The Choice America Now Faces in Iran

For the second time in less than half a year, Iran has hurled hundreds of missiles at Israel. Although Iran technically launched more weapons at Israel in April, only 120 of those were ballistic missiles—a smaller salvo than the more than 180 ballistic missiles used this time. The drones and cruise missiles used in April were more easily intercepted and shot down by Israeli, American, and European air defenses, working in cooperation with some of Israel’s Arab partners.

According to early reports, miraculously enough, no Israelis were killed in this latest barrage, although falling debris killed a Palestinian in Jenin, on the West Bank. But some of the missiles seem to have gotten through Israel’s three layers of anti-missile defenses, inflicting an unknown amount of damage. An attack yesterday by two terrorists in Tel Aviv was far more lethal, killing at least seven civilians; its relationship to the Iranian attack is unclear.

The war between Iran and Israel has gone on for a long time, although mostly in the shadows. Iran has armed Hezbollah as a proxy force to attack Israel, and so it has over the years, with roadside bombs, ambushes, and rockets; Iran has also equipped Yemen’s Houthis with long-range weapons to attack the Jewish state, and so they have, as well. Israel has bombed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters in Damascus, sabotaged the Iranian nuclear program, and conducted assassinations and raids (including the lifting of an entire Iranian nuclear archive) in Iran itself. A war on the high seas, in which ships on both sides have been sabotaged or attacked, has drawn less coverage but been no less intense.

But what we’re now witnessing is something different: a large and open exchange of fire, a different stage in a conflict that has been going on for a generation. Its roots lie in the very nature of the Iranian regime. Fundamental to its ideology is unyielding hostility to the United States (“the Great Satan”) and a desire to expel it from the Middle East, a commitment to the destruction of Israel (“the Little Satan”) as part of a path to regional dominance, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a shield against retaliation.

In pursuing these goals, Iran has long relied on indirect means, which even if detected do not elicit all-out conflict with the United States or Israel. Its Arab proxies have the blood of thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Jews abroad on their hands. Until this past month, Iran’s strategy—build a proxy-driven “ring of fire” around Israel and lever the United States out of the Middle East with relentless low-level violence—appeared to be working.

The United States abjured the use of large-scale force against Iran, even as Iraqi militias trained and equipped by Iran ambushed American soldiers. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations reacted by pummeling the country behind those attacks. As recently as 2020, following America’s killing of the head of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, a barrage of missiles hit an American base in Iraq, inflicting concussive traumatic brain damage on scores of American troops without an American reaction. Former President Donald Trump, who ordered the attack on Soleimani, recently dismissed these injuries as “headaches.”

The series of smashing blows Israel has landed against Hezbollah over the past month—against its leadership, its middle management, its arsenal, and its communications—changes all this. Iran’s most powerful surrogate has been beaten badly in ways from which it may not fully recover. The implications for Iran are profound, coming on top of Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse during the new Iranian president’s inauguration. Iran’s attacks in April, and even more so now, are desperate attempts to avoid what Iran’s leaders fear most—strategic humiliation.

To American minds, at least, avoiding humiliation as a strategic objective, or even inflicting it as a tool of strategy, may seem absurd. To the Iranian regime, though, humiliation is potentially lethal. An unpopular regime that is presiding over a feeble economy, backed by a military that cannot protect its own airspace, dependent on a tired revolutionary ideology, led by a repressive and corrupt elite, and directed by the octogenarian last link to the regime’s founder cannot afford humiliation.

One might think that, for Israel, simply parrying the Iranian blow would be enough, as it was in April. It is not. In the Middle East, as in most of the world, if you keep on taking punches without punching back you look weak, and as Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” This is why President Biden’s plea for a “proportional” response by Israel is absurd: The logical consequence would be a large-scale, expensive, and totally ineffective Israeli attack on Iran. Last April Israel merely hit a radar site in Iran—a flick on the nose to warn of worse to come. This time, it has to deliver.

There are deeper reasons for Israel to hit back hard. Defense is often a mug’s game; it costs more than offense. If Iran does not suffer (not merely “pay a price”) as a result of this attack, it has every incentive to keep on building more advanced missiles and to have another go, and then another. Sooner or later, some of its missiles will hit their targets.

But this is also an opportunity, for the United States as it is for Israel, to confront an enemy who is in fact weak. Iran has been penetrated by Israeli—and, one must presume, by American and European—intelligence services. The Iranian military is equipped with a mix of obsolete American hardware from the shah’s days, homemade missiles and drones largely intended for offensive use, and a small number of Russian supplied systems like S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Iran is suffering double-digit inflation, a double-digit poverty rate, and a brain drain brought about by its government’s policies. It is heavily dependent on oil revenues to keep going—revenues earned on the 4 million barrels a day exported despite feeble sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.

All of this argues not only for Israeli strikes—which will surely come—but for vigorous American action as well. Israel may well choose to attack economic targets, and in particular the oil industry that keeps Iran’s economy afloat. Attacks on the nuclear program—buried and dispersed at different sites—would probably be more difficult. In either case, Israel will need American help.

Israel has a large and capable air force, including nearly 40 F-35s. But it lacks a large fleet of aerial refueling planes, necessary for long-range strikes, which the United States has in plenty. At the very least, the United States can quietly help supply that deficit. The question is: Should it do more?

The answer is yes. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden have all insisted that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons. The first concluded an agreement that would slow but not stop that program; the second scrapped the agreement and tightened the screws of sanctions but did nothing to materially affect the program; the third attempted to resurrect the agreement but failed—and again, did nothing substantive. This is possibly the last opportunity to do something of consequence.

The Biden administration’s plea for restraint or proportionality on Israel’s part is obtuse, and its apparent reluctance to act decisively and forcefully here is not merely a display of culpable timidity, but the loss of an opportunity that may not come again.

The United States, unlike Israel, has long-range heavy bombers, unusual advanced weapons, and the ability to operate from bases and aircraft carriers in the region. It has long focused intelligence collection on Iran’s nuclear program—the regime’s ultimate ace in the hole—and thought about how to destroy it. Iran has killed and wounded plenty of Americans, and has never ceased to declare its enmity to the United States. It has now provided the U.S., a country whose avowed policy is to put an end to the menace of Iranian nuclear weapons, the opening to make good on what have been, until now, empty threats and emptier promises.

By taking counsel of its fears, the Biden administration set up Afghanistan for a return to the Dark Ages, set up Ukraine for a hideous war of attrition which it may lose, and will now set up the Middle East and the world beyond for a nuclear-armed Iran. This is not prudence, but strategic folly. There is little time to correct it and avoid worse to come.