MIDDLE EAST

Intro: The recklessness of the Israeli government and the incoherence of US foreign policy deepens the crisis in the Middle East

American presidents who believed they could easily restrain Benjamin Netanyahu have quickly learned their lesson. Bill Clinton’s expletive fuelled language after his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister warned the world that even America’s might as a superpower was no restraint against Netanyahu’s aims.

It increasingly looks as if Donald Trump, too, has succumbed to Israeli wishes. The US State Department quickly declared that the devastating Israeli attacks on Iran – which killed key military commanders and nuclear scientists, as well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. President Trump had urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off, pending imminent US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. Israeli officials, however, have briefed that they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump the only one to oppose it.

Iran, raging with anger from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, is unlikely to believe that the US did not acquiesce to the offensive. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short-term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. Mr Trump has made that harder still by threatening “even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel had convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.

Israel has become dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its recent pummelling of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s air defences have created an opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and while Gulf States don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old adversary weakened.

But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, has only just narrowly survived a parliamentary vote in the Knesset. The Israeli government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others have allowed those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.

The obvious question now is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out key personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to a full nuclear-armed status by Iran – and ultimately others – and risks spurring more desperate measures in the meantime. The implicit and more likely danger is that Israel will hope to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.

At his inaugural speech before becoming president, Mr Trump claimed: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” Yet, reportedly, he now seems unconcerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few around the world will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility of US foreign policy fuels instability and risks drawing others towards fateful miscalculations.

ISRAEL has been warning the United Nations for more than a decade that Iran’s hardline Islamic regime was on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead.

The doom-laden rhetoric of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has become almost part of the global background noise. Like the attention-seeking shepherd-boy in Aesop’s fairytale, he has cried, “Wolf!” so many times that the reaction of most world leaders has been to ignore his false alarms.

The ancient fable, though, ends with a dark twist, when a real wolf attacks the sheep. And within the last few days the UN’s nuclear watchdog has finally sat up and taken notice, approving a resolution that accuses Iran of breaking its pledges not to develop nuclear weapons.

The country’s Islamic fundamentalist government has always claimed that its nuclear programme is simply about “clean energy”. But that is an obvious lie. Iran could always have simply purchased nuclear reactors from Russia and generated ample electricity – but without the plutonium fuel vital to the production of nuclear weapons being under Tehran’s control.

Not only would that have been a far cheaper option, but it could also have led to the lifting of Western sanctions. This would, of course, have been a big win for most of the country, but not its supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei.

He has proved more than willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of his subjects, the people who suffer most from the deprivation resulting from sanctions, by choosing instead to pour billions into nuclear laboratories buried a mile or more underground.

And if the mullahs do succeed in developing nuclear weapons, they will unleash devastation on a neighbour they have long wanted to bomb back to the Stone Age.

Nothing less than a complete abandonment of uranium enrichment in Iran is acceptable to Washington and that is what the US will continue to seek to achieve of the Iranian regime.

The Americans have started calling the Ayatollah’s bluff by suggesting that they could facilitate the enrichment of uranium to the level required for electricity production, but not to a weapons-grade level, outside Iran under strict US control through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA, however, believes Iran could already have enough enriched uranium for as many as ten warheads, an estimate based on the copious traces of radioactive heavy metal detected at unofficial bomb-making facilities, deep underground in remote regions. The Ayatollah has made a pretence of condemning nuclear weapons research for more than 20 years. In 2003 he issued a fatwa (religious edict), declaring that Islam forbids the development, production, stockpiling, or use of such bombs. But the fatwa means nothing – because Shia Muslim law also permits believers to lie in self-defence, especially when they feel they are facing persecution.

And the real truth is revealed in a joint statement by Iran’s foreign ministry and its own Atomic Energy Organisation, announcing it will replace its current centrifuges, crucial for enriching uranium, with state-of-the-art equipment at Fordow, one of its main nuclear sites.

