Last week, reports surfaced that Israel has been conducting large-scale and long-range attack simulations over the Mediterranean. Inasmuch as the exercises included aerial refueling, they are interpreted as preparation for a strike on Iran, specifically its nuclear facilities. Though the US’s National Intelligence Estimate of last fall cast doubt on the goals and status of Iran’s nuclear research, the report is not believed in Israel or in many key parts of the Bush administration. Indeed, many seasoned intelligence analysts also have grave doubts about the NIE’s reliability.

The obviousness of the exercises and the apparent leak about them to the media suggest that an Israeli strike is not in the near future, only that Israel is preparing for such attacks and perhaps losing patience. The exercises were aimed, obviously enough, at intimidating Iran, but also at signaling Washington that Israel is not pleased with US policy toward Iran, which is inconsistent and varies from threats to diplomacy.

An Israeli attack would present formidable logistical and diplomatic problems. Israeli jets must fly over other countries and cannot strike their targets and return without refueling. But where? Iraq is one possibility. Though the Shi’a-dominated government is on good terms with Iran and already burning with sovereignty issues over the US presence, neither it nor the US is in a position to oppose overflights. Kurdistan is more or less independent, but it would not wish to face retaliation from Iran, which has already intermittently shelled Kurdistan. Turkey has fairly good economic and intelligence ties with Israel and so would be one likely ally, if only through acquiescence. Reports surface that Saudi Arabia is so alarmed by Iranian nuclear potential that it would allow Israeli planes to use its air space.

NightWatch asserts that Israel has been negotiating with India to allow its planes to land and refuel there. But Iran has also been negotiating with India as of late, and the issue was likely to have come up. A less palatable option would be for Israeli pilots, on completing their strikes, to eject over the Arabian Sea and be picked up by Israeli naval or commercial vessels.

The consequences of such attacks are numerous and unfathomable. Israel can only disrupt and not end Iranian nuclear research. Two of the principal locations are thought almost invulnerable to conventional air attack. The Natanz plant is under 120 feet of bedrock and the one near Isfahan is burrowed into a mountain. These targets can probably be destroyed by the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (a 30,000-pound bomb recently developed in the US for just such targets), but MOPs can only be carried into combat by B-52s or B-2s, neither of which is in the Israeli arsenal. This of course raises the unsettling though slight prospect of a nuclear strike on those targets.

Iran will strike back at Israel and at anyone deemed to have aided in the strike. Hizbullah will be instructed to attack across the Lebanese border and perhaps elsewhere in the world. (Hizbullah is thought to have bombed a Jewish center in Argentina in the mid-nineties.) Regardless of US foreknowledge and approval, Iran will strike back at the US. Tehran has considerable influence with the Malicki government, the Badr Brigade, and the Mahdi Army, and Shi’a hostility toward the US has been escalating in recent weeks. Iranian Quds Force detachments could easily infiltrate across the Iraqi border and wreak havoc.

Iran’s retaliation against the US will likely trigger US retaliation that might finish the job begun by the Israeli air force. Perhaps this is in the Israeli strategic calculus: to put into play dynamics pressing the US to finish the work on Iranian nuclear plants, including the hard targets of Natanz and Isfahan. All this of course will end any dialog between the US and Tehran and poison relations between the two countries for the foreseeable future, regardless of who is elected in the fall.

~ ©2008 Brian M. Downing
Brian M. Downing is a regular contributor to The Agonist and the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.