Olmert called Bush on a secure line and said cryptically: “Do you remember that
thing in the north that was bothering me? It isn’t there anymore.” Bush is
reported to have replied, “Very good.” Of course, scores of Israeli military
and intelligence officers knew what had happened, but strict military
censorship was imposed, and the story did not get out for many years, by which
time Assad had a rebellion on his hands, and this episode seemed too far past
to justify, much less require, retaliation.
Preserving its
regional nuclear monopoly manifestly serves Israel’s security. But it serves
the general interest as well. Israel is neither a proliferator nor an
aggressor. Not every forceful action it has taken over the years has been wise,
but all have been rooted in self-defense. Its nuclear deterrent encourages its
neighbors to accept that it cannot be driven into the sea, and this conduces to
peace. Were a neighbor such as Syria to deploy nuclear weapons, Israel’s
deterrent would be eroded, making future large Israei–Arab war more likely.
With nuclear weapons on both sides, the region would live nearer the edge of
catastrophe.
Apart from the
impact on Israel’s security and Israeli–Arab stability, a range of dire
consequences would have flowed from Syria’s achievement of a nuclear weapon. To
start, Assad would have had to share them with Iran and Hezbollah, whose
soldiers have kept him in power. Of course, this would put Israel in danger,
but others, too.
The region’s Sunnis
would not feel safe, and the rush would be on for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and
Egypt to acquire their own bombs—and who knows who else? North Korea, an
economic basket case apart from weapon sales, would be only too happy to help
build other Yongbyon-type reactors—and no doubt to sell missiles to go with
them. The region is a tinderbox, with Syria, Yemen, and Libya aflame in civil
war and with other conflicts simmering in Iraq, the Sinai, and Western Sahara.
Adding nuclear bombs to the mix might well lead to disaster.
In addition, there
is the question of what would have happened to Syria itself. Would Assad’s
regime, which repeatedly used chemical weapons against dissident regions of his
own country, have refrained from using, say, very small “battlefield” nuclear
weapons? Would it have exercised such self-restraint even at the moments in the
civil war when the regime seemed on the brink of collapsing? For seven or eight
years now, a war of all against all has raged among Assad, the
al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, ISIS, the relatively liberal Free Syrian Army,
the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), a range of local militias,
Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Even if Assad did not turn his nuclear
guns on his own people, the presence of such weapons, of facilities for manufacturing
them, and of fissile material would have fiercely intensified the mayhem.
One possible
outcome is that one or another terrorist group might have fallen into
possession of a nuclear weapon or of the nuclear material from which a crude
weapon could be constructed or, even more easily, a so-called dirty bomb. (A
“dirty bomb” is not a nuclear weapon but rather a conventional weapon attached
to radioactive material that is spread about by its detonation.) Indeed, at its
height, ISIS’s caliphate controlled most of both banks of the Euphrates in
Syria and most of Deir Ez Zor Province, probably including the site of “the
cube.” Of course, the various states involved presumably would have fought
harder to block ISIS from winning that strategic prize were it still standing,
but then again ISIS and other terror groups would have gone all out for it, too.
The possibility of
a terrorist group acquiring a nuclear weapon or material is not far-fetched. It
alarmed President Barack Obama, who inaugurated a series of biannual global
Nuclear Security Summits devoted to raising awareness of this peril. Few
things, if any, would have made that nightmare more likely to come true than
the production of such weapons in Syria.
***
If the door has been slammed on
the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria, the same cannot be said for
Iran—which brings us back to this summer’s combustions. It is easy to
understand why an Israeli hand is suspected. Israel has good reason to fear an
Iranian nuclear bomb.
In 2005, when
Iran’s volatile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the goal of wiping
Israel off the map, various apologists insisted he had been mistranslated. But
the thought has been expressed by other Iranian leaders, most recently
Brigadier General Hossein Salami, now the head of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, that country’s most powerful institution. “Our strategy is to
erase Israel from the global political map,” he said last year, adding this
poetic touch: “The Israelis will not have even a cemetery in Palestine to bury
their corpses.”
The antipathy
behind such threats is useful to Iran, bridging the gulfs between Persians and
Arabs and between Shiites and Sunnis by posing as the champion of all those who
remain unreconciled to Israel’s existence. But just as Hitler’s anti-Semitism
was no mere contrivance to help win elections in the Weimar Republic, so
neither is the hatred that inspires Iran to sponsor global contests for the
best cartoon that makes fun of the Holocaust. The Iranian-American scholar
Karim Sadjadpour put it:
Distilled to its
essence, Tehran’s steadfast support for Assad is not driven by the geopolitical
or financial interests of the Iranian nation, nor the religious convictions of
the Islamic Republic, but by a visceral and seemingly inextinguishable hatred
of the state of Israel…. Though Israel has virtually no direct impact on the
daily lives of Iranians, opposition to the Jewish state has been the most
enduring pillar of Iranian revolutionary ideology. Whether Khamenei is giving a
speech about agriculture or education, he invariably returns to the evils of
Zionism.