The IAEA’s resolution marks the first time in more than 20 years that it has accused Iran of breaching its promises. This time, they too believe the wolf is preparing to attack. The obvious target is Israel, which Tehran has repeatedly threatened to destroy. In 2005, the then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared “the occupying Zionist regime must be wiped off the map” – an explicit call repeated by many others over the years in Iran’s theocratic regime.

Ten warheads of a similar destructive power to the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 would be far more than the number required to obliterate Israel. Just three might be enough to wipe it off the map – one on Tel Aviv, one on Haifa, and one on West Jerusalem.

Those three cities contain about 10 per cent of the nation’s total population. But Israel is a tiny country, and radiation fall-out from three bombs could make the entire country uninhabitable.

Israel’s famous Iron Dome missile shield, as well as its David’s Sling, Arrow and Thaad air defence systems, are not impenetrable. Last month, Houthi rebels in Yemen hit Ben Gurion airport between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with what they described as a “hypersonic” missile – manufactured and supplied by Iran.

Until just recently, many observers thought Iran’s uranium facilities were less of a real threat than they seemed, because warheads and missiles are useless without a third component: the detonator.

Now, it appears scientists at the Parchin facility south of Tehran have successfully manufactured a trigger powerful enough to set off a nuclear explosion.

All the pieces are in place. For those praying for a negotiated solution to the crisis, and not a military one, is that Iran’s launching pads are out in the open. That will at least give Western politicians some hope.

Unlike China and Russia, which can covertly prepare their nuclear missiles for launch inside concrete bunkers, the Iranians have to position and fuel their weapons on the surface – a process that can take 40 minutes. In theory, that gives the West an opportunity to launch a retaliatory strike first, using conventional or nuclear weapons. The Israelis’ strikeback missiles are kept on permanent readiness, capable of launch within three minutes.

To wait until Iran is less than an hour away from hitting Israel is high-risk policy. Until now, the West has always baulked at the alternative – to approve a knock-out strike against Fordow and Iran’s other subterranean facility, Natanz, both in inaccessible mountainous regions.

Some protagonists in Israel believe a unilateral atomic strike is justified: using a nuke to stop the nukes. But this approach is likely to fail for two reasons. Firstly, most of the energy in a nuclear blast is confined to the surface. Whole cities can be vapourised but bunkers deep underground might well survive undamaged. Secondly, a worldwide escalation in hostilities sparked by such an attack would probably be unstoppable. Russia could feel emboldened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, for example.

More likely, and more effective, would be a series of bunker-busting bombs – blasting an ever-deeper crater until the enrichment facilities are destroyed, even if they are protected by concrete a mile thick.

Tactically, could this work? There are two problems. One is logistical: how does Israel get the bombs to the target? Iran’s air defences have scarcely been tested and might easily be capable of picking missiles or warplanes out of the sky. To launch a mega-attack and fail to damage the nuclear facilities would risk conflagration and all-out war.

The other difficulty is a moral one. Crucial segments of the Iranian programme are based in or near Tehran. The entire ten million population of the capital city is being used as a human shield. Could Britain and the US stomach civilian casualties, especially if it provoked a wave of terrorist reprisals?

Without US help, Israel would not be able to obtain the bunker-busters nor the heavy bomber aircraft required to strike Iran’s nuclear boltholes. These bombers could fly from British bases in Cyprus or the Chagos Islands. This raises the danger of terrorist blowback to “very high”, but backing off means giving in to terrorism and nuclear blackmail.

Israel may well have a brilliant undercover attack planned. Ukraine’s great success smuggling drones under Operation Spider’s Web for mass attacks, deep inside Russia, might be a model. Pinpoint bombing of the entrances and ventilation shafts at Fordow or Natanz, for example, could put a uranium facility out of action for months, trapping the scientists inside to suffocate or starve.

The nature of a nuclear war is horrible and grim. Every possible outcome is terrifying as the threat of full-scale war increases.