Israel at War: Inside the Nuclear Showdown With Iran (5 page)

In the summer of 2009, President Obama did precious little to support the reformers on the streets of Tehran after a rigged reelection of Ahmadinejad, saying he refused to “meddle” in other countries’ affairs. Yet the Obama administration seems perfectly willing to “meddle” in Israeli affairs. In fact, General Jones told a European diplomat that Obama “will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question.” He insisted that the Obama administration “will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.” Since then, Obama has applied intense pressure on Israel to stop building, improving, and expanding Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. The president also called for a comprehensive final peace treaty in which Israel would return to its 1967 borders, a requirement that would force Israel to divide its capital city of Jerusalem and give up the strategically vital Jordan Valley.

Then came the disaster in March 2010, when many Americans and Israelis believe Obama treated Netanyahu with terrible disrespect and a breach of protocol. At one point during a meeting in the White House, Netanyahu refused to sign a document agreeing to divide Jerusalem and return Israel to pre-1967 lines. Obama, in turn, walked out of the meeting, went upstairs to the residence, and refused to come back, leaving Netanyahu and his senior aides alone to figure out what to do next. Obama refused to have dinner with Netanyahu or have a photo opportunity with him or hold a joint press conference—all standard operating procedures for a friend and strategic ally like the leader of Israel.
⁵⁹

“This was a working meeting among friends,” White House advisor David Axelrod tried to spin. “There was no snub intended.”
⁶⁰

Most American friends of Israel saw things much differently. Certainly the Israelis did.

The Romney Option

Would a President Mitt Romney be more likely to order a strike against Iran if he were elected? During the campaign, the governor has clearly positioned himself as a strong supporter of the State of Israel. Netanyahu certainly feels comfortable with Romney—their relationship goes back to when they worked together at the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s. But even if Romney wins, Netanyahu knows the new president would be unlikely to launch a war against Iran in the early weeks or months of his administration. First, Romney would need to hire his national security team. Second, he and his team would need to review all the intelligence currently available on Iran. Third, they would need to develop a war plan and move military assets into position. All of this takes time, and even if Romney is inclined to go down this road, Netanyahu may not feel he has that much time to wait.

Would a President Romney strongly back an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, even if he did not feel ready or able to order an American strike in time? Based on the available evidence, it would appear that Netanyahu believes the answer is yes. Yet Netanyahu may not feel he can wait for the American elections on November 6.

One thing, therefore, is clear to Netanyahu: the most dangerous place on the planet right now is the corridor between Tel Aviv and Tehran, and time for action is running out. The lives of more than 100 million people in this corridor are in grave danger. Iran is closing in on nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them. Israel is fiercely committed to preventing this from ever happening. Unless something dramatic happens to avert catastrophe—and happens quickly—all the evidence suggests Israel and Iran are hurtling toward armed conflict that could break out at any moment.

What Would an Israel-Iran War Look Like?

To be sure, such a war could move fast and be over quickly. In 1967, experts fretted over the worst-case scenarios if the Arab forces launched a preemptive strike against Israel or if Israel initiated a first strike against her enemies. In the end, their dire predictions were wrong. The war was over in six days. On the seventh day, the region rested. There was pain and sorrow, but not nearly as much as had been feared.
⁶¹

But one cannot count on best-case scenarios. One must plan for worst-case scenarios. An Israel-Iran war could prove to be the most devastating war in the modern history of the Middle East. What if the entire region is set on fire? What if masses of innocent civilians are killed? What if a refugee crisis erupts? What if friendly governments are destabilized and toppled by radical Islamic jihadists? What if terrorist cells are activated inside the United States, across Europe, and around the world? What if American and other Western embassies are attacked and overrun, as has happened already in Egypt and Libya? What if our people are held hostage, tortured, or murdered? How high will the price of oil and gas skyrocket? How severely will the already-fragile, sputtering global economy—and America’s own struggling economy—be harmed?

If Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities first, how will Iran retaliate? Will the U.S. and our allies be drawn into the conflict? Will Iran try to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows? Will Washington respond? If so, how?

