Unthinkable (34 page)

It is not a foregone conclusion that Iran would respond to an Israeli attack by hitting American targets. The Iranians like to say that the United States and Israel are indistinguishable. Such rhetoric serves their geopolitical purposes.
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In the real world, Tehran has had little difficulty distinguishing between the two of us. Whenever they have been attacked by the United States (or believed that they were attacked by the United States), they have retaliated against American targets. Israel has never been caught in the cross fire. Likewise, whenever the Iranians have believed that they were being attacked by Israel, they retaliated against Israel and the United States never got hit. Iran believes it is being cyberattacked by the United States and Israel, and believes that the Israelis are killing Iranian nuclear scientists. How have they reacted? With cyberattacks against the United States and Israel, and assassination and terrorist attacks against Israel.

There is one exception to that rule, the failed “Arbabsiar plot” to assassinate Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The assassination never took place, and technically the target was not an American, but the U.S. government claims to have irrefutable evidence that the assassination had been authorized, and the intended bomb almost certainly would have killed Americans. Unless the Iranians believe that the United States was complicit in a similar act of terrorism against them, this incident would be one instance where Iran retaliated against an American target in response to Israeli attacks. Then again, it might have been retaliation for our purported cyberattacks. Numerous crisis
simulations, including those conducted by my own Saban Center and reportedly by U.S. Central Command's annual “Internal Look” war game in 2012, have suggested that in certain circumstances, Iran either might choose to retaliate against American targets or might accidentally do so because it was unsure of the provenance of an attack.
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My own guess is that in most scenarios, the Iranians would be careful not to attack the United States after an Israeli strike.
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These same war games also reveal that if an Israeli strike failed to cripple the Iranian nuclear program, it could be a godsend for Tehran in many ways. A failed Israeli strike would inflict minimal pain on Iran and create golden opportunities for it to withdraw from the NPT, evict inspectors, undermine sanctions, and become the champion of the Muslim world by fighting Israel at a low level and from a distance. This possible success could be rendered meaningless if the Iranians make the mistake of hitting the United States because the Americans swing a much bigger bat than the Israelis. In these same simulations, the Iranians do well until they do something foolish to the Americans, at which point they start suffering massive damage from U.S. retaliation. It is also why, in the real world, the Iranians have been quite careful about not crossing U.S. red lines for the use of force. Karim Sadjadpour likes to say that the Iranians would have to carefully calibrate their response to an Israeli attack “because if they respond too little they lose face, and if they respond too much they lose their heads.”

However, we cannot be certain of that and need to recognize the potential. The Israelis cannot be sure of it, either, and another aspect of the third paradox is that an Israeli strike could strain the U.S.-Israeli relationship if an Israeli strike on Iran resulted in Iranian attacks on American targets. It could even drag the United States into a war it did not want to fight. While some Israelis might rejoice that their own attack forced the United States to do what they had always hoped it would, in the longer run, these events could be disastrous for the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States.

WOULD IRAN TRY TO CLOSE THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ?
Iran is unlikely to try to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to an Israeli attack, despite its threats to do so.

The Iranians have threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in the event of an Israeli or American attack loudly and often. But they make threats all the time and don't follow through on them, frequently after warning that they always make good on their threats. The Iranians have threatened to close the Strait if the United States, United Nations, and European Union passed sanctions against them. They have threatened the Arab states for cooperating with sanctions. They have threatened the Turks for cooperating with sanctions. And they have threatened to halt their own oil sales if the West imposed more sanctions. However, they never made good on any of these threats.
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In January 2012, when the United States shifted an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf on a routine redeployment, Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Ataollah Salehi warned the United States not to move another carrier back in, saying “Iran advises, recommends and warns them [the U.S.] not to move its carrier back to the previous area in the Gulf because Iran is not used to repeating its warnings and warns just once.”
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The United States has deployed multiple carriers to the Gulf since then and the Iranians seem to have forgotten that they ever made such a threat. In several war games I have run or participated in, various Iran teams felt compelled to at least threaten the Strait in response to an Israeli attack because they felt that they had to do something to show that their rhetoric was not meaningless—and in at least one case, this decision led to unintended escalation to a U.S.-Iran clash. However, most of the Iranian teams, including the most aggressive Iran team I ever observed, have tried hard to avoid taking any action in the Gulf for fear of how the United States would respond.

It is important to understand that Iran's rhetoric about closing the Strait in the event of an Israeli attack serves two useful purposes for Tehran. First, it is meant as a deterrent. The Iranians are not stupid, and they realize that the one thing that the United States and the rest of the world
cares about in the Persian Gulf is its oil. Thus they know that a possible disruption of the oil supply terrifies the United States and the entire developed world. So they frequently warn that any attack on them would cause them to cut off Gulf oil flows. Second, threatening to close the Strait is Iran's best method of conducting economic warfare against the United States and the West. Every time that Tehran does so, the price of oil jumps as traders get nervous about oil supplies, and that jump means a higher cost to oil importers (most of the Western nations) and higher revenues for oil exporters (like Iran). Tehran sees the sanctions as a form of economic warfare being waged against them by the United States and its allies. It isn't surprising that they would try to fight fire with fire as best they can.

