Israel Attacks Iran, Promising Full-Scale Military Operation
As nuclear talks falter, U.S. officials deny Washington was involved in the strikes.
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Israel attacked Iran early on Friday morning, targeting the capital Tehran and other parts of the country with multiple airstrikes in a dramatic escalation of its regional war. Explosions were reported in cities home to major sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program. Initial reports indicate that Israel may have targeted the homes of Iranian political and military officials, as well as figures related to its nuclear program. Iranian state TV reported that a number of senior officials were killed, including the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami.
The attacks targeted at least six military bases around Tehran, including the Iranian military complex Parchin, according to the New York Times. Broadcasting the aftermath of the attacks in Tehran, Iranian state television showed that two residential buildings had collapsed, killing and injuring many, including at least one child.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized the attack, named Operation Rising Lion, as a “pre-emptive strike,” before declaring a state of general emergency inside Israel in anticipation of a likely Iranian retaliation. In a speech delivered Thursday night, Netanyahu detailed a full-scale military operation targeting Iranian nuclear and missile infrastructure, claiming it was necessary to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons and vowing that the strikes would continue “for as many days as it takes.” Netanyahu claimed that the attacks managed to strike Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Iranian nuclear scientists involved in weapons development, and Iran’s ballistic missile program.
"Following the preemptive strike by the State of Israel against Iran, a missile and UAV (drone) attack against the State of Israel and its civilian population is expected in the immediate time frame," Katz also said in a statement. Israeli officials have indicated that the country could experience “a significant attack from the east,” in the coming hours, likely in the form of a retaliatory Iranian missile barrage. Israel has closed its airspace, and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport has stopped flights from coming in or out. The Tasnim news agency in Iran has reported that authorities suspended flights at the Imam Khomeini International Airport, which has not been struck or affected by the attacks.
The attacks come after the U.S. announced withdrawals of personnel from embassies and consulates in the Middle East and President Donald Trump hinted that an Israeli attack on Iran may be coming in the near future. Despite those preparations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday that, “the United States was not involved in the strikes.” Yet, according to the Times of Israel, the Israeli military says it is coordinating its actions with the U.S. In his statement, Rubio had said that “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense,” adding a warning to Iran that they “should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
Israel’s assault comes after talks between the U.S. and Iran stalled over new demands from the U.S. for a total dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program. Though U.S. officials have denied that they were involved in the current strikes, the operation now risks entangling the U.S. into a broader war, as Israel braces for likely Iranian retaliation while expanding its own campaign of attacks across Iran.
Although the stated goal of Israel’s operation is to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts, there are reasons to be skeptical about this objective. Long before the current wave of strikes, U.S. intelligence officials and other analysts had pointed to the limited ability of Israeli strikes to destroy or meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program. Unlike nuclear facilities that Israel has struck in the past in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian program is more advanced, fortified, and distributed across a far greater territory. Key Iranian nuclear facilities like Natanz and Fordow are also built under layers of fortified concrete and granite—in some cases literally built into mountains—rendering them impossible to destroy by any known conventional Israeli military capacity.
The likely inability of Israel to fully destroy the program, despite being able to strike at various targets inside Iran, has led some military experts to conclude that the real goal of any attack is simply to fire the starting gun for a larger regional war with no determined endpoint. Such a war would potentially drag the U.S. in as a participant, including to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, even at a time when segments of the Trump administration and its domestic political base are expressing intense frustration over fighting continued conflicts in the Middle East.
“Both the Israeli and U.S. government, as well as our respective military and intelligence services, are fully aware that Israeli airstrikes on Iran are not going to successfully destroy the Iranian nuclear program. We are dealing with underground facilities dispersed over a large country, and human capital that knows how to rebuild things. At most, such attacks would set back progress for a period of months, or less than a year,” said Harrison Mann, a former U.S. army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for the Middle East/Africa Regional Center. “The only thing that you can really achieve by trying to bomb Iranian nuclear sites is to provoke a reprisal by Iran that helps escalate the situation into a larger war and draws in the United States. That’s what any purported effort to bomb away the Iranian nuclear program is actually aiming at.”
Mann, who resigned from his post at the DIA last year in protest over U.S. policy in Gaza, added that an aerial campaign aimed at Iran’s nuclear program would also likely require ground troops to come and do the work of verifying whether the program had actually been destroyed. It would also push Iran to withdraw from its present commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and develop a bomb, a step that Iranian officials have said in recent days is on the table in the event that they are attacked.
“Iran has never built a nuclear weapon. That is a choice that successive leadership in that country has made,” Mann said. “But the way to ensure that they do try to sprint to a nuclear weapon is to make them feel that they have no other choice.”