What if the war has cataclysmic unintended consequences? What if an electromagnetic pulse bomb is detonated in the skies over the Middle East? What if chemical or biological weapons are employed? What if nuclear weapons are used? How might the region—and the world—be changed forever?

These are the questions that Netanyahu has thought about and wrestled with for decades and in a very systematic way since coming to power in 2009. How he answers them will be determined in large part by who he is, the events that have shaped his life, and what he believes at his core.

“The Israeli threat to strike Iran militarily if the West fails to stop the nuclear program may, of course, be a tremendous bluff,” columnist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in 2009. “After all, such threats may just be aimed at motivating President Obama and others to grapple urgently with the problem. But Netanyahu and his advisers seem to believe sincerely that Israel would have difficulty surviving in a Middle East dominated by a nuclear Iran. And they are men predisposed to action. . . . As I waited in the Knesset cafeteria to see Netanyahu, I opened a book he edited of his late brother’s letters. . . . In one letter, Yoni wrote to his teenage brother, then living in America, who had apparently been in a fight after someone directed an anti-Semitic remark at him. ‘I see . . . that you had to release the surplus energy you stored up during the summer. . . . There’s nothing wrong with that. . . . In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a good fist fight. . . . Remember what I told you? He who delivers the first blow, wins.’”
⁶²

Netanyahu made two critical decisions upon coming to power in 2009.

First, it would be the policy of the State of Israel to be ready for all-out war with Iran. To that end, Netanyahu ordered the IDF to develop a detailed, credible plan of attack to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program should all other measures fail. He ordered the Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies to intensify their hunt for Iranian nuclear sites and to prepare precise target lists. He increased the Israeli defense budget. He bought more specialized aerial tankers capable of refueling Israeli fighter jets and bombers in midair. He bought more bunker-buster bombs from the U.S. He bought more missile defense systems and increased research and development funding for even more advanced missile defense systems. And all along, he relentlessly pushed his defense minister, Ehud Barak, to make sure the IDF was absolutely, 100 percent ready to execute its plan on a moment’s notice.

Second, it would simultaneously be the policy of the State of Israel to do everything in its power to avoid all-out war with Iran. To this end, Netanyahu used major speeches to explain the grave danger a nuclear Iran would pose not simply to Israel but to the U.S. and to Europe as well as to the world economy. He pressed American and European leaders to impose more punishing economic sanctions against Iran. He urged American leaders to develop war plans of their own. And right from the beginning of his time in office, he ordered the Mossad to use all means necessary to slow down or stop Iran’s nuclear program to avoid the need for all-out war.

Sources close to Netanyahu say the prime minister does not want to order a strike on Iran. For the last three and a half years, he has hoped that the United States would decisively take the lead in persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear program—or, if that did not work, take military action to neutralize the Iranian threat. Fundamentally, Netanyahu is convinced that the U.S. is best suited for both roles. Historically, the United States has carried far more diplomatic sway with other nations than Israel has. What’s more, should military force become necessary, the U.S. is much better equipped than Israel to deal with Iran. The United States has aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, larger arsenals of bunker-buster bombs, and many more midair-refueling planes. But unfortunately, in President Obama, the Israeli prime minister has seen hesitation instead of decisiveness. There has been tension, not unity, in the relationship between the two leaders. Thus, Netanyahu has felt compelled to work aggressively on both the war-preparation track and the making-war-unnecessary track.

The War in the Shadows

On January 12, 2010, Dr. Masoud Ali-Mohammadi stepped out of his home in a northern suburb of Tehran. The physicist was not simply a professor at the University of Tehran. He was one of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists and was believed to be helping Iran pursue the Bomb.

As Ali-Mohammadi got into his car, a remote-controlled bomb on an adjacent vehicle exploded, killing the physicist instantly.
⁶³

The assassination made news in Iran and around the world. This was in large part because no Iranian nuclear scientist had died under such shocking circumstances since January 15, 2007. At that time, Dr. Ardeshir Hassanpour, an international expert in uranium enrichment, died mysteriously while working at an Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan. Other Iranian scientists and defense officials had disappeared or defected to the West over the years. But the death of Dr. Ali-Mohammadi struck intelligence analysts and journalists as a potential Israeli escalation against the Iranian nuclear program.

