In Israel, the killing of Qassem Suleimani feels like a decisive, if not exactly recommended, move in a game that has been playing out in the region for years.
www.newyorker.com
In the United States, early analyses of the Trump Administration’s assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, tended to come with corresponding analyses of Iran’s array of choices for armed retaliation—attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf, Saudi oil assets, Iraqi political targets, Israel, various diplomatic missions—suggesting that such a response is inevitable, and wondering, ominously, where it will come. By inference, the rationale for
Donald Trump’s bolt-from-the-blue action will be justified, or not, by its consequences and
their consequences. As General David Petraeus told
Foreign Policy, “It is impossible to overstate the importance of this particular action. . . . Suleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia crescent, stretching from Iran to Iraq through Syria into southern Lebanon.” He added, “Now the question is: How does Iran respond with its own forces and its proxies, and then what does that lead the U.S. to do?”
Petraeus’s apprehension was unlikely to have been allayed by the Trump Administration’s alleged contingency plans for an Iranian counterattack. After Suleimani’s death, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader,
reportedly instructed his National Security Council that Iran’s response should not be carried out by proxies but, rather, by Iranian forces in a direct, proportional attack on American interests. If that were to happen, Trump tweeted, his Administration had plans to attack fifty-two Iranian targets—a number that recalls the fifty-two American hostages held in Tehran in 1979. Early on Wednesday morning,
a first Iranian salvo came: units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq where American troops are stationed. There were no reported casualties, and the damage was apparently minimal. Later on Wednesday morning, in a brief address from the White House, Trump said—some would say gloated—that Iran “appears to be standing down.” After misrepresenting the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, he called on
nato—an organization he has frequently scorned—to take a role and reiterated threats and sanctions against Iran but said that he was ready “to embrace peace with all who seek it.”
Whatever Trump does, or does not do, in response, looking one military move ahead does not amount to a strategic plan. And the danger of escalation looms in a region that is, whatever America’s advantage in the airspace, Iranian turf. A missile barrage is the least of Iran’s strategic options. After the killing of Suleimani, which was achieved by a drone strike near the Baghdad airport, the Iraqi parliament called for American troops to leave that country, which has a Shiite majority and is home to militias subject to Iranian influence. Trump threatened economic sanctions on Iraq, but this has mainly compromised Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who presides over cities—recently wracked by demonstrations—that are desperate for foreign investment. It has not, apparently,
mitigated uncertainty regarding the fate of America’s Iraqi bases, which calls the continuing fight against
isis into question, let alone the meagre results of America’s terrible war there. Meanwhile, the Syrian regime owes its survival to Iran, and Lebanon remains dominated by the Iran-backed Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah,
warned that suicide bombers across the region will leave the Americans “humiliated, defeated, and terrified.”
But this is Israel’s turf, too, and the killing of Suleimani feels quite different in Israel than it does in the United States—a somewhat more decisive, if not exactly recommended, move in a game that has been playing out in the region for years. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was reportedly apprised of the U.S. strike in advance by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said that Trump was “worthy of full appreciation”—though he subsequently tried to distance Israel from the killing, calling it “an American event.” Benny Gantz, the opposition leader trying to displace Netanyahu, called the attack a “brave decision.” No major party leader has publicly condemned the killing. On Sunday, Alex Fishman, the security correspondent for the Tel Aviv–based newspaper Yediot Ahronot, wrote, “For years, Israel has tried unsuccessfully to harness the United States for a military confrontation with Iran. And last Friday we emerged from these 40 years in the wilderness.”
Fishman puts things brazenly, but he captured the general mood among Israeli security experts, who take it for granted that they must fight a war of attrition with Iran and its proxies—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. They also assume that, despite Israel’s own “second strike” nuclear capabilities, Iran’s heft—a technologically advanced country of eighty-three million people, with a military industry larger than Israel’s—its nuclear program, and its development of guided missiles constitute an outsized, if not existential, threat. Since October, when Trump seemed willing to abandon the Kurds fighting in northern Syria, Israeli security experts have feared that their American patron was showing signs of withdrawing from the region. Their ultimate fear was that he would leave Israel to face Iran alone.
But something else is at play here. The assassination of Suleimani seems of a piece with Israeli conceptions of “deterrence”—the manifest demonstration of overwhelming force kept in reserve—in which the killing of leaders is an arrow in the quiver. When Amos Yadlin, the executive director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies—he previously served as the chief of military intelligence and as a deputy commander of the Israeli Air Force—was interviewed about the assassination on the Ynet news site, he immediately drew a parallel to the assassination of Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander, in a joint Mossad-C.I.A. operation in 2008. As Hezbollah and Iranian leaders did then, Yadlin said, Iranian leaders would now respond in a measured way. Virtually all defense experts presume a kind of division of labor in the regional contest, with the U.S. deterring Iran’s missile and nuclear programs and Israel countering the missile capabilities of its proxies. The Iranians “really, really don’t want a war with the world’s greatest power,” Yadlin said. Any “broad-based attack,” such as the one that Iranian leaders threatened over the weekend against thirty-two sites, including Tel Aviv, would “bring down on them America’s great might, including B-1 bombers, B-2s, cruise missiles—everything the U.S. has.”
Yadlin did not have to add that what keeps Hezbollah’s tens of thousands of rockets and missiles away from their (far fewer) launchers is the spectre of how the Israeli Air Force would retaliate. In recent months, the Air Force has carried out
dozens of attacks in Syria, and even some in Iraq. “Alongside the limitations on its nuclear program, Iran is continuing to develop missiles that can reach Israeli territory,” the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, General Aviv Kochavi, said last month at a conference in Herzliya. “We are making great efforts to insure that our enemies do not acquire precision weapons, and we will do so openly, covertly, and even at the risk of conflict.”
Since October, though, Israel has worried that the Trump Administration isn’t fully committed to its part of the job. The abandonment of the Kurds, Yadlin told me at the time, “gave Iran a windfall, a direct overland route through Iraq to President Assad’s Syria—and, from there, to Lebanon.” Furthermore, oil-and-gas independence seemed to make the Administration cavalier about the Gulf. Iran
attacked shipping there, then
attacked Saudi oil fields, and even shot down a hundred-million-dollar U.S. drone. “The perception,” Yadlin said, was that the Americans “are willing to impose sanctions, willing to offer economic aid. But, when it comes to the military option, they are very hesitant.” Israel, Yadlin added, doesn’t need U.S. military help, “but this withdrawal means a reduction in Israeli ‘deterrence.’ ”
Israel sought on Tuesday to stand aside from the conflict between its close ally the United States and Iran, and said it was unclear whether Tehran's abandonment of uranium enrichment limits meant it was on a path toward a nuclear weapon.
www.reuters.com
Israel tries to stand aside from U.S.-Iranian conflict
Jeffrey Heller
4 MIN READ
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel sought on Tuesday to stand aside from the conflict between its close ally the United States and Iran, and said it was unclear whether Tehran’s abandonment of uranium enrichment limits meant it was on a path toward a nuclear weapon.
The unusually muted Israeli comments on Iran, Israel’s arch-enemy, emerged after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet met on Monday amid concern over Iranian retaliation for the U.S. strike in Baghdad on Friday that killed Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most celebrated military commander.
Asked on Israel Radio whether Iran was “on the way to an atomic bomb”, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, one of Netanyahu’s closest lieutenants and a member of the security cabinet, said: “It’s too early to say.”
Iran, which has denied seeking to build nuclear arms, said on Sunday it would abandon limitations on enriching uranium, which can be used to make nuclear warheads.
Iran had already breached many of the restrictions of a deal with world powers designed to curb its nuclear programmers, agreed in 2015, which U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018.
But Iran also said on Sunday it would continue to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and could reverse its steps if U.S. sanctions were removed.
Steinitz reiterated Netanyahu’s pledge that Israel would never let Iran to build a nuclear arsenal, a line that Trump has echoed emphatically.
Asked what action Israel should take now, Steinitz said: “There is tension between Iran and the United States and we’re not involved, so I don’t want to relate to it. We’re standing on the sidelines and observing events.”
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Netanyahu has long said the nuclear deal would not prevent Tehran getting the bomb, and he has in the past held out the option of a unilateral strike against Iran to prevent this.
But he largely stepped away publicly from that line after the nuclear deal was signed, focusing instead on pushing for the agreement to be scrapped and sanctions restored.
Any conflict now would stretch Israel at a time when it is deep in political stalemate after inconclusive elections in April and September, with a new vote due on March 2.
Israel is widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal but has declined for decades to confirm or deny it. In an apparent slip of the tongue on Sunday, Netanyahu described Israel as a nuclear power before correcting himself with an embarrassed smile.
The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was quoted as saying on Tuesday that Tehran was considering 13 “revenge scenarios” for Soleimani’s killing.
On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem issued a security alert to American citizens in Israel and the Palestinian territories citing the possibility of rocket strikes, without mentioning Iran.
Leaks from the security cabinet meeting to Israeli media quoted unidentified Israeli intelligence officials as saying the probability of an imminent Iranian attack on Israel was low.
Israel has also tangled with Iran in recent years over the presence of pro-Iranian militias in neighboring Syria, having fought the Iranian-backed Hezbollah force in Lebanon in 2006.
Israel has frequently attacked those forces in Syria and is determined to prevent them becoming permanently established.
I guess it's a messenger/message thing.
