The Meaning of Israel’s Strikes on Iran

By Mark Antonio Wright

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

 

Israel’s retaliatory strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend left a lot of people wondering what was up. The strikes — coming three weeks after Iran’s drone and ballistic missile barrage on Israel — were initially seen as a disappointment. They certainly weren’t as spectacular a social-media event as the exploding-pagers operation conducted against Lebanese Hezbollah. Indeed, the Israelis were widely reported to have been pressured in recent weeks by the Biden administration to avoid attacking Iranian nuclear sites or its oil infrastructure or doing anything that would escalate the ongoing conflict in the Middle East to another, more dangerous level.

 

So did Israel blink?

 

Perhaps — though it’s of course possible, even likely in my view, that Israel may yet decide to attack the sensitive nuclear sites at a time of its own choosing, i.e., after the U.S. presidential election next week. On October 1, I wrote that Israel cannot tolerate Iran as a nuclear-threshold power. I don’t think anything’s changed.

 

But even if Israel’s response wasn’t “The Big One” that many had expected, I think it’s worth noting just how impressive the Israeli air strikes were as a technical display of military power. It should be said that there are probably no more than a handful of air forces around the world that could even attempt such a thing, let alone pull off what Israel accomplished. That a small nation of under 10 million can conduct such operations is simply not ordinary.

 

The Associated Press reports that the strikes “damaged facilities at a secretive military base southeast of the Iranian capital that experts in the past have linked to Tehran’s onetime nuclear weapons program and at another base tied to its ballistic missile program”:

 

Some of the buildings damaged sat in Iran’s Parchin military base, where the International Atomic Energy Agency suspects Iran in the past conducted tests of high explosives that could trigger a nuclear weapon. Iran long has insisted its nuclear program is peaceful, though the IAEA, Western intelligence agencies and others say Tehran had an active weapons program up until 2003.

 

The other damage could be seen at the nearby Khojir military base, which analysts believe hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites.

 

The strikes were spread over three Iranian provinces, and, according to reporting by the New York Times, focused on more than 20 military targets, “including air defense batteries, radar stations and missile production sites.”

 

Importantly, through this weekend’s operation, Israel degraded “Iran’s air defenses and radar system” and “made it easier” for Israeli air force “fighter jets to attack Iran in the future, a move that may either deter Tehran from responding forcefully, or embolden Israel to try further attacks, or both.”

 

In the past few months, Israel has decapitated Hamas and Hezbollah via spectacular displays of intelligence gathering, clandestine operations, and military power. And it has now attacked its principled geopolitical enemy — a nation with which it shares no borders — by conducting air strikes over hundreds of miles against defended targets without losing a single warplane to enemy action.

 

There should be no misunderstanding — what we witnessed over the weekend was a remarkable display of Israeli capability. If Tehran chooses to continue its hostile actions, there will be more to come.