Israel’s Message to Tehran - Dr. Mackubin Owens
Thursday, April 25, 2024
It should be no secret that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with both Israel and the United States for decades. For the most part, Iran has conducted this war using proxies, e.g. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. But that changed recently when Iran launched a direct attack on Israel from Iranian territory, hurling a multi-layered barrage of 330 missiles and armed drones against the Jewish State. The assault was defeated by the combined effort of Israeli air defenses and assistance from the US, UK, France, and Arab allies.
In response, President Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from retaliation. But the prime minister didn’t take the advice, launching successful retaliatory strikes against a sensitive military site in central Iran. In so doing, Israel sent a message to Tehran, one that enhanced deterrence against Iran, something that has been frittered away in recent years by the United States.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
It has long been recognized that there are two components of deterrence: capability and will. In striking targets in Iranian territory, Israel made it clear to Tehran that Israel possesses both in spades. The Israeli strikes hit near the Iranian city of Isfahan, from which Iran had launched some of its armed drones in the Iranian attack on Israel. The Israeli attack defeated Iran’s S-300 Russian-built air defense system, considered one of the most effective in the world. This represented a feat reminiscent of Operation Mole Cricket, during which at the outset of the 1982 Lebanon War, the Israel Air Force (IAF) destroyed Syria’s Russian-built SAM system, enabling it to down nearly 80 Syrian aircraft in two hours.
It is clear that Israel did not employ anything close to its full capability, but part one of the message to the mullahs was the same one that Israel sent Damascus in 1982: we can penetrate your air defenses at will.
But there’s more. Isfahan is also the location of Iran’s largest nuclear complex, where Tehran processes uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride, the essential precursor for enriched uranium, which is necessary to build a nuclear weapon. Analysts believe that Tehran has enough highly enriched uranium to provide weapons-grade material for 12 bombs. So the second part of Israel’s message to Tehran was: your nuclear program is at risk.
Israel has given the United States the leverage to remove the cancer of the Islamic Republic of Iran from the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Biden administration, following in the footsteps of President Barack Obama, has pursued a quixotic policy of appeasing Iran. In pursuit of a foolish nuclear deal with the mullahs, Obama missed an opportunity to support a democratic movement in Iran that might well have ousted the radical Islamic regime, instead granting Tehran access to billions of dollars in frozen oil assets and approving Iranian oil sales. Trump reversed Obama’s wrong-headed policies, but Biden has returned to the Obama approach. Accordingly, Iran is able to produce 1.7 million barrels per day now, up from a low of 200,000 barrels per day during the Trump administration.
Economic pressure on Iran is critical but, as the Israeli strike against Isfahan illustrates, the use of force should never be ruled out. What more might Israel do? Perhaps a strike near Natanz, the Islamic Republic’s second main enrichment facility, which is currently being fortified. But currently, it is defended by the same compromised Russian-built missile system that defends Isfahan.
The combination of the Israeli defeat of Iran’s recent attack and Israel’s counterattack against Isfahan should make it clear to Tehran that not only is your key infrastructure — pipelines, oil refineries, and military assets —but also Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders and Natanz, vulnerable to attack.
We often hear people claim that force doesn’t solve anything. The best retort I ever heard to this canard was at an academic conference on the Christian just war tradition vs. pacifism. Replying to a Catholic priest’s claim that force solves nothing, a friend of mine, an Army officer, said, “Well, Father, can you recite the Albigensian Creed?” At a minimum, Israel’s recent actions against Iran have reestablished the foundations of deterrence.
Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.
Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”
Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.
LEARN MORE HERE