Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

The terrorist attacks on Israeli targets in Tbilisi and New Delhi on 13 February have provided Israel’s hawks with additional ammunition for an early strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but not for the reasons that might be supposed.  It is not the fact of the attacks, but rather their comparative failure that has emboldened the hawks around Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

That Israel’s security and political establishment is locked in a tense behind-the-scenes debate on the likely efficacy or not of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is open knowledge.  We looked at this in detail last week and concluded that: “The past week has provided further strong indications that, with US acquiescence, Israel is seriously preparing for a military strike against Iran if tightening international sanctions do not have a nearly immediate effect in curtailing Iran’s ambitions.”

During the past week, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, General Nikolay Makarov, has added to the belief that the time for action is nearing by saying that he believes a final decision will be taken at the start of the summer.  This fits in with the previously reported assessment of US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta that a strike is likely before the end of June.

Now we have had the much-expected Iranian retaliatory terrorist attacks on Israel – or at least what looks like that and is being presented as such by Israel.  On the day of the attacks, Netanyahu said bluntly: “Iran and its proxy Hezbollah were behind the attacks”.  He also pointed to the “attempts to hurt Israelis” in Azerbaijan and Thailand.

For the Israeli hawks, the interesting point about these attacks is not that they have taken place, but that they were relative failures, and this relative failure has been seized upon as an argument in favour of a military strike against Iran.  The one worrying aspect of the attempted attacks is their geographical spread (from Georgia to Thailand), indicating the range of Hezbollah’s overseas reach, but the hawks are maintaining that the failure of the attacks to do any serious damage shows that fear of massive Iranian retaliation in response to an Israeli strike against its nuclear facilities is overblown.

The hawks have been pointing out that if this is the best that Hezbollah can do to mark the 4th anniversary of Israel’s assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, it really does indicate a declining capability when seen alongside Hezbollah’s retaliation in 1992 to the assassination of Abbas Moussawi.  Then, it took just one month to perpetrate the attack on an Israeli embassy building in Buenos Aires in which 29 Israelis and Argentineans were killed.

The argument is complicated by a dispute within Israeli security circles as to whether or not Hezbollah might have pulled its punches with this week’s attacks.  But if it did, then that is almost as positive as the alternative view that Hezbollah is no longer capable of a major retaliation.  Given the fragility of the situation in Lebanon, and the difficulties faced by Hezbollah’s patron in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, it is indeed possible that Hezbollah did pull its punches, being unwilling to risk everything in a major confrontation with Israel.  Hezbollah will be acutely aware that in June 1982, Israel launched the First Lebanon War in response to the assassination attempt on its ambassador to the UK Shlomo Argov.

Also, while the word of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah may not be something to which Israel gives much credence, his 7 February comments about Hezbollah’s likely response to an Israeli attack on Iran give further weight to the argument that Hezbollah might be trying to avoid a confrontation.  Nasrallah said: “Iran does not command us. Even when it comes to regional developments, Iran will not request anything from Hezbollah and will not desire anything.  When this day comes [and Iran commands us], we are the ones who will sit down and decide what to do.”

The key point is this: if Hezbollah is running scared, and/or if its capabilities really are as constrained as this week’s failed attacks suggest they might be, that would significantly undermine one of the key elements of Iran’s deterrent against an Israeli military strike - or at least that is what Israeli hawks have been arguing this week.  But then, if the opposite had happened, and the attacks in India and Georgia had been devastating successes, the arguments for a military strike on Iran would have been just as magnified.  In other words, what our sources are saying is that the only way in which a war with Iran can be prevented is if Iran demonstrably and quickly backs down on its nuclear ambitions - but that is not an outcome in which any close observer of the Iranian regime would be willing to put much faith.  JdeC.