Britain, Europe, Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

The stakes are high for any target Israel chooses

MIDDLE EAST

THE idiom that “revenge is best served cold” doesn’t apply in the Middle East, because retribution is delivered swift and white-hot.

For in this febrile part of the world, failure to respond to military aggression can be fatal. Enemies smell weaknesses and will readily strike again.

And so, following Iran’s unprecedented missile strike against Israel earlier this week in this rapidly unfolding conflict, it is no surprise that Israel is already planning revenge.

The fact that a seemingly large proportion of the 200 or so Iranian rockets fired were neutered by Israel’s famed “Iron Dome” is irrelevant. Israel will strike back. The question now is just what form that military response will take.  

There are three likely options for retaliation. First, and perhaps most dangerously, Israel may well seize this as an opportunity to strike at the heart of Iran’s nuclear bomb project. Although Iran does not yet have the Bomb, its nuclear programme is alarmingly well advanced. Israel has long believed Iran’s nuclear ambitions poses an existential threat to its security and existence.

Writing on social media, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called this “the greatest opportunity in 50 years” to “destroy Iran’s nuclear programme”.

The most likely target for such an attack is the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre in the centre of Iran, 300km from the capital Tehran. Earlier this year, Israel bombed a nearby military site, a symbolic warning to its Islamist foe that it has the Isfahan centre in its sights.

It houses research reactors, a uranium conversion plant, and a fuel production base. It’s essential to Iran’s nuclear programme. A knock-out blow against this, or a similar facility, would certainly appease the hardliners in Benyamin Netanyahu’s government whose support the leader relies.

However, this strategy would mark a grave escalation in the conflict and poses the ugly risk of significant collateral damage and unintended consequences.

Such a strike could blast radioactive material into the air, unleashing a Chernobyl-style cloud of atomic pollution across the region. In the worst case, a strike on a reactor could even trigger a nuclear “chain reaction” – leading to widespread destruction reminiscent of the 1945 atomic strike on Hiroshima.

Israel must also consider that Iran’s mullahs may retaliate by spiking its future warheads with radioactive waste, creating “dirty bombs” that could have ramifications far wider than a regular missile – because even shot down by the Iron Dome the radioactivity would still disperse.

Another of Netanyahu’s options is that he could try to disrupt Iran’s military arsenals with smaller, localised strikes using its fleet of American F35 and F16 fighter jets. However, considering Iran boasts thousands of missiles and drones across the country this would not nullify the threat of a further strike by the mullahs similar to that seen this week.

Realistically, the most effective method of reprisal would be to attack command-and-control centres, the only places from which Iran can fire its long-range weaponry. Although these are buried deep underground and are incredibly well fortified, they will now be vulnerable to Isreal’s so-called “bunker-buster” bombs such as those used to assassinate the Hezbollah leader last week in Beirut.

There is, however, one further option, though fraught with danger – not just for the cauldron of the Middle East but for the world. If Israel really does intend to shake the foundations of the Iranian regime, rather than just give it a bloodied nose, it could choose to attack Kharg Island, Iran’s only oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf and the foundation of the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ riches.

If Israel does this, the price of oil will sky-rocket far beyond anything we saw during the early days of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Shia Iran will then likely retaliate – as it has vowed – by attacking oil infrastructure in Sunni Saudi Arabia, its enemy, with the goal of further disrupting the global oil supply. This would lead to a severe world shortage with inevitable energy rationing in Europe and the UK.

So far, Israel’s political allies – notably the US and the UK – have stood strong with Netanyahu. But if Israel upsets global energy supplies, international support could rapidly dissipate.

There’s a cruel irony to all this. Because if Israel does strike Iran’s oil industry, Europe could even face the ignominy of going cap in hand to purchase Russian oil – albeit through proxies and intermediaries.

Netanyahu and his war cabinet must choose their next move very carefully indeed.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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Government, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, United Nations, United States

Israel widens the war. Iran could soon be the arch enemy

MIDDLE EAST

NOT since the Saxon nobility were wiped out in the Battle of Hastings, including King Harold and his brothers, almost 1,000 years ago, has one side annihilated the leadership of its arch enemy so suddenly and thoroughly.

First the Israelis killed, blinded, and maimed thousands of middle-ranking Hezbollah fighters, by triggering explosions in their pages and walkie-talkies.

Then, in the last few days, in a series of surgical strikes – precise as they were powerful – Israel’s air force dropped up to 16 bunker-busting bombs onto the underground lair where Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was huddled with his top brass.

They must have believed they were safe in their reinforced concrete hideaway, but for so many essential figures to be gathered in one place displayed reckless hubris which was ruthlessly punished.

Around 20 senior militia commanders were killed, including the security head of the organisation, Ibrahim Hussein Jazini, and Nasrallah’s closest confidante, Samir Tawfiq Dib. Nabil Qaouk, a key figure in Hezbollah’s central council, was killed in a separate air attack.

By any sane rationale, the war between Israel and Hezbollah should be over. But fanatics are neither sane nor rational.

This is a fighting force whose lower ranks are obsessed with martyrdom. They have been comprehensively defeated, but that does not mean they will surrender.

Until now, the Islamist militia was rigidly disciplined, with Nasrallah wielding supreme control. But with the decapitation of their leadership and the destruction of their communications network, the minions of Hezbollah will have nothing to guide them but their own maniacal – and perhaps suicidal – initiatives.

As much as half their stockpiles of rockets, shells, and artillery has been destroyed, but there is still a mass of weapons at the disposal of local commanders eager to burnish their own combat reputations and leadership ambitions.

Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu will probably feel he has no choice but to order a ground invasion of southern Lebanon to stamp out the smouldering remains of Hezbollah. But that is a high-risk strategy for three reasons.

Firstly, Israeli casualties will be higher. In the featureless plains of Gaza, their enemy has nowhere to hide. But in the hilly terrain of Lebanon, it can dart in and out of cover and wreak havoc with its armour-penetrating missiles.

Secondly, a ground invasion will create a huge refugee crisis. In the past week alone, some 80,000 civilians have fled Lebanon for makeshift camps in Syria. The Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati has warned up to a million people could be displaced.

This exodus could be the perfect cover for Hezbollah’s scattered remnants to spread insurgency across Europe. Unable to attack Israel, some might prefer to increase international pressure by exporting misery and violence to Israel’s supporters – with Britain chief among them.

Thirdly, perhaps ominously, the sheer effectiveness of Israel’s megaton assassinations is likely to accelerate the Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

Israel has already shown it has no compunction about killing enemies on Iranian soil, with the elimination in July of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Now, the knowledge that no underground bunker is safe will galvanise Iran’s leaders. While under huge internal pressure to retaliate against Israel directly, they fear the consequences – be they their own assassinations, or airstrikes against their nuclear facilities.

The mullahs will not want to provoke such an attack, especially as they are only weeks away from producing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

They are likely to conclude it makes more sense to challenge Israel using its proxy militias, such as the Houthis in Yemen, whose rocket attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea are designed to strangle Israel economically.

For Iran to create a viable nuclear weapon, it will also need a detonator – not an easy piece of technology to build. But this project, too, could be near completion, possibly with North Korean help.

If Iran does successfully test an atom bomb, international efforts to avert nuclear war will become increasingly hysterical. The UN Security Council could attempt to persuade Iran to freeze its nuclear programme in return for a ceasefire, but this would have little chance of success without the cooperation of the US, who might take the view there is no way to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle once a test has been conducted.

It appears that Israel has won a spectacular tactical victory over Hezbollah. But the main strategic enemy could soon be a nuclear-armed Iran. Armageddon beckons for one side – or both.

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