Israel’s military strikes on Iran take the Middle East to a point of maximum danger of wider conflict, but also perhaps a moment of maximum opportunity.
Israel has delivered a decisive blow to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That development alone makes the Middle East safer over the medium term and allows a window of opportunity to re-engage in meaningful dialogue with Iran in time, perhaps with a rearranged internal political alignment.
On the other hand, Iran has begun its campaign of military retaliation and will make it as violent as possible.
A series of urgent questions present themselves.
How many days will the Israeli campaign go on? How much damage to Iran’s nuclear programs have the Israelis actually inflicted? How many years will the Iranian nuclear weapons program be delayed by? How severe will the Iranian military retaliation be?
Will Iran attack Americans in the Middle East? Can Iran activate remnants of its proxy network to attack Israel? What are the consequences for the critical Israel/US relationship? Did the Trump administration really try to talk Benjamin Netanyahu out of this, or is Washington just establishing quasi-plausible deniability?
There’s too much conspiracy theorising about the timing of the Israeli operation. It’s as close as one minute to midnight as you can get. The Israelis really had no choice.
Which makes the equivocating comments by Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong all the more irrelevant.
If a hostile nation sitting near Australia was on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons and vowed solemnly and repeatedly to wipe Australia off the map, and had spent decades repeatedly attacking us through terrorism, would a Canberra government really wait forever to take action?
The International Atomic Energy Agency had just issued a report saying Iran was in breach of its treaty obligations. Iran had enriched a quantity of uranium to a point for which there was no plausible civilian use.
Iranian leaders and officials have repeatedly asserted their determination to wipe Israel off the map and effectively commit a second anti-Jewish Holocaust.
Successive US administrations, from Barack Obama through to Donald Trump, have tried to negotiate an end to Iran’s heavy enrichment of uranium, which provides nuclear weapons grade material.
The Iranians run the negotiations as long as possible but never give up their enrichment program.
At the same time, Iran is the chief state sponsor of international terrorism. It constructed a murderous network of death-dealing terrorist and state actors to threaten and attack Israel, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, other Palestinian terrorist groups, Hezbollah in Lebanon and its chief state ally in the region, Syria under Bashar al-Assad.
Netanyahu has destroyed or degraded each of those forces. Last year, Iran twice attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones. In retaliation, Israel destroyed much of Iran’s air defence capability.
Israel has been grappling with the Iranian threat for a long time. Back in 2012 I interviewed Netanyahu in Jerusalem and he made international headlines by declaring that Israel would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
The Israelis always hoped that if they had to carry out such an operation, the Americans would join them. It’s extremely challenging and dangerous for Israeli pilots to strike so far from home. But they were always clear they would conduct the operation alone if they had to.
Another question is just what the Mossad operation within Iran has been up to. Israeli intelligence has completely penetrated Iranian society and indeed the Iranian state and military apparatus as well.
Given that Israel has wrestled with the necessity of an action like this for many years, Jerusalem clearly decided that this was a one-off operation and it would make it as consequential as possible.
Thus Israel attacked Iranian missile facilities and military leadership as well as nuclear establishments.
You can be sure that Israel’s most formidable military scientists have worked for years on the question of how to damage facilities buried deep underground, or in the side of a mountain. Israeli officials didn’t believe they could completely destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but they did believe they could cripple it and set it back by years.
In the past, Israel has taken similar, though more limited, actions. In 1981 the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad and prevented Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons.
In 2007, Israel destroyed an undeclared nuclear reactor in Syria.
On both occasions there was a lot of international criticism of Israel. But the world would have been a vastly more dangerous place if the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, or the Assads in Syria, had acquired nukes.
The Middle East is full of tragedy. Iranian nuclear weapons would magnify the potential for tragedy a thousandfold.
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Secrets and spies: How Israel lulled Iran as Mossad plotted its attack
In the middle of the night near an Iranian missile site, two Mossad agents start the finishing touches of a plot that has been years in the making. Hours later Iran’s military and nuclear power will be devastated.