Israel does not, however, stand
alone as an object of Iranian rage. Israel, in Iran’s lexicon, is the “Little
Satan” while the United States is the “Great Satan.” The latter may be too
formidable to tackle frontally, but Iran does what it can to inflict injuries.
A U.S.
district-court ruling in 2011 found that Tehran had “provided material aid and
support to al-Qaeda for the 1998 [U.S.] embassy bombings” in Kenya and Tanzania
in which more than 200 people were killed. According to the report of the 9/11
Commission, “senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to
receive training in explosives.” Others were trained in Lebanon by Iranian or
Hezbollah experts. The commission also found “strong evidence that Iran
facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before
9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.” Regarding the 1996
truck-bombing of U.S. military housing, Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, which
killed 19 U.S. service members and wounded 372 others, the commission concluded
that the operation had been carried out “by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization
that had received support from the government of Iran.” In 2012, under
President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department “designated” (i.e., placed on a
list for sanctions) Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security for having
“facilitated the movement of al Qa’ida operatives in Iran and provided them
with documents, identification cards, and passports” and for having “provided
money and weapons to al Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), a terrorist group” and having
“negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.”
The 9/11 Commission
found no evidence that Iran was directly involved in the 9/11 attack; rather,
it had a history of setting aside sectarian differences to give low-key aid to
a group whose main purpose was to attack America. Likewise, in Afghanistan,
although Iran opposes the Taliban’s return to power (the Taliban are Sunni, and
Iran backs its own militia of Shiite Afghans, the Fatemiyoun), it has given the
Taliban modest support to bleed America. An article early this year in Military Times reported that
“U.S. military intelligence assessments dating back to 2010 suggest Iran’s
elite paramilitary unity, the Quds Force, has a track record of providing
training and lethal arms to the Taliban.” It added that one report “from the
Theater Intelligence Group based out of Bagram Air Base said that Iran’s Quds
Force was paying $1,000 for every U.S. soldier killed and $6,000 for American
vehicles destroyed.”
In Iraq, Iran
trained and supplied Shiite guerrilla groups that inflicted many casualties on
U.S. forces. Still today, long after the American combat role ended, such groups
continue to take a toll. Last December, Kata’ib Hezbollah launched some 30
rockets into an Iraqi base used by U.S. personnel, killing one American
civilian and wounding four U.S. servicemen. When America responded by bombing
the group’s military storage facilities, inflicting casualties, Kata’ib
Hezbollah organized a violent invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps boats have also harassed U.S. Navy and Coast Guard
ships in the Persian Gulf, and last year Iran shot down a U.S. drone. “The only
way for our enemies to be safe is to respect our sovereignty, national
security, and the national interests of the great Iranian nation,” intoned
Salami.
Despite the
bluster, Iran has no wish to tackle the Great Satan head-on, and these actions
amount to nipping at its heels. Iran’s imperial ambitions, however, pose a real
threat to many countries and to the broader structure of peace that America
built and upholds in its own long-term interest. Tehran is not very guarded
about these goals. At a 2015 conference in Tehran, an official adviser to
President Hassan Rowhani spoke of the “Iranian empire.” Later he explained,
according to a report in Al Arabiya News, “that he was
alluding to cultural similarities [of Iran] with Iraq, Azerbaijan and
Afghanistan, adding that ‘unification’ of these countries could halt
expansionist agendas of powers foreign to the region.”
Iran’s ambitions
are defined by three concentric circles, girding the region, the Islamic world,
and the entire globe. This last, widest one may not be on any immediate action
agenda, but it provides a framework in which the Iranian regime views itself in
relation to the outside. Ahmadinejad once boasted: “Thanks to the blood of the
martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen. . . . The wave of the Islamic
revolution will soon reach the entire world.” True, other Iranian presidents
have been less provocative, but Ahmadinejad was the one most closely aligned
with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Indeed, Ahmadinejad’s thoughts are congruent
not only with Khamenei’s but with those of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic. Its constitution
specifies that “faith and ideology” must be the “basic criteria” of the
country’s military policies:
Accordingly, the
Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
… will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the
country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way;
that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.
