WarSclerotic

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Amos Harel

Every round of talks between the international community and Iran about the latter’s nuclear project was described as “definitive.” But on each occasion, it transpired that there was actually disagreement that only prepared the ground for another round. That said, the next discussions between Iran and the six major world powers that will begin next Wednesday in Baghdad deserve our attention.

When U.S. President Barack Obama says a “narrow window of opportunity” remains for a diplomatic solution, when American officials invoke the military option, and when the full oil embargo imposed by the European Union on Tehran is due to take effect within a month and a half – we have enough indications that this will be a meaningful encounter. At some point between the Baghdad talks and the American presidential elections in November, it will become clear whether the Iranian leadership seeks a compromise with the international community, or is willing to risk a direct confrontation in order to avoid being perceived domestically as having caved in to American pressure.

Media coverage around the world, and more particularly in Israel, tends to play up the behavior of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, the future of the Iranian nuclear project will be decided by the country’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some Iran experts believe that if it were up to Ahmadinejad, Tehran would already have reached a compromise.

According to senior Israeli intelligence figures, Mehdi Khalaji – an Iranian-born senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – is a brilliant analyst of the regime in Tehran. In an article he published this week on the institute’s website (“The Ayatollah of Rejection May Be Contemplating Compromise” ), Khalaji argues that the regime is gradually preparing the Iranian public for an agreement that will include significant concessions on Tehran’s part. That, in his view, is the explanation for the effort the regime is making to portray the previous round of talks, held last month in Istanbul, as a great victory for the Iranian approach. For the Iranians, Khalaji maintains, their image is no less important than the fate of the nuclear project.

Whether the six countries that are negotiating with Iran (the so-called P5 +1: the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany ) will be successful depends on their ability to conduct serious talks and at the same time step up the external pressure on Tehran. Only in exchange for an enforceable commitment by Tehran to stop development for military purposes, combined with full transparency, will it be possible to gradually lift the sanctions.

According to Khalaji, Khamenei understands that this is his last chance to save the Iranian economy from being seriously undermined by the sanctions. However, he is hesitating to cut a deal for fear of the implications this might have for his domestic status, which rests in no small measure on progress in the nuclear arena.

In Khalaji’s view, Khamenei lacks the authority and the charisma of his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, and he is concerned that stoppage of the project will ultimately cause the regime’s collapse. Indeed, as part of an agreement, Khamenei may ultimately demand guarantees that the West will not try to overthrow him.

In an address this week at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, former Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar described meetings with the Iranian leadership in the previous decade. One was a rare encounter with Khamenei himself, held in Tehran in 2000. According to Aznar, Khamenei said then that a confrontation with the West and Israel was inevitable. Israel should be wiped off the map, he told his Spanish guest. He emphasized his desire for Iran to become a major power through enhancing its science and technology.

“Nuclear capability is a direct implication of the nationalist rhetoric I heard from Khamenei in our meeting,” Aznar said. “Science is put at the service of the nuclear vision. I find ridiculous the argument about whether Iran wants to achieve a bomb or only attain the technological knowledge needed to manufacture it. If someone invests many millions in putting together a team to compete in Formula 1 races, you have to be a fool to think he is doing it only in order to examine his ability.”

New missions, new challenges

During the week in which a new commander in chief has taken over the controls at the Israel Air Force, the Israel Defense Forces and the media played up the offensive capability of the aerial forces. Uncharacteristically, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz got a little carried away and declared – in the ceremony held to mark the appointment of Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel – that Israel has “the best air force in the world.” For the past four years, the outgoing commander, Maj. Gen. Ido Nechushtan, prepared the force for the possibility of an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. Eshel, the commentators intimated, might well be called on to implement that plan.

Journalist Eitan Haber recently described the air force, and rightly so, as the most important security asset possessed by the Israeli leadership. The country’s leader, he said, should pray every morning that the force’s commander will not sneeze or come down with a cold.

Focusing exclusively on the offensive aspect of the air force misses the full complexity of the picture. Not only is an attack on Iran radically different from the destruction of a nuclear reactor in Iraq or in Syria – in terms of distance to the target, number of sites and the quality of their protection – but there is quite a good likelihood that such an attack will drag Israel into a broader military confrontation of unknowable scope. In that case, beyond launching the inherently difficult attack mission, the air force will be called upon to deploy its capability for the long-term in a broad range of missions spanning a variety of fronts.

If the scenario which holds that Iran will respond not only by firing missiles at Israel but also by getting Hezbollah in Lebanon and at least Islamic Jihad in Gaza to fire rockets proves accurate – Israel will be confronted with an unprecedented offensive against the civilian population on a number of fronts. In that case, the IAF will hunt down missile launchers and attack strategic infrastructure sites, but will also provide close support for the ground forces (which, according to all the declarations of the IDF’s top brass in recent years, will be sent into enemy territory to execute certain maneuvers ) and work to eliminate the threat of surface-to-air missile batteries.

All that could well come to pass – if and when – even without Syria entering the fray. It is impossible to understand the inclination of some Israeli advocates of an attack on Iran, who rule out the possibility that Syria will be part of the response to that attack. Obviously, President Bashar Assad has his hands full at the moment. But is it possible to say with certainty that he will not view a clash between Tehran and Jerusalem as an opportunity to divert the regional agenda away from his ongoing massacre of his people?