Then, on January 19—precisely one week after Dr. Ali-Mohammadi’s death—another assassination made international headlines. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 50, was found murdered in a Dubai hotel room in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Mabhouh was a founder of Hamas’s military wing. He was close to the regime in Tehran. He was responsible for buying weapons from Iran and getting those weapons smuggled into Gaza.
⁶⁴

Was it possible al-Mabhouh was also involved somehow in Iran’s nuclear program? Was Israel becoming nervous that Iran was close to getting a warhead and smuggling it into Gaza? Was Netanyahu ordering the Mossad to take the gloves off?

On April 17, 2010, the
New York Times
published a highly disturbing story headlined “Gates Says U.S. Lacks a Policy to Thwart Iran.” The article reported, “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document. . . . One senior official . . . described the document as ‘a wake-up call.’”
⁶⁵
The article made public what the Israelis privately thought anyway. It seemed to confirm Netanyahu’s worst fears and motivated him to further intensify his preparations for all-out war.

In August of that year,
The Atlantic
magazine published a cover story headlined “The Point of No Return” that dominated conversations in Washington for weeks. The article suggested that the Israelis were finalizing strike plans against Iran based on the theory that neither Western action nor Israeli action thus far had been sufficient to derail the Iranian nuclear program.

“I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials,” wrote Jeffrey Goldberg. “In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance that Israel will attack the Iranian nuclear program in the near future? Not everyone would answer this question, but a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July. . . . Based on months of interviews, I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program.”
⁶⁶

With rumors of war intensifying, September of 2010 brought whispers of an even more dramatic escalation in the covert war against Iran’s nuclear program. A mysterious and devastating computer virus dubbed “Stuxnet”—arguably the most aggressive computer virus in history—was infiltrating computers throughout Iran and metastasizing rapidly. As I reported that fall, “the latest development is a mysterious and highly aggressive ‘malware’ virus of unknown origin that is suddenly plaguing computer systems at nuclear facilities and other industrial plants throughout the Islamic Republic. The effect appears to be so severe that Iran had to announce at least a two-month delay in the launch of online operations at its Bushehr [nuclear] reactor that the Russians helped build. Indeed, an estimated thirty thousand computers in Iran have been infected. Neither the CIA nor Israel’s Mossad has commented, much less claimed credit. Nor are they likely to do so. Perhaps they are not involved. But it may be that the relative success of this ongoing and intensifying covert war inside Iran accounts for why Israel has not taken direct military action thus far.”
⁶⁷

“We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months,” said Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran’s Information Technology Co., a part of the ministry of communication and information technology. “But the virus is not stable, and since we started the cleanup process three new versions of it have been spreading.”
⁶⁸

The
New York Times
then ran this intriguing story: “In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue.” Wrote reporters John Markoff and David Sanger, “Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them. That use of the word ‘Myrtus’—which can be read as an allusion to Esther—to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program. . . . Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.”
⁶⁹

While the Stuxnet virus continued to spread that fall and take down large numbers of Iranian nuclear computers as well as uranium processing equipment, the covert war against the Islamic Republic continued in the shadows. On November 29, another Iranian nuclear scientist was mysteriously killed. “A magnetic bomb placed by a motorcyclist killed nuclear physicist Majid Shahriari in his car,” reported ABC News. That same day, a fourth top Iranian nuclear scientist was nearly killed. ABC reported, “Fereydoon Abbasi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, was wounded when a motorcyclist detonated a magnetic bomb under [his] car by remote control. Abbasi was on a U.N. list of people sanctioned for suspected links to nuclear activities.”
⁷⁰

Had War Been Avoided?

