WarSclerotic

Fans of pro football use the term “game changer” to refer to a long touchdown pass or a key interception that turns a game around.

Similarly, in international politics, there are occasional “game changers” such as the U.S. development of the atomic bomb during World War II or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which fundamentally altered the course of world events.

While perhaps not as decisive as the development of the atomic bomb, nor as dramatic as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revelation that the U.S. and Israel, working together, had forced more than a three-year delay in Iran’s ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon by inserting the Stuxnet computer virus into Iran’s nuclear facilities may, in fact, be a Middle Eastern “game changer.”

This is the case for two reasons:
• First, by delaying Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, Iran’s influence in the Middle East suffered a major blow.

• Second, by eliminating a major area of conflict between the U.S. and Israel over the desirability of an immediate attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, a major problem in the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been removed.

Under the leadership of its firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran had been racing toward the capability of producing nuclear weapons since Teheran broke off negotiations with the European Union in 2005, soon after Mr. Ahmadinejad took office. Since then, Iran has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the European Union and the U.S., on the one hand promising serious negotiations, but then pulling back from serious concessions.

Those concessions include giving International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors full access to Iranian nuclear facilities or sending substantial amounts of its enriched uranium abroad to ensure that it could not be processed into nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, because of its stalling tactics, Iran was able to put more and more centrifuges on line — spinning centrifuges are used to purify natural uranium (about 3 percent pure) into bomb-grade uranium (about 90 percent pure).

By early 2010, Iran had succeeded in getting its centrifuges to enrich uranium from 3 percent to 20 percent, the first major step needed to get to the 90 percent bomb-grade level. However, during the prolonged period of stalled negotiations, the international community grew increasingly impatient with Teheran, although serious sanctions were not imposed until last spring when Russia and China finally acquiesced to the U.S. call to punish Iran.
As Iran produced more and more of the enriched uranium, fears grew, especially in Israel, that it was nearing a nuclear weapons capability. It was at this point, however, that the situation began to go wrong for the Iranian nuclear program. A computer virus called Stuxnet, reportedly jointly developed by the U.S. and Israel, and tested at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, knocked out and most probably destroyed 984 Iranian centrifuges of the P-1 type, considerably slowing the Iranian nuclear effort.

At the same time, Iran’s efforts to develop the more sophisticated P-2 centrifuge have been complicated by embargoes on the carbon steel necessary for its manufacture, as well as by the assassinations of several key Iranian nuclear scientists.

The end result has been to delay Iran’s nuclear weapons program by an estimated three years. This gives Israel sufficient time to, at the minimum, give diplomacy yet another chance, but perhaps more importantly to allow more time both to perfect its complex anti-missile air defense system and to improve its civil defense preparedness.

If Israeli leaders decide, in three years, that Iran’s nuclear installations still need destroying, Israel will be better protected against retaliatory strikes by Iran and its allies — Syria, and the terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas.

From a political perspective, the nuclear setback also is problematic to Iran. Its ability to intimidate the Arab states of the Persian Gulf — allies of the U.S. — has been reduced, and these countries, along with Egypt and Jordan, now have three more years to develop their own nuclear programs to counter-balance Iran.

In addition, should the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was established to investigate the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, decide to blame Hezbollah for the crime, as appears likely at this time, then Hezbollah’s moral legitimacy in Lebanon, and that of its ally Iran also, will be tarnished, as it will be shown that Hezbollah is not just a force opposing Israel, but is a force seeking to destroy Lebanon from the inside.

Also, while the Arab world has recently been seriously challenged by the overthrow of the Ben-Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, the weakening of the Iranian threat due to the delay in its nuclear program can only be seen as a major benefit to the Arab states of the region as they seek to deal with their domestic problems, including Iranian-backed subversion in a number of Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia.

While there are clearly major benefits to Israel, the U.S. and the Arab Gulf states from the delay in Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the delay also benefits the Israeli-American relationship.

Although there are currently a number of issues complicating U.S,-Israeli relations, including Israel’s construction program in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the most important problem in the U.S.-Israeli relationship during the Obama administration, as it had been under former President George W. Bush, is the disagreement over whether, and how soon, to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.

Israel, seeing an existential threat from Iran whose leadership regularly called for the Jewish state’s destruction, wanted the U.S. to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. If the U.S. was unwilling to do so, to give Israel both the political backing and the bunker-busting bombs (some of Iran’s nuclear installations are buried underground) to do so. From the U.S. perspective, particularly that of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has held that post since 2006, the U.S. already had more than it could handle with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. wanted to give sanctions and diplomacy more time to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem, a point Mr. Gates made publicly in rebuttal to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s call for military action against Iran in November 2010.

