Mission Parameters

I have serious doubts that Israel can do enough damage to Iran's nuclear aspirations to allow us to avoid doing the job. In part, I look at what we would need to hit in an aerial campaign and I don't see Israel being able to duplicate moving down that target list.

However, Confederate Yankee thinks Israel could do the job. He notes a small number of capable Israeli strike aircraft with the range to hit Iran. It is an old post recently linked by The Corner so the timing speculation about March 2006 is obviously off. But this claim of capability does raise an interesting point in assuming Israel could do the job. Namely, we have different jobs in mind.

I see the need to tear up the Iranians in general to cripple their ability to retaliate against our forces in Iraq or the Strait of Hormuz. I'd also like to shake up the internal security apparatus as long as we're in their air space anyway. My worry is that a narrowly based strike on Iran's nuclear facilities will just leave a mad Iran eager to hit us even harder with what they have left. So we should hit them so hard that there is nothing significant left to hit us with. And ideally combine it with regime change moves.

However, Israel is not constrained by our goals that translate into a long target list and a lengthy campaign. Israel does not have assets nearby that could be attacked so getting a lot of targets on our target list won't matter to the Israelis. And how much more angry at Israel could Iran under the mullahs get, anyway? The mullahs are already on record wanting to destroy Israel. Hard to make their attitude worse!

And though I wouldn't want to leave Iran's chemical and biological weapons and facilities intact, Israel might feel that only mullah nukes are a critical threat to Israel and that even Iran--which has those chemical and bio weapons capabilities now but has not used them--won't hit Israel with them after a strike to take out Iran's nuclear facilities out of fear of truly terrible destruction at the hands of Israel's nukes.

So Israel may think that it has a much more narrow target set to deal with than we have to claim success.

It is something to think about as some secretly hope we can let the Israelis do our dirty work and take the blame for us. If we want success from our point of view, the responsibility for taking Iran down is ours and ours alone.