Bomb Iran - Part 1 of 2

Israel— and the United States follow through on a long-threatened military operation

One goal I have been working on recently is ensuring that my posts remain as up-to-date as possible, rather than abstract lectures about the political situation in countries like Georgia who rarely receive media attention here in the United States. And that is why, with the dramatic recent events in the Middle East, I feel extremely compelled to share my thoughts with all of you. But first, I will give you all some context.

During President Donald Trump’s first term in 2018, the 45^th (now 47^th) president bucked the advice of much of his cabinet and the Washington establishment when he opted to destroy the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. Like everything Donald Trump, his decision to terminate the Iran nuclear deal elicited a range of responses. Trump’s critics and Democrats claimed he made the decision to destroy his predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy out of spite, while Republicans believed the termination of the JCPOA was necessary to seriously clamp down on Iran’s record of regional destabilization and perpetual threats to destroy Israel. They also praised the collapse of the JCPOA for terminating the alleged cash payments to the Iranian regime delivered by the Obama Administration.

During the Obama Administration, the United States along with the four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany engaged in intensive negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all in the hopes of avoiding the sort of military confrontation over the Iranian nuclear program we are witnessing right now. After years of back-and-forth, the seven countries finally sealed the JCPOA in July of 2015, an agreement that required Iran to dismantle the bulk, but not the entirety, of its uranium enrichment capacity and open itself to rigorous supervision by the International Atomic Energy Association while receiving in return large-scale sanctions relief. This sanctions relief, condemned by American conservatives as “cash payments” to Iran, was definitively the most controversial aspect of the agreement. And it wasn’t just the Republican Party in the US who opposed the JCPOA — Israel has viewed any compromises with Iran as emboldening the regime Jerusalem views as an existential threat.

Another flaw of the JCPOA, besides accomplishing little about Iran’s threatening missile programs and support for terror and violence across the Middle East, was that the agreement contained a sunset clause that would run out in 2030, merely kicking the problem down the road and eventuating a situation where the world would eventually be right back at square one. When Trump ended the JCPOA, he forced a de facto withdrawal of the other five signatories with threats of secondary sanctions. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of secondary sanctions, imagine that you are a banker in London or Hong Kong forced to choose between doing business with the United States or doing business with a regime known for sponsoring international terrorism and with an economy of only marginal significance to the world. I suspect you can deduce which choice is the more rational one.

The risk of Iran and its fundamentalist Islamic leadership obtaining nuclear weapons has been one of the most profound concerns of American foreign policy ever since the Islamic Revolutionary regime’s uranium enrichment program was exposed in the 1990s. While Tehran abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003, likely after witnessing the fate of their neighbor and archenemy in Baghdad, there is still widespread belief in Washington and Jerusalem that Iran has never fully ruled out resuming the program. Both the United States, even under the Biden Administration, and especially Israel have publicly warned the world that they will never, ever, under any circumstances allow Iran to follow North Korea and become a nuclear-armed state, and they would use all methods available to ensure this objective. Whenever you hear the phrase “all options are on the table” from a US official regarding Iran, you better understand that they mean the military option.

In a recent podcast episode I recorded with Iran expert Gabriel Noronha, I asked him to clarify why Iran armed with nuclear weapons is such a dangerous idea. While many of us may assume we have nothing to fear since even the Islamic fundamentalists ruling in Tehran don’t have suicidal schemes to wake up one day and actually launch a nuclear weapon out of the blue, Noronha stated that the danger is more subtle. If Iran were to become a Middle Eastern North Korea, the most dangerous risk would be a surge in nuclear blackmail maneuvers, giving the Islamic Republic near impunity for further mischief. A successful blackmail by the Iranian regime would make coordinated conventional deterrence against Iranian mischief and terror much more challenging, and give Tehran a de facto veto power over regional security arrangements. Just imagine what would happen if Israel could not retaliate against provocations by Hezbollah just because Iran threatened a nuclear strike in return. Not a safe situation.

