Iran Is Winning the War
Weakness in Washington: Advantage IranCol. Richard Kemp: What happens if Israel does not go into Rafah? Look at Afghanistan
Do Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signal fearsome intent when they fire missiles at Iranian proxies while telling Tehran the United States has no desire to escalate? When Secretary of State Tony Blinken says to Iran, “we would like to see them tell the Houthis to stop,” do you think Iran feels the heat?
The questions answer themselves.
Amazingly, some senior Biden administration officials give the impression that the supreme leader’s supposed fatwa banning nukes just might be real—despite the history of Ali Khamenei driving the country’s once-clandestine nuclear-weapons project. Nothing about the Islamic Republic’s “peaceful” nuclear research since 2002, when the weapons program was first publicly revealed, makes sense unless one assumes the supreme leader’s original objective remains.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the regime currently has enough 60 percent enriched uranium for three nuclear weapons, which could rapidly be spun up to 90 percent, the ideal bomb-grade. The stockpile of 20 percent uranium would allow for several more. As it stands now, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, which closely monitors the Iranian nuclear program, Tehran could produce bomb-grade uranium for one weapon in seven days; one month would give enough for six bombs; five months would allow for 12 weapons.
Washington went through a similar experience with North Korea. There, U.S. officials wanted to believe that there was a chance that Pyongyang could be bought off short of a nuclear test, and if it couldn’t, then nuclearization was better than risking war on the peninsula.
Barring some monumental miscalculation by Tehran, Biden surely will be no more bold against the Islamic Republic than George W. Bush was against North Korea. The president’s recent decision to release $10 billion held in escrow for Iraq’s electricity payments to Iran, combined with the not-so-secret indirect talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Oman, strongly suggest that the White House is trying hard to appease Tehran. Washington wants the clerical regime to halt its proxy attacks on U.S. forces and its atomic advance short of a fissile test—at least before the November election.
So What Can Be Done?
Americans and Israelis have for decades shied away from militarily punishing the mullahs for their malevolence. This hesitancy—an unwillingness to escalate—has fed an Islamist appetite for violence. But diplomacy and its euphemisms, sanctions, and whack-a-mole retaliatory strikes have run their course. And what Jerusalem is doing right now—beating back Iran’s proxies—will become a lot dicier once Tehran goes nuclear. Jerusalem might be obliged to accept as permanent a low-level, bloody duel with Iranian proxies. An insoluble Palestinian problem will gnaw at Israel from the West Bank, Gaza, and possibly from within Israel itself. Khamenei’s vision for destroying the “Zionist colonial settler-state”—an approach that will surely survive his death—is to erode Israeli happiness and foreign investment, not a catastrophic nuclear confrontation. Iranian nuclear weapons, the ultimate check on Israel and the United States, are a means to that end.
We are way past time pretending that any other avenue than military action against Iran has a chance of checking an Islamist nuclear-threshold state that is close to dominating the Middle East. The Biden administration’s preferred path—encouraging regime change in Israel, pining for a two-state solution, and importuning the Saudi crown prince to recognize Israel (while granting more sanctions relief to Iran and quietly sending emissaries to Oman)—is guaranteed to make a bad situation worse. As everyone in the Middle East knows, and as the Israelis momentarily forgot before October 7, hard power is the only coin of the realm.
There is no doubting Israel’s spectacular military success so far in Gaza. I have been on the ground inside the Strip several times since the war began, and have seen first hand the remarkable combat actions of the IDF.The Rafah conundrum: Crafting an effective strategy to crush Hamas
They have all but taken apart Hamas as a coherent fighting organisation, while doing everything in their power to minimise civilian casualties and working round the clock to get humanitarian aid to the Gazan population, which I have also witnessed.
Despite all this, the IDF has not yet accomplished its mission in Gaza: to destroy Hamas’s ability to threaten Israel and govern the Gaza Strip and to rescue the hostages. To achieve that, the IDF must launch a major offensive against the four Hamas battalions in Rafah. Focused now on its own survival, Hamas is determined to prevent that from happening and increasingly the international community seems intent on helping them.
That was underlined this week when the UN Security Council demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, which Britain supported and the US failed to veto. That historically shameful resolution was the culmination of a decades-long propaganda campaign under which Israel is an illegitimate entity. As the narrative goes, whatever is done to Israel, including the October 7 massacre, it had it coming; and whatever Israel does in its own defence, including finishing off Hamas in Rafah, it is wrong and uniquely evil.
Many supposed military experts say Israel should not mount an offensive in Rafah. I have not heard any of them put forward a single viable alternative. The White House is apparently recommending a strategy based on pinpoint, clinical strikes into the city, targeting Hamas leaders. Their template seems to be US special forces operations in Afghanistan, and we all know how that ultimately worked out. The Taliban survived, gained strength and eventually re-conquered the country. Under Taliban rule, Isis in Afghanistan has launched multiple global terrorist attacks including last week’s massacre in Moscow, according to US intelligence. A salutary lesson for those who think Israel does not need to finish off Hamas in Gaza.
In any case, in a heavily defended area like Rafah, no military operations can be “clinical”. In February, Operation Golden Hand showed us the necessity for overwhelming violence to enable special forces to extricate a single Israeli hostage from Rafah. The rescue mission had to be backed up by air strikes which reportedly killed dozens of people to enable the withdrawal of the hostage and the rescuers. Left intact, the Hamas battalions in Rafah will fight furiously against any “pinpoint” raids, which will not achieve the level of surprise of Operation Golden Hand if they become part of a series of such operations.
On Monday, the Israeli and U.S. national security advisors, along with other senior officials, had a video call in which they discussed the IDF’s current plans to evacuate civilians from Rafah, the city on the southern tip of Gaza where Hamas’s military strength is now concentrated. Israeli television reported that the American participants rejected the plan, and that their reaction was “harsh.” But, absent a Hamas surrender, one way or another the IDF will have to find have to find a way to deal with the terrorists in the city.
Amos Yadlin and Udi Evental explain that such an operation is necessary to eliminate the four Hamas battalions in Rafah, to kill or capture the group’s other leaders, and if possible to free the remaining hostages. There is yet another reason, which, Yadlin and Evental claim, is “far more important,” namely
the need to cut off the smuggling routes from the Sinai, aboveground and primarily underground, along the Egypt-Gaza border (the “Philadelphi” route). This smuggling activity has enabled Hamas to amass an enormous quantity of weaponry, which the citizens of Israel and IDF forces have encountered in the war. Without thoroughly addressing this issue, the smuggling tunnels will enable Hamas to reap profits, receive assistance from its supporters in the Muslim world, and ultimately restore its military capacity and resume its military buildup.
It should also be emphasized that complete Israeli control in Rafah does not guarantee the success of blocking the smuggling tunnels and effectively monitoring the Rafah crossing (and the adjacent Saladin Gate). These objectives depend, in part, on effective action by Egyptian forces on the other side of the border, who rake in profits from the smuggling and conduct a policy of calibrating pressures vis-à-vis Gaza.
They go on to explain how Jerusalem might deal with this diplomatic and military conundrum:
[T]he threat of an extensive operation in Rafah serves as leverage vis-à-vis Hamas in the context of a hostage deal. The IDF should take advantage of the Ramadan period to start to evacuate civilians and amass forces along the outskirts of Rafah.