The middle circle is the entire
Islamic world—roughly a billion and a half people and some 40-odd countries
with Muslim majorities, about half of which lie beyond the Middle East. Here,
too, Iran’s constitution has relevant directives. “All Muslims form a single
nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran… must constantly
strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the
Islamic world,” it says. Moreover, much as the Soviet Union once appropriated
to itself authority over all Communists everywhere, so Khomeini and then
Khamenei have described the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Umm al-Qura, meaning the
“mother of Islam.” More traditionally, that term was applied to Mecca,
birthplace of the prophet. But one of the regime’s ideologues, Mohammad Javad
Larijani explained, “A state in which the Islamic regime is in complete control
has a select status, called Umm Al-Qura.” (In this view,
Saudi Arabia would not qualify because it is Sunni and the monarchy is not a
religious institution.)
In keeping with the
idea that the Islamic Republic is the mother of the entire global Umma, Iran’s support
for armed groups and its exertion of “soft power” extend beyond the Middle East
to South and East Asia, Central Asia, East and West Africa as well as the
Magreb.
The inner circle of
Iran’s imperial mission is the Middle East, and it is here that its pursuit of
that ambition is most intense and consequential. Lebanon is today dominated by
Hezbollah, which was created by Iran and is unabashedly subservient to it. Next
door in Syria, Hezbollah together with Iran’s own forces and a collection of
Shiite fighters from as far as Pakistan, all recruited and organized by Iran,
have rescued Bashar al-Assad’s regime from imminent collapse and restored its
rule over most of the country. Meanwhile, Iraq is dominated by Shiite militias
and parties with which Iran holds great sway, although there are countervailing
forces supported by the U.S. And the largely Shiite Houthi movement, widely
seen as another Iranian proxy, has gained control of much of Yemen, including
the capital, Sanaa.
Thus, when Qassem
Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards and the architect
of Iran’s regional adventures, exulted that “today we see signs of the Islamic
revolution being exported throughout the region, from Bahrain to Iraq and from
Syria to Yemen and North Africa,” it was no idle boast. In a like vein, when
Sanaa fell to the Houthis, the Iranian politician and publisher, Ali Reza
Zakani, regarded as a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s, enthused that it
had just become the fourth Arab capital “in the hands of Iran and belonging to
the Islamic Iranian revolution.”
Zakani also
predicted, “The Yemeni revolution will not be confined to Yemen alone. It will
extend, following its success, into Saudi territories.” This specter may have
contributed to Riyadh’s decision to enter the war against the Houthis whose
forces have also repeatedly fired into Saudi Arabia. Last year, when a flock of
drones and missiles hit Aramco’s facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia,
temporarily knocking out half of the Kingdom’s oil production, the Houthis
claimed responsibility. But this was revealed to be a lie that the Houthis may
have been coached to tell by their Saudi patrons. The projectiles were
determined to have come from the north, and Yemen lies to the south of the
kingdom. U.S. intelligence concluded that Iranian forces had staged this attack
from their own soil, and their proxies were helping them deflect blame.
In light of these
acts and these ambitions, it is easy to see that Iran’s nuclear aspirations do
not threaten only Israel, perhaps not even primarily Israel, which has a
nuclear deterrent of its own. They would be brandished to further Iran’s drive
to dominate the region, a shield behind which Iran could become still more
aggressive and a Damoclean sword with which to intimidate its neighborhood. The
Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat wrote years
ago, as paraphrased by Israeli regional expert Uzi Rabi, “The nuclear
capability Iran is striving for is not aimed at attacking Israel but rather is
intended to facilitate Iranian dominance.” Bahrain’s foreign minister called it
“the greatest threat to the region.” Clearly the Iranian threat helps to
explain the rapid rise in the willingness of the Arab Gulf states to have open
contact with Israel.
Were Iran to launch
additional damaging attacks against Saudi Arabia, or even more grievous ones,
would a nonnuclear Riyadh dare to retaliate if Iran possessed nuclear weapons?
Indeed, would mighty America be ready to rescue a Gulf state from aggression,
the way it did Kuwait in 1991, if the aggressor was so armed? The answer to
either of these questions might still be yes, but the calculus of the defender
would become much more fraught than it is today, while the calculus of Iran
would be more tempting.
Thus, Israel is far
from alone in fearing the advent of an Iranian bomb. The rest of the region, except
for Iran’s proxies, fears it, too. And many outside the Middle East also have a
critical investment in the security of that region. Western Europe and Japan
still depend on oil imports from the Gulf. Thanks to “fracking,” the United
States no longer does, but the dependency of its principal allies gives it an
enduring vital interest there as well.
