Netanyahu’s Quest To Attack Iran

Ever since his rise to power in the late 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has worked toward a war with Iran, presumably to demolish Tehran’s nuclear facilities but also to ensure Israel’s power projection in the region.

Now the emboldened Netanyahu wants to finish the job, decimate Iran’s nascent nuclear capabilities, undermine Tehran’s future and overthrow its rulers.

The Israel-Iran scenarios

Netanyahu has discussed with U.S. President Donald Trump several possible levels of American backing. According to Israeli observers, there are four viable scenarios for an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, as seen in the light of U.S.-Israeli relations. Let’s name them.

In the cooperative scenario, the United States and Israel cooperate in an attack against Iran’s nuclear sites, which would be followed by Trump’s ultimatum that Iran must entirely dismantle its civilian nuclear enrichment program.

In the clash scenario, the Trump administration would build on diplomacy to seal a nuclear deal. Yet, Israel would attack on its own and thereby undermine Trump’s efforts, causing a bilateral drift between the two countries.

In the investment scenario, Saudi Arabia would offer the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to avoid a destabilization in the region that could undermine Riyadh’s 2030 modernization program.

In the solo scenario, Israel attacks Israel’s nuclear facilities without direct U.S. cooperation, but with the tacit consent of the White House. That would happen after the Trump administration’s threats and coercive diplomacy against Iran.

Ultimately, U.S. priorities will matter the most. But those can be elusive and contradictory. Some in the Congress have called for more U.S. military action, including direct attacks against Iran. Others have echoed the Biden administration’s calls for restraint and de-escalation.

Here’s the problem: any escalation with Iran, whether by the U.S., Israel or both, would likely regionalize the Gaza devastation, an outcome that is misaligned with Trump’s economic and geopolitical goals in the Middle East.

Targeting Iran        

Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter froze billions of dollars in Iranian assets, Washington has sought to restore the status quo ante of the shah that had made Iran safe for American capitalism.

In the 1980s, U.S. intelligence and logistics played a vital role in arming Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, perhaps the most lethal conventional war between developing countries yet, with total casualty estimates up to 2 million. In 1988, the U.S. launched an attack against Iran, presumably in retaliation for Iran’s laying mines in areas in the Gulf. In the mid-’90s, the Clinton administration declared a total embargo on dealings with Iran.

In 2002, President George W. Bush included Iran in his “Axis of Evil” speech. Subsequently, U.S. and Israel cooperated in training secessionist forces in Iran’s Kurdistan province. In 2007, the U.S. reportedly vetoed an Israeli plan to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, during the next three years, the U.S. and Israel deployed the Stuxnet virus, the world’s first offensive cyber weapon, to destroy almost a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

In 2015, years of challenging talks resulted in a nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) between Iran, the U.S. and a set of world powers. Despite Iran’s adherence to it, the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the deal in 2018. As tensions escalated, the Trump administration assassinated Iran’s most important general, Qasem Soleimani, in a deadly drone strike in January 2020.

The longstanding quest for war with Iran   

While the covert war in the shadows has prevailed since the Islamic Revolution, U.S. regime-change efforts moved to a new stage during the Bush administration. Since 2003, the U.S. Army has conducted an analysis called TIRANNT (Theater Iran Near-Term) for a full-scale war with Iran. Reportedly, this plan would be activated in the eventuality of a second 9/11, on the presumption that Iran would be behind such a pivotal operation.

That may be one reason why Israeli U.N. ambassador Gilad Erdan and Netanyahu explicitly compared Hamas’ Oct. 7 offensive to the 9/11 terror attacks, which sparked the U.S. global war on terror. Concurrently, many in Washington sought a pretext for a link with Iran, to legitimize a major regional conflict. In contrast, the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence assessed that Iran had no foreknowledge of or involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks.

For its part, Netanyahu’s government calculated that an Iran conflict could divert mounting negative public attention from atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank.

There were precedents. In 2011, Netanyahu had ordered the Mossad and IDF to prepare for an attack on Iran within 15 days. Yet, Mossad’s chief Tamir Pardo and chief of staff Benny Gantz, the opposition’s key member in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, questioned the prime minister’s legal authority to give such an order without the cabinet’s approval. Netanyahu backed off.

A month after the Hamas offensive, Netanyahu’s Mossad chief David Barnea said Iran had stepped up terror worldwide. If Israelis or Jews are harmed, he added, Israel’s response would go to Tehran’s “highest echelon.”

Using Oct. 7 against Iran     

In April 2024, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus. That attack killed 16 people, including the targets, half a dozen high-level officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The IRGC launched a broad retaliatory attack against Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with successive waves of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. Giving full public notice that its response was on the way, Tehran designed it carefully as a show of force that would not trigger a wave of escalation. It caused minimal damage in Israel. However, as Israel would later acknowledge, despite containment efforts by the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Jordan, some of Iran’s ballistic missiles penetrated Israel’s defenses, hitting the Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel.

Iran’s attack targeted Israeli territory as a warning shot. It demonstrated Tehran’s ability to counteract Israel’s huge air superiority despite lacking a modern air force of its own. It also highlighted Israel’s dependency on major Western powers to protect itself and the inadequacy of that protection.

So, how would Israel respond to a conventional “existential crisis” with Iran?

In late 2023, the hypothesis was tested in a high-level U.S. war game.  Intriguingly, the U.S. participants initially presumed that self-restraint would prevail in this high-level war game. Yet, the simulation’s cold logic compelled them into a sequence of steps that quickly went nuclear.

‘Mother of all bombs’ into nuclear facilities?

Until recently, Israel lacked “bunker buster” bombs and the capacity to mount a sustained air attack that would destroy Iran’s entire nuclear program. But perhaps not anymore.

Recently, German newspaper Bild revealed that the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, announced Washington’s intention to deliver one of the most powerful non-nuclear weapons systems to Israel, known as the “mother of all bombs.” The Pentagon denies the story.

Weighing almost 11 tons (10,000 kg), the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb can destroy deep underground bunkers. The explosive yield is comparable to that of small tactical nuclear weapons.

In January, U.S. military intelligence already assessed that, absent an agreement, Israel would probably strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, most likely the Fordow enrichment plant, an Iranian underground uranium enrichment facility 20 miles (32 km) from the city of Qom, in the first half of 2025.

First tested in 2003, the “mother of all bombs,” a 30,000-pound (14,000-kilogram) monster, was used for the first time in combat in 2017 in Afghanistan by the Trump administration, despite the dire collateral damage.

Whether such use of the MOAB would spark a regional war or trigger waves of new terror and insurgencies in the Middle East is a matter of debate. But it would mean a potentially catastrophic escalation in the region and reshape geopolitical landscape in the early 21^st century.

Dan Steinbock is the author of “The Fall of Israel.” He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (U.S.), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see www.differencegroup.net/