Details of Israel’s recent limited retaliatory strike against an Iranian anti-aircraft missile squadron in Isfahan remain unclear. But still, some conclusions can be drawn.
Israel’s small missile volley hit its intended target, zeroing in on the very launcher designed to intercept such weapons.
The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. This proximity was by design. Israel has shown Iran that it can destroy anti-missile batteries designed to deter attacks on nearby nuclear facilities.
The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage against Iran’s nuclear facilities with reasonable assurance that it would not be able to deter an impending attack. By comparison, Iran’s previous attacks on Israel were much larger and more indiscriminate. It was another fiasco, with an estimated 99 percent of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles missing their planned targets.
Additionally, more than 50% of Iran’s approximately 115-120 ballistic missiles were reported to have failed to launch or malfunctioned in flight.
Collating these facts provides a disturbing corrective to Iran’s constant boasts that it will soon possess nuclear weapons that could wipe out the Jewish state.
Consider yet another nightmare scenario: If an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile were launched toward Israel, it could pass through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four, in addition to Syria and Iraq. In the case of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such a trajectory would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of the recent Iranian airstrikes were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory long before reaching Israel.
The Iranian attack prompted Arab countries, the United States, Britain, and France to work together to destroy nearly all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, it is a premonition of the kind of advanced air resistance it could face if it decides to go nuclear.
Even if half of Iran’s ballistic missiles were successfully launched, only a handful apparently came close to their intended targets, in contrast to Israel’s successful attacks on Iranian missile batteries. . So, if Iran fires a nuclear-armed missile at Israel, is it possible that it could pose as great a threat to itself and its neighbors as it does to Israel?
And even if such a missile were to take to the air and successfully cross Arab airspace, it would be overwhelmingly likely to be neutralized before exploding over Israeli airspace.
Any such launch would require Israel to react immediately. And incoming bombs and missiles will probably evade Iran’s countermeasures and hit their targets 100% of the time.
Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and safe from attack, the mystique of Iran’s nuclear threat has disappeared.
It should be more difficult for theocracies to sway Western governments with hostage bribes, sanctions relief, and implicit threats that Iran will nuclear attack the Jewish state.
The new reality is that Iran is provoking Israel, which has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-capable missiles in fortified silos and submarines. Tehran has no ability to stop these missiles or the most advanced fifth-generation Israeli aircraft carrying nuclear bombs and missiles.
If Iran launches two or three nuclear missiles now, they either fail to launch, fail in the air, explode inside Iran, or are shot down or shot down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies. We must fear that the possibility is overwhelmingly high. By the tripartite Israeli anti-missile defense system.
Add all this up and Iran’s attack on Israel seems like a historic fiasco. It showed the world that Iranian air strikes are powerless, just at a time when Iran is under threat of nuclear development. It has become clear that an incompetent Iran could be as much of a threat to itself as it is to its enemies. Thanks to the attack on Israel, a new chapter has opened in which the country’s territory is no longer off limits to Western countries.
The failure to deter a much smaller Israeli response, combined with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in thwarting a much larger Iranian attack, has given Iran’s authoritarian regime its shrill rhetoric. It is a reminder that it is intended to cover up one’s own powerlessness and hide one’s own vulnerability. enemy.
And what about the patient Iranian people?
The truth will be revealed that the consequences of its own theocracy’s damage to mainland Israel are negligible, and that in return it has been a successful, if merely demonstrative, response to Israel.
Iranians will therefore learn that their homeland, currently vulnerable, will no longer be off-limits in the future.
And they will conclude that Israel has more effective allies than Iran and that its own ballistic missiles may be more suicidal than murderous.
As a result, they may conclude that the real enemy of the Iranian state is not the Jews of Israel after all, but the Islamist theocrats who have lost their freedom.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of Basic Books’ The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can get in touch by sending an email to authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
