Israel’s Approach to Iran May Be Getting Bolder
Officials are beginning to think about targeting the ayatollahs, not merely their nuclear program.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leads a prayer over the coffin of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Aug. 1. Photo: -/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA digital billboard in central Tehran’s Palestine Square was unveiled in 2017, counting down until Israel’s demise.
Shiites are usually ambiguous about eschatological dates, but when it comes to the Jewish state, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wants something imminent.
Threats to Israel have many causes but one abetting force: the Islamic Republic’s implacable hatred of Zion.
Strip Iranian aid from anti-Zionism, and Israel’s intractable struggle with the Palestinians loses its capacity to throw the Mideast into regional war.
Israelis have long viewed their tactical successes as a long-term strategy.
The Jewish state “mows the lawn” of nearby threats, which means, among other things, destroying enemy weapon stockpiles, killing enemy commanders, and executing old-fashioned incursions that tear up enemy infrastructure and offensive capacity.
The Gaza war began because Israelis forgot they have to perform this unpleasant task routinely.
With the Islamic Republic always seeking to fortify its “ring of fire” around the Jewish state, too long a respite led the Israelis to pay a terrible price.
Yet we’ve found in conversations with Israeli officials that Jerusalem is beginning to reorient its strategy.
Toppling Iran’s clerical regime, not merely countering its proxies or thwarting its nuclear program, has become the goal.
Philosophically, this is an enormous change.
As a rule, Israelis haven’t believed in the potential for regime change among Muslims.
The possibility of such an event leading to a friendlier, democratic Iran has been too abstract for hard-nosed Israelis.
Mossad officers and senior Israeli officials routinely belittled Uri Lubrani, the former Israeli ambassador to Iran who focused on hearts-and-minds propaganda and small-scale covert actions aimed at toppling the Islamic Republic.
Most Israeli officials likely still don’t think Iranian democracy is probable.
They do, however, now appreciate the depth of Iranian popular disgust for the clerical regime.
Sending Mossad officers into Iran to oversee recruited assets for lethal operations, or to steal the regime’s nuclear-weapons archives, is demanding work.
Still, these operations are much less prone to error than building interlocking teams of Iranian agents to aid demonstrations or labor strikes.
In-country covert action is vastly more difficult than launching cyber attacks on banking and energy infrastructure.
Israelis also have limited resources: What’s peanuts to the Central Intelligence Agency is a splurge for the Mossad.
For Jerusalem to pursue these expenditures, to be willing to spend money on things that don’t necessarily go boom in the night, would be a testament to how seriously Israel’s security and political classes view the Iranian threat.
What Jerusalem can actually accomplish is impossible to assess before the Mossad starts trying.
American covert action during the Cold War had mixed results.
Subvention in the form of foreign anticommunist labor unions, publications, intellectuals, civil-rights activists and journalists were more effective than most behind-the-Iron-Curtain operations, which led to the deaths of many agents and a few officers.
The Western left have exaggerated most of America’s now-notorious Third World coup d’état operations, especially the 1953 effort against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The natives, not the Americans, were the decisive and sometimes singular players.
The promise of audacious operations is built on stubborn willpower, as well as the ugly details born from trial and error.
We know the ardent commitment Israeli governments have given to running lethal operations inside Iran.
That experience has built up skills applicable to nonlethal covert action.
Jerusalem is doubtless aiming for a ripple effect and good timing: Its actions might amplify eruptions of discontent, which have regularly shaken the regime since 2009.
The biggest and most controversial temptation for Israel would arrive if Iran again erupted into massive protests.
Jerusalem might decide that an Iran consumed by internal violence and unrest could effectively collapse the Islamic Republic and make future nuclear work impossible.
An Iran in chaos would affect the entire Mideast—and, perhaps, benefit Israel. Arming the theocracy’s internal enemies, assuming the Iranians are willing and the Israelis could accomplish it, could be an option for a Jerusalem that sees itself in a death match with Tehran.
American administrations, with brief exceptions under Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, have prized engagement over regime change.
The never-dying left-wing analysis of Iran’s internal evolution—the potential for normalizing relations and America’s culpability for Iran’s Islamic radicalism—has informed the Democratic Party’s approach to the Islamic Republic since Bill Clinton.
Any Israeli government would have to weigh the benefit of anti-Iranian operations against possible U.S. hostility.
As the Iran-Israel war intensifies, however, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Jerusalem take more-aggressive measures.
No matter what happens, Americans ought to remember that, as in the Cold War, the struggle ends only when the evil empire falls.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario