Unthinkable (32 page)

THE THIRD PARADOX.
The problem with the second paradox is that it is not just the worst-case scenario; it is the most likely outcome of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program. That is why the smartest Israelis place so much emphasis on American support, because they hope that the United States would be able to mitigate or eliminate the second paradox—an Israeli strike can only succeed if the sanctions and inspections remain in place to prevent Iranian rebuilding, but the strike itself is likely to undermine the sanctions and inspections. It is also part of the reason why polls in Israel demonstrate that few Israelis (18–22 percent, depending on the poll) favor an attack on Iran without American support, but far more (43–52 percent) would support one with American backing.
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In addition to the greater punch that the United States brings, the Israelis in the latter
group are betting that the Americans will solve the problem of the second paradox.

Unfortunately, that just brings up another problem. While Israel's faith in the United States is touching, it may also be misplaced. It isn't entirely that the United States won't want to do so—it may. The issue is as much that the United States may not be
able
to. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to participate in numerous crisis simulations (“war games”) that attempted to explore the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. I have even run four of them at the Saban Center at Brookings since 2009. In every case, the United States' initial reaction to an Israeli strike was the same: Washington refused to “pile on” by conducting follow-on strikes against Iran to finish the job the Israelis started, it offered defensive aid to the Israelis (Patriot batteries and AEGIS cruisers to help Israel shoot down incoming Iranian missiles, information about Iranian actions and the like), and it tried to prevent the unraveling of the sanctions and inspections on Iran. And just as consistently, the United States could not prevent Iran from withdrawing from the NPT and other countries from turning against the sanctions and inspections and blaming Israel for having made the mess in the first place.
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There are several scenarios for how the sanctions might break down after an Israeli strike. The most likely would be a repeat of the Iraq experience, where the sanctions remained on the books but fewer and fewer countries adhered to them. America's unilateral sanctions would remain, including our secondary sanctions, which threaten other countries with economic retaliation if they don't abide by our sanctions. These secondary sanctions have been an important element in galvanizing international effort against Iran. However, as was the case with Iraq, it is just not clear how much Washington would be willing to try to apply them in an environment where much of the world has lost interest in sanctioning Iran and enforcement would mean protracted fights with dozens of U.S. allies and trading partners.

Secondary sanctions are forbidden by the terms of the World Trade
Organization, to which the United States is an adherent and enthusiastic proponent. No one has been willing to challenge the United States on our secondary sanctions because most of the other key members of the WTO agree about Iran. However, if that changed as a result of an Israeli attack, they might be willing to do so. Alternatively, they might dare us to apply our own secondary sanctions. These are powerful tools if there are only a few offenders who can be forced to choose between trading with Iran or trading with America—a decision the United States almost always wins. If large numbers of countries are trading with Iran, however, then Washington would face a much more difficult situation. Sanctioning too many countries and cutting our trade with them could hurt the U.S. economy as much as it hurts theirs.

Moreover, the U.S. government, under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have made clear that they oppose an Israeli strike. In 2008, then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert reportedly discussed the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran with President Bush, who apparently told him flat out not to attack.
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Other reports claim that Israel also requested more powerful bunker-buster bombs, additional refueling aircraft, and the right to overfly Iraq—occupied by U.S. military forces at the time—only to have their requests turned down by the Bush administration.
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The Bush 43 administration was routinely accused of being overly fond of Israel, a criticism that has never been leveled at the Obama administration. So it is not surprising that they too have given Israel a “red light” whenever the idea of an attack on Iran has been broached.
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Instead, in the spring of 2012, President Obama promised that if Israel refrained from attacking and the Iranians refused to compromise on their nuclear program, the United States would act instead.
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Thus if Israel were to attack Iran anyway, it may well find an American government unenthusiastic about helping it secure the diplomatic requirements it needs to nail down any military accomplishments.

This problem is undoubtedly another reason that Israel has not attacked Iran so far. The United States keeps demanding more time to let diplomacy, carrots and sticks, have their effect and Israel keeps agreeing.
The Israelis understand both the military-technical and strategic hurdles their own strike would face, and so would prefer either a negotiated solution or an American attack to their own. But another element of that restraint is that Jerusalem needs to keep accommodating Washington's requests so that if it ever feels compelled to attack Iran on its own, the United States will not be able to say that it hadn't been warned or that Israel had not given the Americans every chance to find a different solution.

In 2003, I had a long conversation in Tel Aviv with Eli Levite, then one of the brightest stars of the Israel Defense Forces. Talking about an attack on Iran and whether it made sense for Israel to launch one, Eli made clear that he feared that Israel might someday have to, but he foresaw many obstacles to overcome to make a strike worthwhile. Of all the smart things that Eli told me that day, I think that the smartest was this: “What is it that we fear from a nuclear Iran? We're not afraid that they are going to use a nuke on us. They aren't suicidal. They know what we could do to them. What we are afraid of is that the day after Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they turn to Hizballah and Hamas and say, ‘We gave you ten thousand rockets, now go ahead and use them against Israel because we [Iran] aren't afraid of them [Israel] anymore.' But if we attack Iran, what is going to happen? They are going to turn to Hizballah and Hamas and say, ‘We gave you ten thousand rockets, now go and use them against Israel.' We could be making inevitable exactly what we are trying to prevent.”

That is the heart of Israel's fourth paradox.

