Israel’s Attack on Iran Has Failed

By Dmitry Orlov

There are lots of journalists attempting to offer play-by-play coverage of the Israel-Iran war. There is also no shortage of commentators willing to offer opinions on the Israeli attack on Iran and on Iran’s response and some even venture to predict its outcome. I, for one, am willing to step back and let events unfold. Meanwhile, here are some similarities and differences to consider, just in case you decide to choose sides in this conflict based on hard data rather than propaganda or whim.

Iran and Israel are the last two theocracies left on the planet. (Vatican is a theocracy but is not a nation and so doesn’t count.) Iran is an Islamic Republic presided over by an ayatollah and as such is a throwback to an era a few centuries back. Israel is an ethno-religious state that defines itself as a “Jewish state,” jewishness being simultaneously an ethnicity and a religion. As such, it is a throwback to an era a few millennia back when tribal gods, like the Jewish god Jehova, were all the rage. This makes the Israeli-Iranian war something like a dinosaur fight: two anachronistic relicts going at each other, but not with fangs and claws (or spears and swords) but with high-tech drones and rockets (it is, after all,the 21st century). The vast majority of the world’s population, who believe in secular rule, freedom of religion (even for Jews) and the separation of church and state should be forgiven if they decide to just hang back and have these two political living fossils mutually annihilate.

But that’s where the similarities end. The differences, on the other hand, are quite stark. Iran does not possess nuclear weapons. It is a party to the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty). It allows IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities. It reports on the movement of enriched uranium. And for all of that, it is under constant international pressure and sanctions and declared a threat just for the purely theoretical potential ability to create nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Iranian nuclear engineers are working under a “fatwa” (a religious pronouncement having the force of law) that makes nuclear weapons “haram” — forbidden.

Turning now to Israel: it possesses a nuclear arsenal estimated between 80 and 200 warheads. These are some decades old and may no longer be effective due to the effects of radioactive decay. Israel has not signed the NPT, does not allow international inspectors and keeps its nuclear program completely secret. But instead of constant international pressure and sanctions it receives support and military assistance from the West. Moreover, Western leaders facetiously declare it to be a “stronghold of democracy” and allegedly a victim.

Let’s not be silly and run around with our hair on fire at any mention of “nuclear weapons.” These weapons are extremely useful for keeping the peace — provided they remain under strictest control and (here’s the key proviso) are never-ever-ever used. Having nuclear weapons is one thing, and quite acceptable given a reasonable set of conditions; using nuclear weapons is strictly forbidden and automatically makes you a war criminal and subject to destruction — with nuclear weapons if need be. The US committed the grand faux pas when it dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, earning Harry Truman a spot on frying pan number one in a whole new Circle of Hell (if all goes well, he will remain its only resident for all of eternity).

As far as keeping the peace, nukes are most effective. Just get yourself a few nukes, and everyone will be afraid to touch you. The worst position to be in is to have a nuclear program and allow yourself to be convinced not to develop a nuke. Muammar Qaddafy opted to give up his nuclear program and ended up killed and his Libya destroyed. Kim Jong Il made no such error, developed and tested some nukes, his son Kim Jong Un built some rockets that can fly them to California, and now he can afford to return Donald Trump’s rose-scented love letters unopened and suffer no consequences.

Iran did the stupidest thing possible, which is to have a nuclear program with uranium enrichment centrifuges that have been coming tantalizingly close to achieving U235 concentrations high enough to make a bomb but being coy and declining to actually pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and make a few nukes. The reason is the aforementioned “fatwa”. It may seem highly moral to the faithful followers of an ayatollah, but it looks highly suspicious from the point of view of anyone else actually involved in nuclear politics. It is doubly suspicious behavior in a country whose leaders continue to repeat the mantra “Death to Israel” — Israel, which, quite incidentally, does have nuclear weapons.

Israel developed its first nuclear weapons in 1966-67 in collaboration with South Africa: these two Apartheid states working together was a match made in hell. South Africa had the uranium ore while Israel had the brains. South Africa gave up on its nuclear weapons program in 1989, making it the only nation to develop nuclear weapons and then give them up while Israel never confessed to having nuclear weapons but has escaped international scrutiny because that would be “antisemitism”.

And so a danger remains that as Israel becomes sufficiently degraded by Iranian rocket strikes, it opts out to strike out using its nuclear weapons like a cornered rat. However, the plutonium cores in its plutonium-based bombs (plutonium having been produced at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona by irradiating natural South African uranium in a heavy-water-moderated reactor) are now close to 60 years old and plutonium has a tendency to go bad over time, accumulating isotopes that make the weapon both dangerous and unreliable. The rockets for delivering these bombs are also somewhat uncertain. That’s all the good news.

