Israel Matzav

Israel's plan on Iran?

Edward Luttwack argues that taking out Iran's nuclear facilities doesn't have to be nearly as complicated as its been made out to be (Hat Tip: Dan F - who also sent me the entire article to get around the fire wall).

Yet everyone seems to assume the scope of the attack itself is a fixed parameter—a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that some fear to take and others dread to leave undone. That, by all accounts, is exactly how the issue was framed when the debate started in the last years of the second George W. Bush administration. This is misleading. The magnitude and intensity of an attack is a matter of choice, and it needs to be on the table.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners offered President Bush only one plan, a full-scale air offensive with all the trimmings—an air war rather than an air strike. While the plan was never publicly disclosed, its magnitude was widely known, and I have learned some of the details. Instead of identifying the few critical nodes of a nuclear-weapon program, the target list included every nuclear-related installation in Iran. And to ensure thorough destruction, each target was accorded multiple aiming points, each one then requiring a weapon of commensurate power, with one or more to follow until bomb-damage assessment photos would show the target obliterated.

That plan elevated the attack to a major operation, with several hundred primary strike sorties and many more support sorties for electronic suppression, refueling, air-sea rescue readiness, and overhead air defense. Given all those aiming points and the longest possible target list, casualties on the ground could run to the thousands.

...

But this war planning denied to the president and American strategy the option of interrupting Iran's nuclear efforts by a stealthy overnight attack against the handful of buildings that contain the least replaceable components of Iran's uranium hexafluoride and centrifuge enrichment cycle—and which would rely on electronic countermeasures to protect aircraft instead of the massive bombardment of Iran's air defenses.

That option was flatly ruled out as science fiction, while the claim that Iran's rulers might be too embarrassed to react at all—they keep telling their people that Iran's enemies are terrified by its immense might—was dismissed as political fiction.

Yet this kind of attack was carried out in September 2007, when the Israeli air force invisibly and inaudibly attacked the nuclear reactor that Syria's Assad regime had imported from North Korea, wholly destroying it with no known casualties. To be sure, an equivalent attack on Iran's critical nuclear nodes would have to be several times larger. But it could still be inaudible and invisible, start and end in one night, and kill very few on the ground.

The resulting humiliation of the regime might be worthwhile in itself—the real fantasy is a blindly nationalist reaction from a thoroughly disenchanted population. In fact, given the probability that an attack could only delay Iran's nuclear efforts by several years, the only one worth considering at all is the small, overnight strike.

Could this be what Israel is planning?

Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:38 PM