The principal threat Israel will face from a nuclear Iran is more aggressive terrorism, unconventional warfare, and rocket attacks against Israel by Iran's proxies and allies, and possibly by Iranian intelligence and military services themselves. When you speak to Israeli military and civilian leaders,
that
is their real fear. That Hizballah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General
Command (PFLP-GC), and all of the other groups trying to kill Israelis will be armed, trained, supported, and encouraged to do so to an even greater extent than they already are. The history of the Cold War demonstrated that nuclear powers had to treat one another far more cautiously to avoid escalation than they did non-nuclear states.
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Pakistan and possibly North Korea have felt less constrained to wage unconventional warfare against their historic foes after they acquired nuclear weapons and Saddam Husayn sought nuclear weapons to enable conventional military operations, specifically against Israel.
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If Israel attacks Iran's nuclear program to try to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, Iran will almost certainly retaliate.
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Iran would be infuriated by an Israeli attack and would doubtless feel the need to make Israel pay a price for its attack if only to convince Israel not to do so again. Whenever Iran has perceived that it has been attacked (even when it actually wasn't), it has responded—from tanker attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, to Khobar Towers, to the more recent assassinations of Israelis in Georgia, India, and Bulgaria in response to Israeli hits on Iranian nuclear scientists. Last, there would be little downside for Iran to go to war with Israel and big potential benefits for it to do so. As long as Iran keeps its retaliation to terrorism and conventional rocket and missile attacks, Israel will have little ability to do more than respond in kind. After having had some of its nuclear sites flattened by an Israeli first strike, the Iranians may feel that they can sustain what are likely to be smaller and weaker Israeli follow-on attacks more easily than the casualty-conscious Israelis can tolerate Iran's blows.

War with Israel after an Israeli first strike has two other advantages for Iran. First, it brings about precisely the regional instability that so many countries feared would follow an Israeli strike and so led them to urge Israel not to attack in the first place, and therefore would likely amplify international opprobrium against Israel. Second, it could rally at least some portion of the Arab and Islamic worlds to Iran's defense (even if only diplomatically and rhetorically) because Iran will have been attacked by the hated Israelis. Even those Muslim countries that hate the Iranians
would find it hard to criticize Iran, let alone take action against it. As Ephraim Kam has acknowledged, “There is hardly any doubt that Iran would respond to an attack with the use of force, unlike Iraq's decision in 1981 and Syria's decision in 2007 to refrain from retaliating.”
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The methods Iran would try to use to retaliate are also straightforward. The Iranian air force lacks the range, refueling capability, and skill to penetrate Israeli air defenses and strike Israeli targets. Thus, if Iran wants to strike Israel directly, it will have to do so with ballistic missiles. The Iranians have several hundred ballistic missiles and some portion of them are believed to be modified Shahab-3s, Ghadr-1s, and Sajjil-2s, which could reach Israel—although some have raised doubts regarding how many of these missiles they have.
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All of these have small warheads (generally about 1,650 pounds) and poor accuracy, making them useful only for attacks on large, undefended targets—like cities.
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Along with ballistic missiles, there are also rockets. Iran has provided tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of rockets of various sizes and ranges to Hizballah, Hamas, PIJ, and other groups, all of whom could attack Israel.
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Some of these groups, like PIJ, are effectively proxies of Iran and so would undoubtedly participate in any retaliation against Israel. Hamas and Hizballah have close ties to Iran, but are independent and therefore could choose not to attack Israel even if Iran is hit.

This is basically the same list of likely suspects to conduct terror attacks against Israel in retaliation for a strike on Iran. Tehran has its own capabilities in the Revolutionary Guard and its intelligence services that it would undoubtedly employ. PIJ, PFLP-GC, and other groups would mount their own attacks as best they could. Israel does such an effective job policing its own territory that Iran and its allies would undoubtedly look to hit Israeli targets abroad as well. In the past, Iran and its friends have attacked Israeli targets in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and they could easily expand their activities to Africa and North America. Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has claimed that Iran and Hizballah have forty sleeper terrorist cells around the world ready to conduct attacks in retaliation for an Israeli strike.
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He might be right.
Then again, there might be four hundred such cells. Or four. Or four thousand. It is impossible to know. But there is no reason to doubt that Iran and its allies would hit Israelis (or even just Jews) wherever they can to retaliate for an Israeli strike.

The real question is not whether Iran and its allies would retaliate, but how bad the retaliation would be. Ten years ago, there was reason to believe that Iranian retaliation could create severe, even disastrous problems for Israel and the United States. Today the extent and impact of the retaliation is much less clear.
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In particular, both Hizballah and Hamas may have reasons to show restraint.

Despite its close ties to Iran, there are incentives for Hizballah to hold off in the face of an Israeli attack on Iran. Hizballah continues to claim victory in its 2006 war against Israel, but it has refrained from provoking Israel ever since, suggesting that the Israeli campaign, poorly implemented as it was, inflicted serious damage on Hizballah. Soon after the fighting stopped, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah himself admitted that he had not expected that the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers would trigger such a fierce Israeli response, and that if he had it to do all over again, he wouldn't. “We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. . . . You ask me, if I had known on July 11 . . . that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not,” he said.
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This admission implies that Hizballah is not looking for a repeat of the beating it took in 2006, especially since it is widely believed that the IDF has studied the mistakes it made and could hurt Hizballah far worse in a repeat performance. In particular, in the 2012 fighting in Gaza, Israel unveiled its new Iron Dome antirocket system, which should mitigate Hizballah's ability to hurt Israel, although there is an ongoing debate about the extent of the system's success.
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On top of that, Hizballah worries about its ability to hold on to its dominating position in Lebanon now that it has lost Syrian support. This concern might convince the Shi'i Arabs of Hizballah to avoid tying themselves even more closely to Shi'i Persian Iran at a time when the Sunni Arab world has lost a lot of its patience and sympathy for Tehran.