Is Israel really planning to strike Iran soon?

By Michael Weiss

Nahum Barnea is a bit like the Andrew Marr of Israel: a respected, sober journalist who can always be relied upon as a barometer for establishment thinking. So when Barnea published his column last Friday in Yedioth Ahronoth, the highest circulation daily in Israeli, explaining that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak were acting as “one body, with one goal” to militarily destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, the response was a bit like hearing on the Politics Show that David Cameron was seriously mulling resignation. It was the kind of rumour that is impossible to contain.

Crucial to Barnea’s scoop was that the most stalwart Israeli cabinet opponent of a strike on Iran, the ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, had now been converted to the side of pre-emption. The rest of the Israeli media took it from here, first excitedly reporting that the Israel Defense Forces had suspiciously test-fired a ballistic missile – rumoured to be the long-range surface-to-surface Jericho – out of the Palmachim Air Base. (The IDF test-fires missiles all the time, but never mind.)

Next it was suspiciously pointed out that the Israeli Air Force had just concluded a sophisticated exercise at a Nato air base in Sardinia featuring combat drills with Italian and Dutch fighter jets, 2,400 km distance runs and mid-air refuelling – exactly what it had better practice for a jaunt into Persia. (Ah, but such joint Israeli-Nato air manoeuvres, it was disclosed below the fold, are performed every two years.)

Finally, seasonal change played its part in escalating the frenzy, as many analysts went on record saying that any strike this year had got to be soon because winter cloud cover would obstruct aircraft targeting systems.

What makes this round of will-they-or-won’t-they speculation about Israel’s motives different is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest bulletin on Iran, due to be published on November 8. According to a Telegraph exclusive, Western diplomats who have seen the report say that this time the IAEA has got “substantiated evidence from intelligence reports, interviews with Iranian scientists and on-the-ground inspections that Iran is carrying out a nuclear weapons programme in parallel to its civilian energy goals.”

According to The Guardian, which has spent the last five years denying that Iran was pursuing any such weapons programme at all, unnamed MOD and Whitehall officials think that the US “may decide” to speed up its own plans of attack. In that case, British military strategists are “examining” whether Royal Navy ships and submarines armed with Tomahawk missiles would back up any forthcoming American air campaign. Yet even The Guardian concedes that the MOD has got “no hard and fast blueprints for conflict” while “insiders concede that preparations there and at the Foreign Office have been under way for some time.” (On the whole, defence correspondent Nick Hopkins hedges his bets more than a government press secretary.)

But like the butterfly that flaps its wings in Malaysia and causes a hurricane in Seattle, Barnea’s little essay is a case study in chaos theory. The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl shrewdly observes that Israel is probably not going to hit Iran without Washington’s approval, and that approval is unlikely to be given in the midst of Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign. However, what this news cycle has cleverly done is refocus all diplomatic attention on Iran’s quest for WMD, a quest that the West, the Arab world and Israel are united in wanting to stop. (In this context, it’s worth asking if Netanyahu is really as furious about the leaking of cabinet discussions as he makes out.)

Operation Babylon, which ended Saddam Hussein’s nuclear fantasy and upset the Reagan administration only superficially, happened decades ago when there weren’t quite so many US troops stationed in the region trying to secure tenuous new democracies. Ayatollah Khamenei’s revenge for having his long-sought toy taken away might include triggering Hamas and Hezbollah proxy attacks against Israel or even wheeling Iran’s own Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into more overt acts of terrorism against Western or American targets. The elite Quds Force of the IRGC was recently fingered in a complex assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador to the US.

A few years ago, I heard retired IDF commander Moshe Ya'alon tell a room full of people that Israel had so well war-gamed a strike on Iran that it could bomb an active nuclear reactor in such a way that there’d be no fallout radiation. But, he went on to stress, he’d still prefer it if George W Bush undertook this burdensome task himself, regretting that the invasion of Iraq seemed to marginalise such a contingency. Years later, and now back in government as Netanyahu’s Strategic Affairs Minister, Ya’alon is still singing the same tune, with a less friendly White House to contend with.