{"id":181884,"date":"2025-06-13T19:38:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T19:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/181884\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T19:38:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T19:38:29","slug":"why-netanyahu-attacked-iran-and-what-israels-strike-means-for-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/181884\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Netanyahu attacked Iran and what Israel’s strike means for the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Israel launched not merely a string of attacks on Iran, as had been the case with recent incursions, but the start of an all-out war<\/a>, whose goal seems to be the destruction of not just\u00a0the country\u2019s nuclear facilities but also its military command and, possibly, the Islamic regime itself.<\/p>\n

The question now is what happens next. Iran has pledged to inflict \u201csevere punishment<\/a>\u201d against Israel, but its first retaliatory strike, involving 100 drones<\/a>, did little if any damage. Will Iran soon launch hundreds of ballistic missiles, as it has in the past? Will this trigger a wider war in the region? Will the U.S. get pulled into the fight, despite President Donald Trump\u2019s deep reluctance to get directly involved in a war? And how will Israel\u2019s campaign\u2014by far the largest and most ambitious it has ever mounted against Iran\u2014reshape the dynamics of the entire Middle East?<\/p>\n

Clearly the attack, which began in the early hours Friday, had been in the works for months. It involved more than 200 fighter planes dropping ordnance on 100 targets<\/a>, wiping out command and control centers, killing several Iranian military commanders as well as top nuclear scientists, and damaging the vital uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.<\/p>\n

Soon after the air raids began, Israel\u2019s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that this was only the first phase of attacks that could go on for days or weeks, for as long as it takes to destroy Iran\u2019s ability to threaten Israel\u2019s survival. He called the campaign Operation Rising Lion<\/a>\u2014a symbol of victory and divine protection in Hebrew mythology. Later in the day Friday, Israel\u2019s attacks on Iran had reportedly resumed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Trump had urged Netanyahu<\/a> not to launch this attack as long as his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, was engaged in talks to dismantle Iran\u2019s nuclear program through diplomacy. Witkoff and his Iranian counterparts were scheduled to hold their sixth round of talks in Oman this Sunday<\/a>. Just hours before the attack began, Trump still publicly held out the possibility that the talks would succeed\u2014though he also allowed that the prospects seemed dimmer than he\u2019d thought a couple of weeks earlier<\/a>. On Wednesday, he ordered the evacuation<\/a> of nonessential U.S. personnel from Iraq as well as American military families from bases throughout the Middle East. He did this in anticipation of a possible Iranian attack, which would presumably be launched in retaliation to an Israeli attack on Iran. Some took Trump\u2019s order as a bluff\u2014part of a ploy to frighten Iran into accepting stiff demands, which it had previously rejected, in the talks. It turned out not to be a bluff. More than that, Israel launched the attack two days before the talks were set to resume.<\/p>\n

It is not yet known whether Israel took this step without Trump\u2019s consent\u2014which would have been all but unprecedented in the history of U.S.\u2013Israel relations. Soon after the attack, Marco Rubio<\/a>, who holds the dual hats of secretary of state and national security adviser, issued a statement calling the attack \u201cunilateral,\u201d claiming that the U.S. had no involvement in it, and urging Iran not to attack American targets as part of its very likely retaliation\u2014as firm a distancing from Israel\u2019s actions as one could imagine.<\/p>\n

However, Trump told the Wall Street Journal<\/a> that he knew all about Israel\u2019s plan ahead of time, that he wasn\u2019t given a mere \u201cheads-up.\u201d It isn\u2019t yet known whether Trump gave Netanyahu a full green light, but it does seem that he didn\u2019t flash a red light, as he had done a month earlier.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Fred Kaplan
\n How Trump’s Iran Deal Efforts Fell Apart and How We Got Here
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, speculated on CNN late Thursday night that Trump\u2019s public plans to proceed with Sunday\u2019s talks in Oman may have been part of a ruse in order to keep Iran off guard, so the attack would be a surprise. Dennis Ross<\/a>, another experienced Middle East hand, agreed. Iran\u2019s military chiefs and top scientists probably would have taken cover, had they expected an attack was coming. Air-defense crews might also have gone on alert; instead, not a single Israeli plane was downed.<\/p>\n