“Will Israel launch a preemptive military strike against Iran to stop the current regime from building nuclear weapons, and if so, how soon?” I asked on my blog on December 16, 2010. “That’s a question I have been asked throughout this fall’s book tour for
The Twelfth Imam
. As we end 2010, my sense is that the Stuxnet computer virus, which has infected more than thirty thousand Iranian computers and brought Iranian enrichment of uranium almost to a standstill for the time being, the recent assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist, the near assassination of another top Iranian nuclear scientist, and the effect of new economic sanctions are all having a significant impact. Anything is possible, of course, but some experts I’m talking to believe that there is a little more breathing room, and an Israeli strike would be generally unlikely before the fall of 2011, at the earliest. That is speculation, to be sure. The threat is very real. But some progress has been made against Iran this fall, and for this we should thank the Lord and the hard work of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.”
⁷¹

I noted that I had just attended a conference on “Confronting the Iran Threat,” organized by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank. “Most fascinating for me was the opportunity to have a private lunch with one of the more interesting speakers at the event, a gentleman named Uri Lubrani, who at the age of 82 serves as Iran advisor to Israeli vice prime minister Moshe Yaalon,” I reported. “Lubrani previously served as an Iran advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and was Israel’s ambassador to Iran before the Revolution in 1979. He knew the Shah personally. He warned Israeli officials in Jerusalem that a revolution was coming. And he actually flew out of Tehran international airport on February 1, 1979, just hours before Ayatollah Khomeini arrived back in Iran to crowds of millions shouting, ‘The Holy One has come! The Holy One has come!’”

My personal conversation with Lubrani was off the record. But I reported at the time several of the on-the-record comments he made to the conference attendees:

• Assessing the Iranian president’s character:
  “Ahmadinejad is not . . . a clown. He is a clever, sophisticated son of a b—.”
  
• Assessing Ahmadinejad’s statements that he is in contact with the Twelfth Imam:
  “I believe Ahmadinejad really believes what he says. As mayor, he paved a road from the [Jamkaran] mosque to the capital so the Twelfth Imam could travel straight to Tehran.”
  
• Assessing the “Twelver” End Times theology held by Ayatollah Khamenei:
  “You have a totally irrational [religious] philosophy that is driving the Ayatollah’s regime in Tehran.”
  
• Assessing Russia’s growing ambitions in the Middle East and strengthening alliance with Iran:
  “Russia is aspiring to be important in the world again.”
  
• Assessing Turkey’s swing away from the West and toward alignment with Russia and Iran:
  “I detect in their rhetoric that they want to be a Middle East power. . . . They believe the Ottoman Empire should be resurrected.”
  
• Assessing the Iranian threat:
  “Iran is on the warpath and has been for some time.”
  
• Assessing the need for the West to launch preemptive military strikes against Iran in the near term:
  “I’m against military action [at the moment]. I think it would be counterproductive. . . . The Iranian people are the West’s greatest ally.” Lubrani urged U.S. and Western leaders to do more to support the “Green Movement,” the pro-democracy movement in Iran. He is hopeful there can be an overthrow of the Iranian regime by these pro-democracy forces before the need for military force arises.
  ⁷²
  

One of the panels at the conference was titled “Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option Be Employed against Iran?” The speakers were Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for
The Atlantic
magazine; Reuel Marc Gerecht, former CIA operative; Ken Pollack, former director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, now with the Brookings Institution; and Israeli Major General (reserve) Yaakov Amidror, former head of the IDF’s research and assessment division.

Jeffrey Goldberg noted that while he had written in his September 2010 article that there was a better than 50 percent chance of Israel hitting Iran by summer 2011, he now believed the apparent success of various covert actions—including the Stuxnet virus, which appeared to be the result of a U.S.–Israel partnership—had worked to “elongate the timeline.” He said he believed Israeli officials now felt they had a little breathing room and that all things being equal, the timeline for an Israeli strike against Iran would now be “the end of 2011.” I asked Goldberg to assess whether Netanyahu would order a preemptive military strike against Iran if diplomacy, sanctions, covert actions, and other measures weren’t enough and Israelis were in danger of facing another Holocaust. Goldberg replied, “Netanyahu doesn’t like to make decisions . . . but I think he would feel as if he failed Jewish history if he failed to stop Iran [from getting the Bomb] if nothing else works.”