Still, there are also lots of reasons why the Iranians are unlikely to actually try to close the Strait of Hormuz. They receive 90 percent of their imports by ship through the Persian Gulf, and that loss would throw their already reeling economy into chaos.
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But the most important reason the Iranians won't try is that they know they can't. If they try, it is a virtual certainty that they will have their navy, air force, air defense forces, coastal defense forces, and possibly whatever is left of their nuclear program obliterated by the U.S. armed forces.

Iranian conventional capabilities in the Gulf are dangerous enough that if they acted with surprise to close the Strait—by secretly beginning to mine it and suddenly launching “swarming” attacks with their small boats, antiship cruise missiles, and aircraft—they probably could do considerable damage to a handful of unprepared American warships, and frighten away other vessels for some period of time.

However, the moment that they did so, the widespread expectation is that the rest of the world would turn to the United States and in effect say, “Do whatever you need to do to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” The United States has privately warned Tehran that if it tries to make good on its threats to close the Strait, the United States will counterattack regardless.
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And Iran simply does not have the military capacity to resist the full force of the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Iran's air defenses are woefully
inadequate to deal with American airpower, which would systematically tear up Iran's air and air defense forces, then its coastal defenses, then sink its navy before moving in to clear away any remaining mines. It would be a relatively big operation, and might take weeks or even a few months to build up the forces and execute the campaign plan, but there is virtually nothing that Iran's conventional forces could do to prevent it.
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And the Iranians seem well aware of this.

The Iranians would also have to fear that once the United States began a major military operation, we might decide to clear up a few other problems while we were in the neighborhood. We might decide to smash whatever elements of the Iranian nuclear program the Israelis missed. We might even decide to get rid of the root cause of the problem, the Iranian regime. Consequently, while we would have to be on our guard to defend the Strait in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, the chances that Iran would try anything are low.

From an American perspective, an Israeli strike is a terrible idea. It would have a low probability of achieving even a short-term benefit and a high probability of creating significant long-term problems. One of the few foreign policy items that the Bush 43 and Obama administrations could agree upon was the need to convince the Israelis not to strike Iran. If anyone is going to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, it should be the United States, not Israel—although my own sentiment is that an American strike would also be problematic except in certain specific circumstances.

Many Americans who favor an Israeli strike say that they do so because at least the Israelis have the guts to do it, whereas the U.S. government doesn't. They would prefer that the United States employed force against Iran, but since the United States won't, an Israeli strike is their next choice. That makes no sense to me. Just because someone is willing to do something difficult does not mean that they are the best person to do that job.

As for those Israelis who favor a strike, their rationale is the fear that Iran will prove irrational once it acquires a nuclear weapon and use it unprovoked against the Jewish state. Setting aside the great weight of historical evidence that this fear is groundless, even then an Israeli conventional attack on Iran would make little sense. Such a strike would be unlikely to halt the Iranian nuclear program. It would be more likely to make the situation worse both by providing Tehran with an excuse to withdraw from the NPT and evict the inspectors and an incentive to further disperse its nuclear program (potentially making it impossible to strike again in the future) and to go ahead and weaponize. Thus, for those Israelis who truly fear that Iran would use nuclear weapons against them unprovoked, the only sensible option would be to strike Iran with nuclear weapons
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to ensure that the Iranian program was obliterated with little chance it could be rebuilt. After all, if the alternative is that at some point in the next few years Iran will have a nuclear weapon and Israel will not have the ability to stop it, and if you believe that Iran will unquestionably use a nuclear weapon on Israel, then no Israeli could worry about respecting moral and political niceties like the taboo against first use of nuclear weapons. The logic compels Israel to use nuclear weapons as its first move, not its last.

What an awful mess. Israel has played Hamlet for nearly two decades because the Israelis see the same awful choices. They recognize all the problems and paradoxes that they would have to overcome for a conventional military operation to work and they fear that it will not do the job. They know that if it doesn't, then they will be left with the choice of launching a nuclear attack on Iran or living with an Iranian nuclear capability, and they also know that a failed conventional strike might make a nuclear strike impossible.

These conundrums explain why Israel has not struck Iran's nuclear program as it did Iraq's and Syria's even though the Israelis have been debating, planning, training and otherwise preparing for it since the 1990s. It also reflects why the likelihood that Israel will strike Iran is lower than so many think.

Israel might still strike. It might even succeed. People sometimes behave in ways that defy all logic—especially in the Middle East. And against all probabilities, sometimes those things work. But such an outcome is unlikely. It is far more likely that an Israeli attack on Iran would not work out well for Israel, for the United States, or for anyone else.

E
xcept under certain specific circumstances, I do not favor the use of force against Iran by the United States as the solution to our problems with Tehran's nuclear ambitions. This chapter will explain why.