Then of course there is the risk of proliferation, not only to Iran’s militant allies in Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, but also to countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who are widely believed to have plans to develop their own nuclear arsenals should Iran cross the threshold. While I am of the theory that more nations with nuclear weapons in certain limited contexts may stabilize regional security situations by institutionalizing the famous Mutually Assured Destruction, still, neither Turkey, Saudi Arabia, nor any of the other Gulf States feel the same sort of existential danger from Iran that Israel does. That is why Israel is far more prone to risks and escalation against Iran, especially since the devastating October 7 attacks by Hamas.

And just last week, with diplomacy going nowhere and Iran in violation of multiple IAEA protocols, Israel made the fateful decision to escalate its long-running shadow war in the most dramatic manner possible.

According to the Financial Times, Israeli air and drone attacks have assassinated at least 17 Iranian military leaders and 10 top nuclear scientists. Among the military leadership killed by Israel were Mohammad Bagheri, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed forces, thus making him Iran’s most senior military officer, and Hossein Salami, the Commander-in-Chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s military-within-a-military devoted at all costs to maintaining the regime’s revolutionary ideology and home and exporting it abroad— a task more vital to the IRGC than traditional national defense. As for Salami, I would like to remind you that he recently threatened to “open the gates of hell” against Israel and the United States if they ever dared attack Iran. Instead, it appears that Mr. Salami himself has been sent to the gates of hell. And with the majority of Iran’s missile launchers, The Iranian regime’s most powerful weapon against its enemies, now completely destroyed, Israel and the United States are still right here on Earth.

And in a stunning display of double-dealing, corruption, and incompetence at the highest levels of the Iranian regime, Israel was able to eliminate many of these officials via drone strikes in their own Tehran apartments, precision targeting the residences of military leaders and nuclear scientists while leaving the structural integrity of their apartment blocks intact. Such operations would plainly not have been possible without a significant incidence of Israeli agents placed deep within the Iranian security apparatus. Furthermore, if Iran had any kind of decent intelligence apparatus, they ought to have known that an Israeli attack was imminent and it was in their existential interest to move to a secure location. Praying to Allah in the hopes he would protect them was not going to cut it.

The main target of Operation Rising Lion, as the Israelis have called their attack on Iran, is of course the nuclear program. On that front, the electrical infrastructure at Iran’s largest enrichment facility, Natanz, has been completely destroyed with and along with it potentially the plant’s entire enrichment infrastructure. Iran’s hardest target, which you may have already read about, is Fordow, the Iranian enrichment program’s ultimate insurance policy. I don’t need to elaborate much here, but I am sure you have read that the Fordow Nuclear Fuel Enrichment Plant is buried deep underground. One standard bomb alone, or even several standard bombs, are simply not enough to cover the nearly 100 meters between the surface and the plant itself. If you haven’t read so already, there is only one bomb and one country capable of inflicting serious damage that deep below ground: the GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, an enormously powerful “bunker buster” designed specifically for Iran’s underground nuclear facilities and only capable of being delivered by American B2 bombers.

Despite the long-term close relationship between the United States and Israel, I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone that most Americans have been hesitant about engaging in a serious military operation against Iran. The main reason, of course, is fear of the damage Iran can cause after being attacked. While Iran and its regime have been weakened, they still have plenty of avenues to cause mayhem should the clerics and IRGC sense that the entire Iranian revolutionary project is in peril or on the brink of collapse. On the other hand, Israelis, who sense existential danger from Iran, have less restraint. Thus, I have long predicted, ever since the JCPOA collapsed in 2018, that it was only a matter of time before Israel and its Winston Churchill-admiring Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would take drastic measures to end the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all. And the US would subsequently be strongly compelled to intervene and finish the job.

I seriously believe we are now witnessing a conflict whose stakes are far more profound than the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. We all know now that Iraq was not seriously developing any Weapons of Mass Destruction. However, Iran in 2025, at least before these Israeli attacks, is an adversary far more powerful than Iraq ever was, with the capabilities to acquire a nuclear weapon in only a matter of weeks. If not for Washington’s and Jerusalem’s clear red lines on this matter, Iran would likely have already crossed that threshold and become that terror-backing North Korea in the Middle East the world has feared for so long. Now, with Operation Midnight Hammer, we have now witnessed how far the two countries are prepared to go to stop Iran from acquiring the sort of bombs capable of wiping out entire nations. With more to come in the days ahead, stay tuned for Part 2.

To Be Continued…