But back to what has been happening since Friday the 13th a week ago. At this point, the IAEA and its hysterically blind leader Rafael Grossi, along with 18 US intelligence agencies, have conceded that Iran does not have nuclear weapons or an active nuclear weapon development program. However, that is not stopping Donald Trump from thinking that it does, nor is that likely to deter permanent Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahoo from claiming that Iran is days or weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon, as he has been saying for the past four decades. Clearly, these two need a good, solid reason to attack Iran, facts be damned. Why?

To simplify, let’s not consider that Israel has any prerogatives separately from the US. It is simply a Middle Eastern colonial outpost, similar to the The Kingdom of Jerusalem, a.k.a. the Crusader Kingdom — a Crusader state established in the Levant after the First Crusade. It held together for close to two centuries, lasting from 1099 to 1291. It seems unlikely that the current Kingdom of Jerusalem will last as long. It is already the longest military occupation in modern history, and military occupations are notoriously expensive and unsustainable over the long run. Specifically, the Israeli project is unsustainable without US support, and the US is running out of money to support itself, never mind useless hangers-on like Israel or Ukraine.

And so Trump ordered Israel to attack Iran. Why? And why now? The reason Trump saw this attack as attractive is that the Israelis convinced him that the plan stood a good chance of victory. They had it all arranged, they thought. They worked on this plan for years: they recruited, they infiltrated, they brought in and assembled attack drones, they spotted all the locations where Iran’s government and military officials could be found sleeping in their beds and they had jets and air tankers ready to swarm in and knock out (or so they thought) Iranian air defenses and ballistic rockets. They even had the son of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the old American Iranian puppet leader, pop out of a hole in the ground and, like a good hereditary puppet, standing by to have Uncle Sam’s firm hand inserted from behind.

And the reason Trump thought that this plan was necessary was that he needed a military victory to balance out the military defeat in the Ukraine. He performed a rather theatrical pivot at the G7 (G6?) meeting in Canada, which he left early to pointedly avoid encountering the Ukrainian no-longer-president Zelensky (whom he detests) and to attend an urgent meeting in the White House Situation Room on the subject of the Israel-Iran war. As he boarded Air Force One, perhaps he was humming to himself Queen’s “We are the champions”: “No time for losers ‘Cause we are the champions of the world.”

Trump did what he could to soften up the Iranians prior to the attack. He beguiled them by pretending to be negotiating one of his famous “deals” with them, giving them no reason to think that a sudden sneak attack was coming. As a result, the Iranian military was not in their command bunkers and battle stations but sleeping in their beds with their wives, making easy targets for the Israeli drones. Nevertheless, the Iranian military and government structures proved resilient enough to be up and running some hours after their top commanders were taken out. The Israelis did knock out some air defense systems (Iran had quite a lot of them but they weren’t quite up to date) and lots of dummy jets, rocket launchers and other supposed military junk hammered together out of sticks and plywood.<

And then the real action started. Iran has many kilometers of tunnels hidden deep underground and stocked with thousands of rockets that can reach Israel. There are some old, simpler rockets that are intended to deplete Israel’s air defense systems. Already the US is struggling to resupply Israel with whatever air defense rockets they can scrounge but they are clearly in very short supply already. There are also some modern hypersound rockets that no air defense system can stop. Iran launches two rocket attacks a day and doesn’t seem at all eager to stop.

And now let’s consider the two opponents. Israel is a postage stamp-sized country of just 3920km2 (after subtracting occupied West Bank, Gaza and Negev Desert) and hosting around 10 million inhabitants. Iran is a huge country of 1,600,000 km2 and over 90 million inhabitants. Iran is not a country that can be conquered using aerial bombardment and neither Israel nor the US, nor all of NATO has the ability, or the willingness, to mount a ground invasion. Israel, on the other hand, can be made unlivable quite readily using some finite number of rocket strikes.

First, Israel is not self-sufficient in anything except rocks and sand and is dependent on a constant flow of imports through its one major airport (Ben Gurion) and three major seaports (Haifa, Ashdod, and Eilat). Eilat, on the Red Sea, has been all but shut down for Israel-bound traffic by those frisky Houthis of Yemen. Haifa has been shut down by Iranian rockets. Ashdod remains in operation, but for how long? Second, Israel is so small that it has just one or two of each: one oil refinery, just four power plants over one megawatt, and so on down the target list. Iran has many times more rockets than it would take to make Israel completely unlivable: no electricity, no sewage treatment, no pumped water, no gas, no gasoline or diesel.

It is to early to call the outcome, which depends on what happens first: will Iran run out of rockets or will Israel run out of important targets for Iran to destroy. But it is already safe to say that Israel’s Blitzkrieg attack on Iran has failed. US military’s entry into the conflict remains the wild card, but given its unpopularity among Americans, illegality (without congressional approval) and slim chances of success, it does not appear likely.

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