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Thirty six years ago today, on what was in that year the occasion of Judaism’s holiest day, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on an unsuspecting Israel.
- What came to be known as the Yom Kippur War came closer than any other Arab-Israeli conflict to the complete defeat of the nation of Israel.
- Through superior military leadership and technology, the Israelis absorbed the Arab blow and counter-attacked, turning the tables on their enemies.
- The Egyptians were stranded in the Sinai desert on the wrong side of the Suez Canal, and Israeli forces advanced into the suburbs of Damascus, Syria’s capital. The US brokered the complex disengagement agreements, where Israel voluntarily let its attackers off the hook, and marched back to defensible lines.
- But the cost of the conflict to Israel was enormous. 2,800 Israeli soldiers were killed. While that seems small in comparison to contemporary US losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, consider that on a per capita basis, the losses for Israel were equal to three times the American losses in our decade of involvement in Vietnam (58,000×3=174,000) in a span of only 21 days. There is no American precedent for such losses in such a short period of time, and the psychological impact on Israel at the time, was significant.
- This is useful history as we consider Iran and contemporary challenges to Israel’s security and the broader security interests of the US in the Middle East.
- At the G-20 in Pittsburg last week, President Obama announced that Iran has a secret nuclear enrichment facility, south of Tehran in the holy city of Qom.
- Shocked, are you?
- The news, which won a rare border-to-border banner headline in the Washington Post, is only sensational if you believe Teheran’s party line that all this effort to hide – literally tunnel – with regard to its nuclear program is nothing more than a misunderstanding about Iran’s peaceful intentions regarding nuclear energy.
- The revelation of the expanded nuclear program has been known to Western intelligence since mid-2007.
- President Obama’s announcement of enhanced Iranian nuclear malfeasance fit awkwardly with the Administration’s previous announcement that it was canceling a Bush-approved, ground based missile defense system designed to protect our Eastern European allies from Iranian missiles.
- Here, appeasing revanchist Russian machinations and creating a de facto sphere of influence for the Medvedev-Putin gang among NATO member states in Eastern Europe, fit uneasily with the firmer diplomatic line Team Obama planned on taking with the Iranians in their October 1 sit down on the Iranian nuclear program.
- But by public accounts, the first session with Iran was a success, with limited Iranian concessions which are at once intended to be meaningful and beside the point. Democrats and like-minded Europeans, who see talking as a goal in itself, are rightfully happy, having met their own litmus test of bountiful procedure without meaningful result.
- But it is this very posturing and atmospherics that cloud what should otherwise be a clear-eyed view of the facts.
- Revelations of the Qom facility should put to rest any notions that the Iranian nuclear program is designed for anythingbut the weaponization of nuclear materials. The West is now, openly, in a race against time with the Iranian nuclear program.
- And Iran’s final push for nuclear weapons comes as the Islamic Republic has shown its true nature through a rigged presidential vote that led to country-wide protests and a massive government crackdown with the government killing its own citizens to preserve its power. The blatant lack of political legitimacy is ironically polished by the respect and prestige accorded by the West in engaging the Mullahs in nuclear talks.
- It is the contradiction of Western outreach at this sensitive time that engagement to beat a nuclear technical time line may in fact significantly retard progressive forces in Iran that have challenged the government and offer the only real alternative to a more open and authentic negotiating partner.
- As President Obama loves to say, “we didn’t get here overnight.”
- Dithering by the international community, with endless talks, stern threats and no action, has provided the Iranian regime priceless time to move forward on its atomic bomb manufacturing project. As the Bush Administration yielded to Euro-soft power on Iran in its second term, the only result was more process and increased Iranian nuclear capability.
- A draft IAEA report, not yet released purports that the Iranians already have the ability to construct a nuclear weapon. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is more conservative in his estimate saying 1-3 years. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, isn’t talking.
- From the Mullahs perspective, time is on their side. They have duly noted recent history where, after a flurry of activity, nations rapidly lose interest in sanctions on new nuclear states once the new equilibrium of the revised status quo is digested. Simply look at India, Pakistan and even North Korea. The Iranians can take heart at US policy shifts toward India where sanctions of the 90s have led to close nuclear cooperation in the 21st century.
- So understanding the importance of time to result, what is the endgame?
- Obama has promised crippling sanctions if the Iranians don’t respond to his overtures. But the sanctions that will hurt the most are in the hands of nations that simply do not see the Iranian threat from the same vantage point as the US; Russia and China. Persuading these nations to implement the sanctions may be as hard as convincing the Iranians to give up its nuclear weapons.
