Cartoon by Margolis & Cox

Predicates and Consequences of the Attack on Iran

By Dana Allin

International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS): On 12 May 2007, US president George W. Bush and his national-security principals met to consider an Israeli request for US weapons deliveries that would help the Jewish state in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In the White House there was disagreement: Dick Cheney, the vice president, supported Israel’s request; secretary of defense Robert Gates wanted the president to deny it. Cheney could point to the apparent successes of Israel’s attacks on nuclear reactors in Syria a few months earlier and in Iraq in 1981. Gates, preoccupied with the predicaments US troops faced in Afghanistan and Iraq, urged restraint based on the general proposition that when ‘you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging’. Gates won the argument: Bush not only turned down the equipment request, but also signalled sharply that Israel should hold fire.

Tension between the United States and Israel recurred with greater acrimony a few years later. Barack Obama had entered the White House convinced that it was time for a ‘new beginning’ in America’s approach to and relationship with the Muslim societies of the Middle East. This entailed, inter alia, an American demand that Israel freeze construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank, which the new administration considered, along with Palestinian terrorism, to be the major obstacle to a workable two-state settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But there was also a new government in Israel. Ehud Olmert, a centrist who had made a genuine and significant effort towards peace with the Palestinians, was succeeded in late March 2009 – two months after Obama took office – by Benjamin Netanyahu, who fiercely resisted not just the settlements freeze but the entire Obama world view, including a future Palestinian state roughly outside the lines of Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

The debate about how to handle Iran’s nuclear programme overlay the disagreement about how to deal with the Palestinians. Obama did believe that both problems called for assertive diplomacy and, in the case of Iran, implicit military threats. But Israelis – especially those on the right – tended to view Iran, which supplied money and weapons to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as the ultimate cause of Palestinian unrest. The Israelis weren’t imagining Iranian hostility, nor were they crazy to fear what an Iranian clerical regime that condemned the idea of a Jewish state might do about it if it acquired nuclear weapons.

Many Israelis disliked Obama and feared his diplomacy. From our perspective – we are both Americans – their antagonism seemed suspicious and unsavoury. But their underlying focus had to be taken seriously. Some 13 years ago, as the Israeli government was again agitating for military action against Iran and threatening to go it alone, one of us used this space to explore Israel’s and the United States’ divergent perceptions:

Israel’s political leadership paints a picture of self-contained air-strikes without a hugely damaging blowback. The picture is plausible. But one reason Washington doesn’t believe it is that Washington has a much broader stake in the rules of international order. This statement may sound odd to those who look at America as the archetype of a superpower bull in the world’s china shop. And it is true that the United States is generally inclined to a flexible reading of international law when it comes to judging its own use of force. Nonetheless, America sees itself – and has reason to see itself – as a main pillar of world order, with responsibilities that include, but certainly go far beyond, preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. America’s own excursion into preventive war is recent and regretted. The current administration can count many ways that US power was depleted through preventive action against an Iraqi threat that turned out to be more distant and hypothetical than claimed at the time.

In his subsequent campaign to stymie Obama’s diplomatic efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions through an arms-control agreement, Netanyahu went to another well of hostility to America’s first black president: the US Republican Party. Netanyahu’s 3 March 2015 speech warning a joint session of Congress of a ‘bad deal’ that would ‘all but guarantee’ a nuclear-armed Iran was an undisguised attack on the administration and a key moment in the partisan polarisation of US support for Israel. In the event, Netanyahu failed and Obama’s preference for pressure and diplomacy succeeded.

Amid the wreckage of international diplomacy, comity and order in 2025, it is truly astonishing to look back just ten years. In 2015, major state powers and international organisations – notably China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union – cohered as a genuine ‘international community’ regarding, at least, the imperatives of non-proliferation. Led by the United States under Obama, negotiators achieved the breakthrough agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. In essence, the deal lifted debilitating sanctions on Iran in exchange for its forbearance on uranium enrichment and submission to monitoring and inspections.

It was, in fact, an extremely good deal from any reasonable American or indeed Israeli perspective, involving the substantial removal of enriched uranium from Iran, limits on its stockpile, a cap on enrichment purity – translating to a breakout time for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon of at least one year versus a matter of weeks in 2025 – and the most intrusive international monitoring programme ever established. While critics pointed to sunset provisions they considered too lax and the fact that the JCPOA did not address Iran’s missile programme or its destabilising regional activities through the ‘axis of resistance’, the US intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency consistently assessed that the Iranians were complying with the agreement – in other words, that it was working for its primary intended purpose.