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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
/
Can Netanyahu avoid triggering a regional war?
Analysis by Nic Robertson, CNN
Updated:
5:07 AM EDT, Wed April 17, 2024
Source: CNN
Israel, aided by its allies, dodged a bullet Sunday.
To be more precise, 60 tons of explosives aboard more than 350 Iranian
projectiles, some bigger than a family car, failed to dodge Israel’s
defenses.
Yet Israel, in defiance of US President Joe Biden’s warnings to
“take the win” and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s threat of a
“severe, extensive and painful” response to any retaliation, is
contemplating just that.
Deterrence, shorthand for “meanest S.O.B. in the room,” Israel
believes, is the cornerstone of its survival. Iran is stealing that
brick.
In a paradigm shift after decades of shadow proxy war, Tehran is
usurping Israel’s strategy. “We have decided to create a new
equation,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
Commander Hossein Salami said. “We will retaliate against them
[Israel].”
When faced with existential threats in the past, Israel has executed
the most audacious raids the region has ever witnessed. Cloaked in
extreme secrecy in 1981, they bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak
before it went on line. Similarly, in 2007, they bombed Syrian dictator
Bashar al Assad’s nuclear reactor before it could be built.
Both attacks partnered intelligence with conventional military assets.
It was 11 years before Israel admitted to the Syria strike.
The point being, Israel won’t telegraph its plans as Iran did at the
weekend, in carrying out in response to a suspected Israeli strike
on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, , earlier this month.
Aside from the core members of Israel’s war cabinet – Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and
Netanyahu’s former biggest political rival Benny Gantz – more than
a dozen other people have sat at the table deep inside the Kirya,
Israel’s maximum security defense headquarters in Tel Aviv, thrashing
out their next move.
Notably, Mossad Chief David Barnea and Army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi
are among several security and intelligence officials who have been
brought in.
Outside the room, Netanyahu faces huge pressure from his hard right
governing coalition. Bezalel Smotrich is demanding he “restore
deterrence,” and popular Minister of National Security Itamar
Ben-Gvir is calling on the prime minister to “go crazy.”
Outside Israel, where allies are condemning Iran’s attack but urging
restraint and some are also bitter about Netanyahu’s deadly treatment
of Gaza’s Palestinians since Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack,
calls for fresh sanctions on Tehran are growing.
War cabinet members Gantz and Gallant are both seized of the diplomatic
opportunity – Gantz saying, “we will build a regional coalition to
exact a price from Iran”, while Gallant, according to a government
press release, “highlighted the opportunity to establish an
international coalition and strategic alliance to counter the threat
posed by Iran.” The defense minister has hinted heavily that Iran’s
nuclear facilities are in his sights, saying it is “a state that
threatens to place nuclear warheads on its missiles.”
Netanyahu, meanwhile, said in a statement on the X account of his
office, “The international community must continue to stand united in
resisting this Iranian aggression, which threatens world peace.”
Netanyahu’s next move will likely try to lock in sanctions, and
strike before negative Gaza headlines dump the international good will
filling his sails.
The clock is ticking. He needs two things, time to prepare a
significant surprise strike, and time to coalesce international
diplomacy. As both march to different beats, his legendary political
acumen faces one of its stiffest tests yet.
Recent evidence suggests his finger no longer feels the regional pulse
as it once did.
Earlier this year, following Israel’s precise, targeted assassination
of Saleh Al-Arouri, Hamas’s Lebanese chief, in a second-floor Beirut
apartment, the former fighter pilot and former head of the IDF’s
Military Intelligence Directorate Amos Yadlin told me Israel was acting
inside “red lines” to avoid escalation.
“The threshold is quite flexible,” Yadlin explained. “Deterrence
is a decision at the head of a leader that can give a command to pull
the trigger to launch a missile to start a war.”
Yadlin knows a thing or two about deterrence and Israel’s past
strikes against the nation’s existential threats. He was the fighter
pilot who dropped the bomb that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in
1981, and in 2007 was the intelligence chief who planned the
sophisticated audacious strike destroying Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear
plant.
Last weekend, Iran’s leaders decided Netanyahu’s calculation to
kill Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s commander running their proxies
threatening Israel from Syria and Lebanon, in their Damascus consulate
on April 1 had crossed a red line. Netanyahu’s calculation was wrong.
“I think the Iranians will be very, very careful, even if after a
provocation is they will suffer a loss, but starting a war with the US
or even with Israel. They are not there yet. The damage that can be
inflicted on Iran is huge, is huge.”
So the most important question right now must be, can Netanyahu read
the room right – with Iran threatening to attack, allies warning him
not to – and avoid triggering a regional war.
And the answer to that is buried in Yadlin’s remarkable insights.
Iran, he implied, won’t attack Israel as long as it fears America’s
reaction. Netanyahu has so strained relations with the Biden
administration over Gaza, Israel’s enemies smell blood.
Since the US abstained at a UN Security Council vote last month to call
for ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas has taken an intransigent turn to
hostage negotiations.
Netanyahu is famed as a political survivor. But now he faces the
biggest gamble of his career. He is betting the blood of his nation
over Iran’s read of his rift with America.
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