Israel Matzav

Israeli war game assumes Iran has nuclear weapons

A war game on Sunday that assumed that Iran has nuclear weapons concluded that an Iranian nuclear weapon would handcuff Israel's ability to act militarily.

"Iranian deterrence proved dizzyingly effective," Eitan Ben-Eliahu, a retired air force commander who played the Israeli defence minister, said in his summary of the 20-team meeting.

Though the wargame saw Iran declaring itself a nuclear power in 2011, the ensuing confrontations were by proxy, in Lebanon. In one, emboldened Hezbollah guerrillas fired missiles at the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv. That was followed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence findings that Iran had slipped radioactive materials to its Lebanese cohort, to assemble a crude device.

Neither move drew Israeli attacks, though Ben-Eliahu said his delegation had received discreet encouragement from Arab rivals of Iran to "go all the way" in retaliating.

Instead, Israel conferred with the United States, which publicly supported its ally's "right to self-defence" and mobilised military reinforcements for the region while quietly insisting the Israelis stand down to give crisis talks a chance. "As far as the United States was concerned, Israel was trigger-happy. It sought to use the Hezbollah (missile) attack as justification for what the United States was told would be an all-out war," said Dan Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv who played President Barack Obama.

Kurtzer voiced satisfaction with his team's response to the "dirty bomb", which entailed cajoling U.N. Security Council powers into mounting an armed intervention against Hezbollah.

"Countries like China and Russia have their own terrorists, and don't want to see them getting nuclear weapons," he said.

"In certain circumstances, agile U.S. diplomacy can actually work in this region, and it ends up not only leaving Israel in check but it also ends up (with Washington) leading a willing international coalition."

Of course, that's just the first few months with Iran as a nuclear power. What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:17 AM