On its face, the current strategic balance between Israel and Iran favors the Jewish state. In extremis, because it represents the only already nuclear adversary, Israel is in a dominant position to achieve “escalation dominance.”
At the same time, (1) an “asymmetrical nuclear war” could be fought with Israel as the sole nuclear combatant, and (2) Iran is verifiably close to becoming a nuclear combatant state.
How should Israel proceed? The only reasonable answer is to choose strategy and tactics that could offer it a continuous bargaining advantage without incurring unacceptable war risks. The optimal way for Jerusalem to ensure an “escalation advantage” would be to engage Iran directly (not just via its assorted jihadist proxies) while that state enemy is still pre-nuclear.
Once Iran was able to join the “nuclear club,” Israel’s capacities to manage military crises could become severely limited or non-existent. At that uncertain point, any residual Israeli prospects for a successful preemption would almost certainly have vanished.
Though necessary, keeping Iran non-nuclear would not automatically remove that adversary’s ability to inflict catastrophic harm on Israel. Even a pre-nuclear Iran could make compelling use of radiation-dispersal weapons and/or launch conventional combat missiles against Israel’s alleged Dimona nuclear reactor.
In a conceivably worst-case scenario, North Korea, as an Iranian ally, would place its nuclear assets at Tehran’s operational disposal.
Significantly, North Korea has previously been involved in Middle Eastern military matters (e.g., it built a nuclear reactor for Syria at Al Kibar that was preemptively destroyed by Israel’s Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007) and is now forging assorted “mutual security ties” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
For the most part, an Israel-Iran war would be without precedent or sui generis. Accordingly, a core question arises: How should Israel proceed with gainful war planning? Two interrelated and mutually reinforcing answers should be advanced.
Immediately, Jerusalem needs to undertake a doctrinal shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (the “bomb in the basement”) to “selective nuclear disclosure” and to clarify its widely assumed “Samson Option.”
Whatever its tactical particulars, the overriding point of any last-resort Israeli military option would not be to “die with the Philistines” (per Samson in the biblical Book of Judges) but to support the credibility and efficacy of its nuclear deterrent.
More specifically, a partially but properly disclosed Samson Option would reveal that Israel has aptly calibrated nuclear remedies and that these remedies could apply at the highest end-point of realistic war scenarios.
If Iran were an already nuclear enemy state, Israel’s capacity for effective self-defense would face staggering tactical limitations. But because the Islamic Republic is still pre-nuclear, Iranian aggression could even prove net-positive for Israel. Ironically, such an Iran-created war could offer Israel an eleventh-hour opportunity to prevent or at least delay enemy nuclearization and to avoid or delay a vastly more destructive war. In formal legal terms, this argument pertains to Israel’s capacity for “anticipatory self-defense.”
“The safety of the people,” declared Roman philosopher Cicero, “is always the highest law.” During the past several months, Tehran has been taunting Israel as if the Jewish state was the weaker adversary. Still, in any intra-war search for “escalation dominance” by an already-nuclear Israel and a not-yet-nuclear Iran, competitive risk-taking would favor the former.
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