Forever War
The current war began after nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran began stalling over the issue of permitting Iran to maintain nuclear enrichment for civilian energy purposes. In April, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff indicated publicly that such an arrangement may be acceptable to the U.S., as long as Trump’s requirement that Iran not develop a nuclear weapon was met. After the Iranians expressed their agreement with these terms in public statements, the U.S. position began rapidly shifting. In recent days, Witkoff and others in the neoconservative faction of the DC foreign policy establishment have begun demanding instead a Libya-style dismantling of Iran’s entire nuclear program – an issue that Tehran had already indicated was a red-line that would destroy the possibility of a diplomatic agreement.
“The U.S. is reaping what it sowed in 2018. We had a deal—not a perfect deal, but a good deal that the Iranians were fully implementing,” said Sina Azodi, a specialist in international relations and Middle East politics at George Washington University. “But Donald Trump came in, he withdrew from it, and he mistakenly calculated that Iran would come back and beg for a better deal. Everything he thought has proven wrong.”
Depending on how the cycle of attacks and retaliation plays out, a conflict with Iran may come to dominate the policy agenda of the second Trump administration. The Israeli security establishment had been divided over whether to proceed with an attack absent U.S. support, but there has been a longstanding expectation inside Israel that a prolonged military confrontation with Iran would need significant U.S. assistance, either in the form of direct military operations, intelligence support, logistics, or help in defending and deterring against counter attacks by Iran and its allies.
The current strikes, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said will continue “as long as necessary,” may well trigger that process of starting a larger war. A report this year by the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) acknowledged that airstrikes would be only the first phase of a much larger conflict, stating that, “follow-on covert action and military strikes to disrupt and delay efforts to rebuild may be necessary in the months and years following an initial attack.”
Retaliatory Effects
Last year, Iran launched two missile barrages against Israel following other Israeli attacks. But security analysts say that those attacks were carefully calibrated and telegraphed in advance to manage the level of escalation and prevent a full-blown war from breaking out.
Following serious Israeli attacks on its nuclear program, Iran is now faced with a choice between capitulating, retaliating, or withdrawing from the NPT and dashing towards a nuclear weapon. Given the nature of Iran’s military capabilities, which are based on a mix of sponsorship of non-state militia groups who wage sub-conventional warfare one one hand, and a massive fleet of ballistic and hypersonic missiles on the other, Iran’s ability to retaliate in a measured way that creates a deterrent without escalating the situation to a major war is limited.
"Iran’s strike capabilities are heavily optimized for two scenarios: low-key operations below the threshold of major military campaigns, or an all-in confrontation. Last April, its attack was very performative, whereas in October they decided to showcase some of their higher-end capabilities,” said Shahryar Pasandideh, a security analyst focused on defense issues. “But this time if Israel attacks Iran, the Iranians may retaliate by going for a qualitatively different set of targets.”
Iran may also choose not to retaliate in a sustained manner to Israel’s attacks if it decides instead that a better retaliation would be withdrawing from the NPT, expelling nuclear inspectors, and pursuing a nuclear weapon. That would mean that Iran’s immediate kinetic reaction may be limited, while the country prepares instead to develop a bomb outside of international monitoring.
“If there are far-reaching and non-symbolic attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, and the Iranians decide to go for nuclear breakout in response, it doesn’t make much sense to do sustained retaliatory missile attacks,” added Pasandideh. “It comes back to strike capabilities. If you are going to pursue a nuclear weapon in response to being attacked, it would be better to limit your retaliation to a one or two day campaign of missile strikes, and then husband the rest of your forces for a period of months or a year until you have rebuilt what you lost and are in a position to break out with a nuclear weapon.”
Depending on its duration, the war may wind up triggering splits inside Trump’s coalition, divided between America First figures averse to more wars in the Middle East, and neoconservatives, for whom attacking Iran has been a long-cherished goal. If the war continues for an extended period of time, the ability of the U.S. to avoid a larger conflict will diminish, and Israel’s own pressure on the U.S. to intervene and help continue its campaign will only increase.
“There’s no viable Israeli option without close American coordination. Any extended Israeli campaign has to have a central American role in it,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The Israelis are not just selling war to America, they’re selling endless war to America.”
Why is the world just allowing Netanyahu to blindly walk us into WW3??? Why is this war criminal so powerful. Most citizens in western democracies don't even like him. He is not a leader of any major western democracy. He's a corrupt politician and criminal at that.
Where are our safe guards, institutions and governments/leaders? That are supposed to stop this madness.
This is a systematic failure of western democracy. I really hope leaders around the world (especially elected left leaning leaders) step up and do their JOB. And STOP this madness.
NOT ONE elected representative of either cartel political party has had the ethics or courage to stand up to Israel's Bibi Netanyahu and inform him that no one elected him to run the United States, run our universities, or run our international relations. NOT ONE. Ensuring Israel's existence and safety does not mean cowards from both parties can allow Israel to govern Americans.