Pre-emptive strike against Iran still on the agenda
How to prevent or deter a nuclear-armed Iran was once again at the forefront of Israeli minds during the past week, for two reasons. The first was the visit to Jerusalem by former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton and the second was a boost given to Israel’s deterrent capability by news that Germany is to supply it with a sixth Dolphin-class submarine.
The background to Bolton’s comments was the earlier public intervention in the debate by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan. In January, Dagan had said that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until at least 2015 because of “measures that have been deployed against them”, by which he meant last summer’s Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Then in early May, Dagan told a conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would start a regional war. He said: “An aerial attack against Iran’s nuclear reactors would be foolish...Anyone attacking Iran needs to understand that it could start a regional war which will include missile fire from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Iranian problem must be made an international problem, and we must continue to work to delay the nuclear program.”
Dagan’s public intervention may have been sparked by reports that only 10% of Iran’s centrifuges had been destroyed by the Stuxnet worm and that both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak were favouring a military strike.
In his intervention last week, Bolton told The Jerusalem Post that he was “dumfounded” by Dagan’s view. Bolton argued that a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities could be highly effective and that it is the only sensible option because “diplomacy isn’t going to work” any more than computer viruses, “nifty” though they are.
According to Bolton: “The way to stop the Iranian nuclear programme...is to break Iranian control of the nuclear fuel cycle, and to do that you need to destroy the facilities at Isfahan, their uranium conversion facility; you need to destroy their uranium enrichment facilities, which are currently at Natanz; and you need to destroy their heavy water reactor, under construction at Arak. We know where all those facilities are...They can all be destroyed.”
Bolton accepts Dagan’s argument that Hezbollah would certainly unleash a violent response from its bases in Lebanon to any Israeli attack on Iran, but, he argues: “For all the risks of a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s programme – for all the political risk, all of the military risk, all of the risks of Iranian retaliation – the comparison you are making is not between the world as it is today versus the world after a military strike on Iran; the real comparison is the world after a military strike on Iran compared to Iran with nuclear weapons.”
Those who are not as fearful of the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as Bolton, that is those who believe Iran can be deterred from using such weapons, were coincidentally given a boost last week by confirmation that Germany is to supply Israel with a sixth advanced diesel-powered submarine, thus further boosting Israel’s second-strike capabilities. Israel took delivery of three Dolphin submarines in the early 1990s and two more-advanced versions are under construction. Now a sixth is to be delivered, thus boosting the argument of those who say that Israel has little to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran because it has such a robust second-strike capability.
It appears to be an evenly balanced debate. The history of nuclear weapons is that they are unusable against any country that can retaliate in kind, and even those who are in favour of a strike do also fear that Dagan may be right about the utility of a strike and about the wider consequences, including a devastating retaliation on Israeli civilian centres from Hezbollah rockets.
On the other hand, our diplomatic sources in the region say two further points need bearing in mind. The first is that the Gulf Arab states are becoming more, not less, fearful of Iran as a consequence of the Arab Spring. Yet even before the dangers unleashed by the Arab Spring, it is clear that Saudi Arabia was urging Israel to strike against Iran. One of the diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks last year included King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urging the United States to “cut off the head of the snake”. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa was also quoted, in conversation with a US diplomat, as arguing forcefully for taking action against Iran “to terminate their nuclear programme by whatever means necessary”.
A final point is this: those Israelis (and others) who argue for relying on deterrence rather than a pre-emptive strike (few genuinely believe that diplomacy will work) miss a key consideration. Israel did not develop its nuclear capabilities to deter a nuclear attack, it developed them as the ultimate defence against overwhelming conventional attack. ‘Red lines’ for using nuclear weapons were first articulated by Israel in the late 1960s, and in addition to defending against nuclear or bio-chem attack these included a successful Arab military penetration into core populated areas; the destruction of the Israeli Air Force; and the exposure of Israeli cities to devastating air attack. In line with this doctrine, at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Golda Meir put Israel’s nuclear forces on alert, with the initial target list including the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus.
Today, an Iranian nuclear capability threatens Israel less because of the possibility of a devastating first-strike than because it could prevent Israel using its own nuclear weapons in response to an overwhelming conventional Arab attack. That deterrence effect would be crucially undermined if the attacking forces felt they were protected by an Iranian nuclear umbrella.
The debate goes on, but our sources say it would be a mistake to assume that Dagan’s intervention against military action, however influential he may be as a former Mossad chief, will prove decisive. JdeC.