Operation Rising Lion

Israel’s aerial assault on Iran, launched on 13 June, was a straightforward act of aggression that extends the sequence of violence begun in Gaza and continued in Lebanon, Syria and beyond. Whether the attack was green-lit by the United States, or more likely ‘yellow-lit’, is still unclear. But it hardly matters, since the US quickly moved to support and abet the attack.

The US and Israeli governments have presented the offensive as a pre-emptive effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but that justification is laughable. As recently as April, the assessment of the US's own intelligence agencies remained what it had been for years: there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. Israel, on the other hand, has hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons.

The main initial targets were Iran’s missile installations and its military leadership. Senior figures killed in the first round of airstrikes included Hossein Salami, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps; Esmail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the aerospace forces; Mohammad Kazemi, head of intelligence; and Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces. Bagheri’s replacement as chief of staff, Ali Shadmani, is thought to have been killed in a strike on Tuesday.

The overground section of the nuclear facility at Natanz was targeted in the first wave of attacks. On Tuesday, the IAEA said that the 15,000 centrifuges there are likely to have been damaged or destroyed. This morning, Israel struck the Arak nuclear facility, which has in any case never been fully operational and was deactivated a decade ago. Other Iranian nuclear facilities are deep underground, where Israel’s air force can’t reach them. It has had no trouble hitting Iranian television stations in Tehran or psychiatric hospitals in Kermanshah.

Israel’s codename for the attack was Operation Rising Lion, a pointed reference to the pre-1979 Iranian national flag, a lion before a rising sun. Israel and the US seem to hope that they can shatter the Iranian state and induce civil unrest. This is an attempt at regime change, or regime destruction, poorly disguised as an anti-nuclear operation.

In response, Iran has launched missile attacks on Israel, and on Tuesday hit the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. But though at least one Israeli Hermes 900 drone has been shot down, Iran’s capabilities are limited. Israel has achieved air superiority, and missile installations at Tabriz and Kermanshah are either inaccessible or partly out of action. The more advanced missile production facility at Khojir was hit on Wednesday morning.

Iran has had a uranium enrichment programme for thirty years, but Israel has presented no evidence that it has been trying to build nuclear weapons. It has recently installed thousands of new centrifuges, which came online in November. As a result, Iran’s stocks of 60 per cent enriched uranium hexafluroide for use in research reactors have more than doubled, from around 180 kg to an estimated 400 kg. But Iran has no 90 per cent enriched uranium, the type required for nuclear warheads.

Israel has been threatening something like this since the 1990s. But there have also been signs of more recent war planning on the part of the US. In early April, the US and Israel discussed the possibility of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and an ‘Israeli commando raid’ on underground facilities. The only weapons potentially capable of reaching deeply buried bunkers are the US’s GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators. They are carried by B-2 stealth bombers, six of which were moved to Diego Garcia. On 8 April, after a meeting with Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu said an operation on Iran would only work if ‘we go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and American execution.’

At the time, Trump elected instead to continue talks with Iran, led by Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East. He now claims that he had given the Iranians sixty days to ‘accept a deal’, but in reality neither side had got down to the details. The Iranian government insists it is committed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that it ‘will never compromise its legitimate and inalienable rights under the treaty’ – namely to a domestic civilian nuclear programme. Production of highly enriched uranium is not in itself a violation of the treaty (though Iran was probably in violation of the treaty’s Article 3, on safeguarding by the IAEA). From Iran’s perspective, the US and Israel’s demands amounted to an insistence that its civilian nuclear energy programme be dismantled.

For more than forty years US policy has been to punish Iran for its defiance of American designs in the Persian Gulf. It has isolated the country diplomatically and conducted a major sanctions campaign with the stated aim of destabilising the Iranian government. But why support an Israeli attack now, in the middle of talks (the next round had been due to begin in Muscat on 15 June)?

It's possible that the negotiations were from the start misdirection or chicanery. Or that Trump was interested in a deal in the abstract, but was persuaded out of it by other elements in the US security system. Or it may be that Israel felt the talks were serious enough that it had to act to overtake them. Whatever the order of events, the US has since thrown its weight behind the attack. On Monday the air force sent a fleet of refuelling planes to the Middle East and Trump told civilians to leave Tehran. On Tuesday he demanded ‘unconditional surrender’.

In the past, European states have provided at least rhetorical opposition to US and Israeli threats against Iran. But these attacks have been loudly defended by both Britain and Germany – the German foreign ministry described them as ‘targeted strikes against nuclear facilities’ – and prevaricated over with dishonest professions of concern about domestic repression in Iran. The UK has moved a few military assets to the Middle East, supposedly ‘to support regional security in general terms’.

British commentators have been entertaining fantasies about a new Iranian government formed by opponents of the regime. But opposition figures within the country and principled critics abroad, such as Parastou Forouhar, whose dissident parents were killed by the intelligence services in 1998, see the current operation as a brazen attack on their country. The reformist intellectual Mohsen Kadivar has said that Israel’s aggression ‘must be unequivocally condemned’ and proposes a temporary ceasefire, a suspension of enrichment and immediate direct talks with the US. The Iranian government has repeatedly offered talks if the bombing stops.

What matters now is whether or not the US decides to join the air campaign. Even if it does, a centralised state like Iran is unlikely to collapse, and it will recover from the damage to its military apparatus. The US could target more secure Iranian nuclear facilities – especially Fordow, in the mountains north of Qom – with heavy munitions. But it isn’t clear that even the US air force can disable them. GBU-57s can penetrate between ten and sixty metres below ground, depending on the composition of the rock above. Fordow has reinforced chambers buried deeper still. The scenario to be hoped for – easy enough to imagine – is that Trump will get bored or distracted and call it off.

Iran’s leaders must now feel that they made a major strategic error in not acquiring nuclear weapons. What other lesson could they draw from this?