Israel and Iran both have little incentive to stop fighting and no obvious route to outright victory
When Israel and Iran clashed last year, they fought in short and contained bursts that usually ended within hours, and both sides looked for off-ramps that allowed tensions to ebb.
Since Israel started a new round of fighting on Friday, the two countries have said they will continue for as long as necessary, broadening the scope of their attacks and leading to much higher casualty counts in both countries. This time, the conflict appears set to last for at least a week, with both Israel and Iran ignoring routes toward de-confliction.
Israel seems motivated to continue until the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, either by force or renewed negotiations. Yet Iran has shown no sign of voluntarily ending enrichment, a process crucial to building a nuclear bomb, and Israel has no known ability to destroy a pivotal enrichment site that is buried deep underground.
“We’re weeks rather than days away from this ending,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs at the Pentagon until January.
“Israel will keep going until, one way or another, Iran no longer retains an enrichment capability,” added Mr. Shapiro, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group. “It’s now clear that if Israel leaves this unaddressed, its campaign will have failed.”
While Israel has easily struck Iran’s main enrichment site at Natanz, central Iran, it lacks the American-made “bunker-buster” bombs needed to destroy a smaller subterranean site dug deep into a mountain near Fordo, northern Iran. Israeli officials hope that their strikes on other targets — including Iran’s top military commanders, nuclear scientists and its energy industry — will inflict enough pain to encourage Iran to willingly end operations at Fordo.
For now, Iran seems far from such a capitulation, even if Israel has shown increasing dominance in Iranian airspace, according to Sanam Vakil, who leads analysis of the Middle East at Chatham House, a London-based research group. Though Israel hopes to prompt its collapse, the Iranian government remains in full control of Iran and still has substantial stocks of ballistic missiles, even if Israel has limited its ability to fire some of them.
“I don’t see any surrender coming from Tehran right now — there are no white flags being waved,” said Dr. Vakil. “It’s very hard to see Iran walking back its enrichment rights while Iran’s program still looks operational and Iran is intact as a state,” she added. “Their goal is to survive, to inflict damage and show their resilience.”
Much depends on how President Trump reacts. Unlike Israel, the United States has the munitions and the aircraft to destroy Fordo. Analysts like Mr. Shapiro say that Mr. Trump could consider such an approach if Iran chooses to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear bomb instead of reaching a compromise. [Continue reading…]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ABC News on Monday that targeting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would end, not escalate, the ongoing fight between Israel and Iran that erupted late last week.
When asked by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl about reports from ABC News and other outlets that President Donald Trump rejected an Israeli plan to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, concerned that it would escalate the conflict, Netanyahu said, “It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict.”
“We’ve had half a century of conflict spread by this regime that terrorizes everyone in the Middle East; has bombed the Aramco oil fields in Saudi Arabia; is spreading terrorism and subversion and sabotage everywhere,” Netanyahu said. “The ‘forever war’ is what Iran wants, and they’re bringing us to the brink of nuclear war. In fact, what Israel is doing is preventing this, bringing an end to this aggression, and we can only do so by standing up to the forces of evil.” [Continue reading…]