Nechushtan and Eshel understand that in case of a war with Iran, the IAF will, for the first time, need to devote no small part of its attention to defensive missions. During the Nechushtan period, the force’s antiaircraft system was upgraded to an air defense system whose primary mission is to intercept missiles and rockets, by adding the Iron Dome and Arrow systems (to be augmented in the future by mid-range interceptor Magic Wand and the long-range Arrow 3 ).

The IDF top brass, which in the past almost instinctively recoiled from having to engage in defensive missions, has changed its approach and now treats this possibility with the enthusiasm of the newly converted. The agreement that Defense Minister Ehud Barak was due to sign this week in Washington will ensure an American gift to the tune of another $1 billion to acquire the intercept systems.

However, two reservations need to be made about this vigorous and wide-ranging procurement arrangement: First, that the pace of training for the batteries’ crews and the rate of production of the systems themselves are still far from being able to close the gaps in operational deployment in the immediate future. And second, that outside the defense establishment, there is considerable skepticism about the systems’ ability to provide effective protection in a scenario in which thousands of rockets are fired at the home front.

In the past few years, the air force has also been required to upgrade its capability to deal with a double threat: surface-to-air missiles on the one hand, and surface-to-surface missiles and rockets on the other, that will be fired at IAF bases. For three decades at least, Israel has operated on the basis of the assumption that it was guaranteed air superiority in confronting the enemy. But for the past two years, the gap in favor of the air force has not been self-evident, with the introduction into some of the neighboring countries of new and advanced surface-to-air missiles. In addition, there are already incipient signs – as seen in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and in the subsequent sporadic rounds of fighting there – that the other side will do its best to thwart takeoffs from air force bases in wartime via the use of missiles and rockets.

When Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah boasted a week ago about the precision munitions his organization possesses, he was apparently referring, in part, to Hezbollah’s ability to launch M-600 missiles supplied by Syria for specific purposes, such as striking at air force bases. Nechushtan revised the force’s concept in this regard, from “absorption” to “functional continuity” – meaning the ability of the bases’ technical crews to cope with a situation in which the runways are under almost continuous bombardment during warfare. The air force has been training for this contingency for some years. It’s a new and relatively unfamiliar challenge, and it is complicated to assess in advance quite how much of a problem it will pose.

Blind spot

For the past few years, Ehud Barak has been delivering almost the same speech about Iran. First comes the assertion that Israel is the strongest country in the region – “from Tripoli in Libya to Tehran” – followed by a few words about the intensity of the challenges, and then an expression of confidence in the ability of the IDF and the other security bodies to meet them.

Barak and his senior partner, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rarely speak in specifics about the possible consequences for the home front of an Israeli-initiated attack on Iran. For the majority of the public, then, the penny has not yet dropped when it comes to the character of the next war, if it erupts.

Maj. Gen. (res. ) Yishai Bar, who recently completed a tour of duty as commander of the General Staff formation responsible for deploying for combat in Lebanon, last week told Haaretz that “the director of Military Intelligence spoke recently about some 200,000 missiles and rockets that are aimed at the Israeli home front. I hear the home front defense minister [Matan Vilnai] state firmly that there are failures and gaps in the deployment of the home front. Who is to blame for this failure? I am not a big expert on the home front, but if there is a concrete threat, please deploy accordingly. If the political leadership decides that the home front is under threat, it has to budget the components of the response that it finds reasonable.”

On several occasions in the past year, there have been reports that the West is concerned about the fate of the vast stocks of chemical weapons in the possession of the Syrian army. They are liable to fall into the hands of extremist Sunni movements, which are against the regime and are under the influence of the murderous Al-Qaida ideology; or, they could be transferred deliberately to Hezbollah. In the indirect dialogue which Jerusalem and Damascus have maintained across the years, it was clear to the Syrians that use of chemical weapons will draw an extremely sharp Israeli response – almost as though Israel had been attacked with a nuclear weapon, despite the huge difference in the potential for damage latent in the two types of weapons. Will the same degree of deterrence be maintained in the face of an extremist Sunni or Shiite terrorist organization, whose considerations are different from those of Damascus?

After the false alarm of the first Gulf War, in which Iraq did not use chemical weapons, the average Israeli treats the protective kit against chemical weapons as a joke. The project of redistributing gas masks to the country’s citizens is proceeding lethargically, mostly due to budget constraints. To date, only about 55 percent of Israelis have received the masks. Taking into account the possibility of a fundamental change in the balance of power in the north, in terms of chemical weapons, this would seem to be a significant blind spot on the part of the leadership.

Fringes to the center

Israel’s intelligence assessments about the situation in Syria are constantly updated, and currently show more modesty than a few months ago, when Assad’s fall was forecast to be almost imminent. The current analysis is that the serious bloodletting from which the regime suffers has not yet reached a critical mass which will bring about his fall.

The opposition’s chief difficulty lies in the concentration of the effort in the big cities: Damascus and Aleppo. The regime remains in control in both, despite the demonstrations. In contrast to Egypt, where the overthrow of the regime began in the heart of the country, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in Syria the revolution is progressing from the fringes to the center, and not at the pace hoped for by the West. Assad remains in the picture, and in the event of a regional war, he may even consider joining the Iranians, depending on his self-interest at that moment.