NEWS
ANALYSIS
Israel’s Strike on Iran: A Limited Attack but a
Potentially Big Signal
Israel hit a strategic city with carefully measured
force, but made the point that it could strike at a center of Iran’s nuclear
program.
David E.
SangerEric Schmitt
By David E.
Sanger and Eric Schmitt
Reporting
from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/us/politics/israel-iran-analysis.html
April 19,
2024
For more
than a decade, Israel has rehearsed, time and again, bombing and missile
campaigns that would take out Iran’s nuclear production capability, much of it
based around the city of Isfahan and the Natanz nuclear enrichment complex 75
miles to the north.
That is not
what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet chose to do in the predawn
hours of Friday, and in interviews, analysts and nuclear experts said the
decision was telling.
So was the
silence that followed. Israel said almost nothing about the limited strike,
which appeared to do little damage in Iran. U.S. officials noted that the
Iranian decision to downplay the explosions in Isfahan — and the suggestions by
Iranian officials that Israel may not have been responsible — was a clear
effort by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to avoid another round of
escalation.
Inside the
White House, officials asked the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence
agencies to stay quiet about the operation, hoping to ease Iran’s efforts to
calm the tensions in the region.
But in
interviews, officials quickly added they worried that relations between Israel
and Iran were now in a very different place than they had been just a week ago.
The taboo against direct strikes on each other’s territory was now gone. If
there is another round — a conflict over Iran’s nuclear advances, or another
strike by Israel on Iranian military officers — both sides might feel more free
to launch directly at the other.
Mr.
Netanyahu was under competing pressures: President Biden was urging him to
“take the win” after a largely ineffective aerial barrage launched by Iran last
week, while hard-liners in Israel were urging him to strike back hard to
re-establish deterrence after the first direct effort to strike Israel from
Iranian territory in the 45 years since the Iranian revolution.
American
officials say they recognized quickly that they could not talk Mr. Netanyahu
out of some kind of visible response.
So the
White House and the Pentagon urged what amounted to what one senior American
official called a “signal, not a strike,” with minimal chance of casualties.
But while it was a minimalist option, its long-term effects on the
Revolutionary Guards and the teams of scientists who work on Iran’s nuclear
program have the potential to be substantial. They could speed a movement to
put more nuclear facilities deep underground, or to expand them to make it even
harder for nuclear inspectors to understand where Iran is doing its most
sensitive work.
And,
American officials worry, that may accelerate the confrontation over the
nuclear program itself, which has grown more and more opaque to inspectors over
the past two years.
The signal
sent by the decision to hit a conventional military target in Isfahan was
clear: Israel demonstrated that it could pierce Isfahan’s layers of air
defenses, many of them arrayed around key sites like the Isfahan uranium
conversion facility.
That
25-year-old facility, relatively vulnerable to a strike, is Iran’s primary
production line for converting its large stores of natural uranium into a gas —
called UF6 — that can be fed into centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel, either
for power production or nuclear weapons.
Israeli
warplanes also fired missiles on Iran during the attack, suggesting that more
advanced firepower was involved than initial reports had indicated.
It was not
immediately clear what types of missiles were used, where they were fired from,
whether any were intercepted by Iran’s defenses or where they landed. But just
as the drones launched from under Iran’s nose sent a message about Israel’s
capabilities, so did guided missiles from Israeli warplanes.
A senior
American official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive
intelligence assessments, said on Friday that Israel had notified the United
States through multiple channels shortly before the attack. But unlike the
alert Israel gave the administration moments before its warplanes struck the
Iranian embassy complex in Damascus on April 1, the official said this latest
attack was not unexpected given all the warnings Israel had issued during the
week.
“While
there has been no official claim of responsibility for the overnight attack
against the military base in Isfahan, the message is clear: Iran’s attempt to
unilaterally move the goal posts of war in the region will not be met with
silence and inaction,” said Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East
policy official who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “A
state-on-state attack involving drones and missiles will be met with a
response.”
“Yet last
night’s strike was precise and limited,” Ms. Stroul added. “The message is that
Iranian air defenses are entirely penetrable, and their forces cannot protect
their military bases from external attack. But the damage was limited. If
Iranian leaders decide that further escalation is not worth the risk of a much
more lethal and expensive attack within their own territory, this escalation
cycle can close.”
The
longer-term effects are harder to predict. Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and former
dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, noted
recently that Iran would likely now be determined to move its weapons “closer
to Israel,” and may face new pressure at home to openly seek a nuclear
deterrent.
Iran has
barred some, but not all, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog. It has enriched uranium to 60 percent
purity, putting it just days or weeks from bomb-grade quality. And at the
height of the conflict with Israel last weekend, some senior commanders talked
publicly about Iran reconsidering its official position, which is that it would
never seek a weapon.
Julian E.
Barnes contributed reporting.
David E.
Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a
Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on
challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
Eric
Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S.
military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported
on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt
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