Fortunately,
despite decades of efforts, Iran has not yet achieved entry into the nuclear
weapons-club. That eventuality was forecast to have happened long before now.
In January 2006, soon after Iran was censured by the Board of Governors of the
IAEA Commission, an article by New York Times diplomatic
correspondent Steven Erlanger described various estimates of the time needed
until Iran could make a bomb. David Albright, noted nuclear-weapons authority,
said, “Iran could have its first nuclear weapon in 2009.” European officials
estimated five years, while those of Israel said four to five, and “American
officials have offered estimates of six to 10 years,” wrote Erlanger. He added,
however, that another respected American arms-control expert, Gary Milhollin,
was skeptical of the longer range and thought the Israeli and European timeline
more likely.
It is now nearly 15
years since that was written, and Iran is still not a member of the club. Some
of that is due to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, but that was signed
already years beyond most of these estimates. The delay, it would seem, was due
largely to Israel’s efforts—all of which have been undertaken in the hazy world
of covert action, so they cannot be known with certainty.
A joint project of
Israel and the U.S. begun during the George W. Bush administration and
continued by President Obama introduced a “worm” (later dubbed Stuxnet) into
the computer systems of Iran’s nuclear program. It caused the centrifuges at
Natanz to function incorrectly, leading to the destruction of an estimated
1,000 of them, one-sixth of Iran’s total. Other equipment used in the
program—computers, transformers—was sabotaged, and the shipment of some needed
parts or materials was impeded by other means. Without American collaboration,
Israel identified the top scientific personnel in the nuclear project, and six
out of 15, according to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, met violent deaths
inside Iran. Bergman interviewed then–CIA director Michael Hayden, who told
him, “This program… .is illegal, and we never would have recommended it or
advocated such a thing. However, my broad intelligence judgment is that the
deaths of those human beings had a great impact on their nuclear program.” In
fact, Bergman reports that Hayden told him these killings were the single most
effective measure in slowing Iran’s progress.
Stuxnet was part of
a larger sabotage project called Olympic Games that began in the latter years
of the century’s first decade. Did it continue in some form after 2010, when
the computer worm was discovered? Nothing has been revealed about this. The
deaths of the scientists occurred in 2011 and 2012. And then there were this
summer’s mysterious combustions. It seems unlikely that Israel undertook no
efforts to impede Iran’s nuclear progress between 2012 and 2020. But whatever
may have been done remains undiscovered.
The spokesman for
Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said the country could make up for the 2020
destruction of the centrifuge plant at Natanz in 12 to 14 months. Some Western
experts have estimated it will take two years. And after that? Both Joe Biden
and Donald Trump have asserted the wish to negotiate a new deal with Iran; at a
minimum, the Natanz attack has bought them time. At this point, 18 years after
an Iranian exile group revealed Tehran’s hidden nuclear enrichment, Iran still
has no bomb, confounding expectations. Israel’s actions, so it seems, have had
much to do with the delay from which many have benefitted.
***
Israeli genius has made
significant contributions to the world. For example, in the realm of
environmental protection, Israelis invented drip irrigation and rooftop solar water
heating. In medicine, the flexible stent, keeping coronary arteries open, and
also the “pillcam,” which, once swallowed, transmits pictures of the GI tract.
In computing, the firewall and flash disk drives. In automotive travel, Waze
and Mobileye, built into vehicles to prevent crashes. This is to mention just a
few highlights of the much larger phenomenon of Israeli ingenuity and
creativity. Earlier this year, the Iranian parliament, or Majlis, passed a law
banning the use of all Israeli hardware and software. To this, the appropriate
Israeli rejoinder might be, “Make my day.” So ubiquitous are Israeli
contributions to the world of cybernetics—via Israeli outposts of Intel, Cisco,
Microsoft, etc.—that were Tehran to enforce this law, its nuclear program, and
much else, would be stopped in its tracks.
Unlike Iran, much
of the world recognizes Israel’s contributions to technology. Its contributions
to global security are less well recognized but no less significant. The world
has been blessedly free from really big wars since 1945. This is primarily the
result of American efforts to build and uphold a structure of relative peace.
In that effort, the U.S. has had many partners, but by and large, America has
contributed not only the lion’s share of capabilities but also of will and
courage. Having one ally that has brought to the table its own remarkable
capabilities as well as a powerful sense of will—expressed in the courage to
undertake “audacious and risky” acts in confronting threats—has been of considerable
benefit. A world without nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein or
Bashar al-Assad or, for the time being, those of the supreme leader, is a much
safer world than it would have been otherwise. More people than know it owe
Israel a debt of gratitude.
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