Reeling from the final stage in Israel’s long-running campaign to knock out its nuclear capabilities, Iran has retaliated with a modest flock of drones that have been easily swatted aside. That is dangerous for everyone else.
Launching 100 unmanned aircraft against the Jewish state after three top commanders, air defences, nuclear facilities and missile launch sites were destroyed is a sign that Iran’s capacities for conventional revenge have already been degraded.
So, Tehran will use hybrid warfare to strike back against Israel and its allies.
The most obvious targets are steaming through the Arabian Gulf. Oil tankers, carrying the lifeblood of global industry through the narrow choke points of the Gulf, have been struck with mines in “mysterious” assaults by Iranian commandos over recent years. These have been a rehearsal for retaliation against Israeli attacks that Israel has said were coming.
For years, Iran’s top leadership has described the Jewish state as a “cancer” that needed to be “cut out” of the Middle East and should be annihilated.
Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon, as a proxy force to maintain pressure on Israel, backed Hamas in Gaza and on the West Bank, sent money, technicians and missiles to the Houthis of Yemen, and dispatched squads of assassins around the world to threaten its critics.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza against Hamas has evolved into a programme to drive the Palestinian population out of the enclave.
But Israel’s campaigns everywhere else have, for years, been deliberately shaping the battlefield for the operation against Iran’s nuclear programme.
Over the last 12 months, Israel has eviscerated Hezbollah with bombs hidden in pagers, airstrikes and a ground invasion of Lebanon. It continues to target Hezbollah supply routes and Iranian advisers in Syria.
Yemen’s Houthis, encouraged by Iran, have fired missiles and drones against Israel and been struck by Israel, the US, and even the UK as they have attempted to strangle shipping routes in the Red Sea.
Last year, Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Iran retaliated by firing more than 180 ballistic missiles against Israel. And Israel, with a longer-term eye on Iran’s missile capabilities, hit back with airstrikes against Iran’s missile bases.
But Israel has been steadily working to cripple Iran’s efforts to build an atomic bomb. Between 2007 and 2020, at least six Iranian nuclear scientists were murdered. Five were killed by assassins using motorcycles who stuck bombs to their cars or shot them through the windows. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the physicist who led Iran’s nuclear programme, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun.
Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, survived an assassination attempt in 2010 – but was killed by Israel’s latest wave of attacks along with Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran.
Key Iranian military leaders were also targeted by Israel in its effort to not only scupper Iran’s nuclear capabilities but enfeeble its ability to strike back.
Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces and the second-highest commander after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; Major General Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s primary military force. And General Gholamali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces, were all killed.
Now Israel continues to target Iran’s air defences and missile bases in its biggest wave of airstrikes against the regime and its military ever.
Benjamin Netanyahu has said he ordered the attack, which he has been advocating for years, because Iran could have been days from producing weapons-grade uranium and a year from building a bomb.
The years of delay and diplomacy aimed at slowing Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear power have given Israel the opportunity to plan and incrementally work towards the latest solution to what, for Israelis, has been an existential threat.
Since Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz have been hit. This is a site believed to have been focused on using centrifuges to enrich uranium. In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus infected Iran’s nuclear industry and destroyed some centrifuges.
Iran’s biggest enrichment programme is believed to be in Fordow under a Revolutionary Guard base and half a mile underground inside a mountain, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
That puts it beyond the obvious conventional capacity of Israel, or even the US, to attack by conventional means – not even bunker buster bombs can get through that much of the earth’s surface.
Israel says it used Mossad commandos to target some of the sites in Iran.
Iran is likely to retaliate in similar fashion. It has promised a “hard slap” against the US for its support of Israel (the UK was quick to say it had no role in Rising Lion).
The obvious targets would be US bases in the Gulf. But that would invite a wider war with the US directly, which would delight Israel and which Iran could not resist – it could lead to the collapse of the Islamic regime in Tehran.
Iran will target Gulf shipping and drive up oil prices, which would suit its allies in the Kremlin.
But it will also continue to train, fund, and direct small groups of militants to conduct terror attacks around the world. Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the killing of more than 55,000 Palestinians with weapons supplied by the US, UK and others has already fuelled anger across the Islamic world.
Iran will harness that rage and build its reputation as a nation prepared to martyr itself in the fight against the “Zionist entity”.
That will take time but Iran’s revenge will be cold and it will be worldwide, and it will be bloody.
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