From the U.S. perspective, a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran could bring in its wake a number of negative consequences for America. First, Iran could step up its aid to anti-U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby complicating the U.S. military effort in both countries.

Second, Iran could strike at U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf. Third, Iran could, at least temporarily, force the closure of the Straits of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily, thereby causing world oil prices to skyrocket. Whether such Iranian responses would have a long-term negative effect on the U.S. position in the Middle East is, however, a very open question given the fact that any Iranian attack on U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, or attempts to close the Straits of Hormuz, would lead to massive U.S. retaliation against Iran, including attacks on the main pillars of the Islamic regime such as the slamic Republican Guard as well as on Iran’s air, naval and missile bases, attacks that could seriously threaten the regime in Teheran.

Nonetheless, the U.S. preferred not to take the risk although American leaders from Mr. Gates to President Obama repeatedly stated that the United States had not taken the military option in dealing with Iran “off the table.”
The Israeli perspective on Iran differed sharply from that of the U.S. In the first place, Israeli leaders tended to take Iranian rhetoric much more seriously than did the United States. When Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose power in Iran is rising, and whose position in the Islamic Republic is now second only to the Ayatollah Khameini, openly states that Israel “should be wiped off the map” and denies the Holocaust, Israeli leaders — and the Israeli public — become concerned.

Then, when the Iranian discourse about destroying Israel becomes combined with Iran’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons, Israelis, both on the right and on the left, see Iran as becoming a threat to Israel’s existence. The question for Israel was what to do about the existential threat from Iran. From a purely logistical point of view, it would be far easier for the U.S. to attack Iran than for Israel to do so. The U.S. could use a combination of B-1 and B-2 bombers, long-range missiles with conventional warheads, and fighter bombers launched from the U.S. aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to begin an attack on Iran.

By contrast, Israel would have to depend on a combination of F-15 and F-16 military aircraft, which would have to be refueled both en route to Iran and on the way back to Israel, plus a limited number of missile strikes from Israeli submarines in the Indian Ocean. In addition, while the limited Israeli military resources would have to be concentrated on Iran’s nuclear installations, thus leaving Iran’s intermediate range missiles free to strike Israel in retaliation, a U.S. attack would presumably not only destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, but also its air, missile and naval bases as well, thus making an Iranian retaliatory attack against Israel more difficult.

It is for these reasons that Israel has pushed so hard, albeit so far without success, for a U.S. strike on Iran, causing a considerable amount of friction in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. However, under President Obama, the U.S. has done a considerable amount to strengthen Israeli security, including asking Congress to appropriate an additional $205 million for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, pre-positioning additional U.S. military equipment in Israel that it could use in case of an emergency, and increasing the number of top-level security meetings between the two countries.

Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have claimed that by being unwilling itself to deal with the growing menace from Iran, and not giving Israel both the political backing and the bunker-busting bombs to do the job itself, the U.S. was not dealing seriously with Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

This issue, at least for the present, has been removed from the U.S.-Israeli agenda. Indeed, the story of the development of the Stuxnet computer virus, if newspaper reports are to be believed, indicates a great deal of close U.S.-Israeli security cooperation. This has involved P-1 centrifuges that the U.S. acquired from Libya when Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi closed down his nuclear program in 2003. The U.S. also received information from the German company Siemens on how its computer controllers, which run the Iranian centrifuges, operate; and a test facility at the Israeli nuclear site of Dimona evaluated the vulnerabilities of the P-1 centrifuges.

The end result of the joint U.S.-Israeli project was at least a three-year delay in the Iranian nuclear weapons program — the same delay, it is estimated, that the U.S. or Israel would have obtained from a strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, with none of the military, political or economic costs that would have accompanied a military attack, because Iran cannot prove that the attack originated either in Israel or the U.S. It is also an open question as to whether Iranian computers are sophisticated enough to retaliate in kind against the U.S. and Israel.

Besides removing a major irritant in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, at least for the time being, the successful Stuxnet operation also has demonstrated a close degree of Israeli-American security cooperation that bodes well for the future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

With the Iranian nuclear threat now postponed, and the Iranian political position in the Middle East weakened as a result of the delay in its nuclear weapons program, the time would appear ripe for moving ahead with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as Netanyahu can no longer argue that the Iranian threat needs to be dealt with first. Whether President Obama will be able to build upon the success of the Stuxnet operation, and the new spirit of security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel to promote the peace process, however, remains to be seen.

Dr. Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone professor of political science emeritus at Baltimore Hebrew University and is visiting professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Among his publications are: “Israel In The Begin Era,” “Israel Under Rabin,” “Contemporary Israel” and the forthcoming, “Six Decades Of U.S.-Israeli Relations.”