Israel's offensive against Iran suffers from the same inherent flaw as the campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip : maximalist objectives. This is because it is not guided solely by military logic and national interests. Binyamin Netanyahu's political motivation to remain in power at any cost is the main guiding principle.
The Israeli prime minister said on Saturday: “In the near future, you will see Israeli planes, our brave pilots, over the skies of Tehran. We will strike at all targets of the ayatollahs’ regime.” As he did in Gaza, Netanyahu has been preparing the public for a long campaign.
The attacks have caused damage to the surface of nuclear facilities, with varying degrees of compromise to operations. The underground centrifuge parks where uranium is enriched are not within reach of Israeli missiles. This would require the use of large bunker-busting bombs, which only the US possesses, and there is no indication that Donald Trump intends to give them to Israel.
Iran’s nuclear program will be slowed by the Israeli strikes. The deeply unpopular regime will appear more vulnerable. But the strikes only prove to the Iranians the need to obtain nuclear weapons, just as the attempt by Netanyahu, hated by the Iranians, to mobilize them to overthrow the regime has the opposite effect of uniting them against this external intervention by a nuclear power that forcibly denies the enemy that power.
Israel has good strategic reasons to seek to prevent or at least delay Iran’s conversion into a nuclear power. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian theocracy has worked to challenge the existence of Israel, which illegally occupies Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam.
One of the biggest promoters of the clandestine part of Iran's nuclear program, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, denied the Holocaust and flirted with the idea of wiping Israel off the map. Thus, in the Israeli imagination, with well-founded reasons, the military bias of the Iranian program, which the regime has not acknowledged, is associated with a nuclear Holocaust. Iran's support for groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis reinforces this perception.
But just as he has prolonged the carnage in Gaza to postpone his meeting with the polls and the Supreme Court, where he is accused of corruption, Netanyahu will also prolong the military friction with Iran. Unattainable goals serve this function. Neither Trump nor the Israeli electorate have shown themselves capable of stopping him. That is why this will be a long war.