- So, what’s left? The US could enhance its targeting of Iranian financial institutions, shutting off capital to the regime. This may be more forceful, but not without collateral damage with allies the US needs to stay on board.
- In terms of escalation, the US could impose a blockade of Iran with likeminded nations. That is an act of war that would quickly unravel relations with the Russians and Chinese.
- So short of direct military strikes, what is left to be done?
- Read the papers carefully in the coming weeks my friends. The end game is emerging before negotiations even start. The assumption? That the Iranian program cannot be stopped and that a nuclear Iran is inevitability.
- The proposed solution is doctrinal; nuclear deterrence of the kind that governed US Soviet relations during the Cold War. For instance, if Iran uses its nuclear weapons it will face immediate nuclear retaliation, perhaps for a time, massive and disproportionate retaliation.
- The world knows that Israel has up to 200 deployable nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. That the program remains unacknowledged may require the US to extend its nuclear umbrella to Israel in order to formally deter an Iranian attack.
- For strategists, the very threat of retaliation holds in check an attack. In the old days, it was known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
- But MAD logic is flawed here due to geography and ideology.
- Consider that the distance from Sderot – the Israeli town that is continually peppered with missiles from Hamas-held Gaza – north to Tel Aviv is 20 miles. It is 20 miles north from Tel Aviv to Haifa’s outskirts. Jerusalem is less than 20 miles south east of Tel Aviv, and you would be in Jordan if you went 20 miles due east from Tel Aviv assuming you count the West Bank as part of the distance.
- Simply put, Israel has no defense in depth. Even society-destroying nuclear attacks, hypothetically played out between the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War, left millions alive on both sides given the sheer size of both countries.
- Israel does not have that luxury.
- A single nuclear weapon, even one as “small” (15 kilotons) as that used over Hiroshima – detonated over Tel Aviv – could pose an Extinction Level Event (ELE) for Israel.
- Such an attack would pulverize Tel Aviv out to a radius of three miles in all directions and smash windows and knock down wooden structures up to 15 miles away, well within the Tel Aviv District where 1.2 million Israelis live. Casualties from the blast and radiation would be nothing short of catastrophic, overwhelming Israel’s medical infrastructure.
- Remember, as destructive as a single nuclear weapon detonated over Tehran would be, there is no comparison between that attack on the Iranian nation and the impact of a single nuclear weapon on the very existence of Israel. By virtue of the Israel’s limited geography, the impact of the blasts would be vastly asymmetrical in Iran’s favor.
- Which brings us back to the Mullah-ocracy running Iran. Is Ahmadinejad the crazy puppet of the religious powers that truly run Iran? Are his musings on the destruction of Israel the rants of a deluded man meant to sate and divert the appetites of committed Muslims mired in Iran’s mismanaged economy?
- Are we in the West certain that the people holding the strings in Iran – the same who ordered the murder of their own citizens rather than tolerate dissent – are truly canny calculators who simply want security for the Iranian nation that borders six countries, two nuclear powers and a NATO ally?
- The fact of the matter is that we don’t know.
- As Americans, we tend to confer our logic on our enemies. So, when Osama bin Laden declared war on the US, it barely made a ripple in the US. What could one man do against the American colossus?
- What could one man do, indeed.
- And as the promise of Western-inspired rationality plays out inconclusively in talks with Iran, the clock toward a weapon will still be ticking.
- For Obama and the United States, there are no good options, as he probably already knows. But the Iranian threat to the US proper is, for now, hypothetical. Iranian ICBMs capable of reaching the US are still a few years off, but they are on the drawing boards.
- For Israel the equation is much more consequential, as are US interests in the region, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to name just a few. The moment Iran goes nuclear, the nature of the playing field changes.
- Pre-emption has been Israeli strategy since its founding in 1948. No Israeli Prime Minister can be placed in the position of postponing action on threat capable of such destructive capacity on his/her country.
- As Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 were an unacceptable threat to the United States – despite its massive nuclear superiority – so a functioning Iranian nuclear weapons program is an unacceptable risk to Israel.
- In 1938, as Hitler began his bluster and bluff to retake the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, creating the crisis that ended in Western appeasement in Munich, German military leaders considered a coup. For those military professionals, the German army was simply not ready for a two front war and feared disaster.
- How history might have changed if unflagging efforts by the West had led to that coup, instead of accommodation.
- The Iranian problem is not solved with talks with the Mullah-ocracy that does not command the respect or support of its citizens. The only non-military path forward resides with the people and efforts the West can take to empower their will for self governance.