One question, which will no doubt be examined in the days to come, is whether Trump knew about the timing of the attack. He was still saying, just hours before, that he preferred to let diplomacy play out before Israel drew the military card. Even if he knew about Israel\u2019s plan (almost certainly true), did he know about when it was going to occur\u2014did he know Netanyahu was going to attack before the talks? That is, was Trump in on the ruse? If so, it makes him an unreliable partner to anyone wanting to engage him in sensitive arms control talks in the future. (This is one reason, among many, that Iran is likely to scoff at his plea, issued Friday morning, to return to the negotiating table and \u201cmake a deal<\/a>\u201d before Israel inflicts still greater damage.) If not, it suggests that Trump is unable to control even his closest ally.<\/p>\n

What happens next? If Iran does retaliate with greater force, Trump will almost certainly help Israel shoot down<\/a> the incoming missiles, drones, or planes. (This would be true of just about any American president.) In other words, the U.S. will inevitably become involved in the war.<\/p>\n

Last year, when Israel and Iran exchanged missile volleys, other countries\u2014including Britain, France, and Jordan<\/a>\u2014also got involved in Israel\u2019s defense. It\u2019s uncertain, given that Israel started this round of the war, whether they will all participate again. If not, more of Iran\u2019s missiles will break through. If some of Iran\u2019s weapons kill Americans in Israel, Trump will be pressured to get involved in the war still more directly. The Iranians surely know this, and it may deter them from mounting such attacks, but rational thinking doesn\u2019t always prevail when passions swell and survival instincts turn desperate.<\/p>\n

None of this would likely have happened if during his first term Trump hadn\u2019t scuttled the Iran nuclear deal, which President Barack Obama and the leaders of five other nations\u2014Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China\u2014had signed with Iran back in 2015. The deal called for Iran to dismantle its nuclear program, in exchange for which the other countries would lift most (though not all) of the economic sanctions against Iran. The deal was working. By the time Trump withdrew from it in 2018, Iran had exported 97 percent of its enriched uranium, dismantled its plutonium reprocessing plant, and taken all the other steps required, including opening up its facilities to very intrusive verification procedures by international inspectors.<\/p>\n

Trump said at the time that he hoped to negotiate a \u201cbetter\u201d deal with Iran, but in fact, there was no such thing to be had. For a year, Iranians sought other ways to lift the sanctions, which had been restored, to no avail. So they set about rebuilding their nuclear program. Until today\u2019s strikes, \u00a0they were closer to building an atomic bomb than ever before.<\/p>\n

A deal might have been made even now, except that Trump insisted that any agreement must prohibit Iran from enriching any uranium at all. Iranians demanded that they be allowed to enrich enough uranium for civil purposes, such as electrical power\u2014and their case was compelling. (At various points in the last few months, even Trump has gone back<\/a> and forth<\/a> on whether to permit this.) The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty<\/a>\u2014written by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s<\/a>, entered into international law in 1970, and signed since by 190 nations, including Iran\u2014not only permits signatories to enrich uranium at very low levels, it enshrines this privilege as a right, and it requires nuclear-weapons states to assist them in obtaining the technology. Iranians argued a decade ago that they shouldn\u2019t be barred from an activity that the rest of the world was allowed as a right. Obama and the other negotiators, who initially pressed for an enrichment ban as well, conceded the argument, in part because they realized there would be no accord if they didn\u2019t do so.<\/p>\n

Given how much further the Iranians have been enriching uranium in the decade since Trump pulled out of the deal\u2014in other words, given the stronger deck of cards that Iran held (to put it in terms that Trump should understand<\/a>)\u2014it was fantasy to expect them not only to dismantle their nuclear program but also to give up enrichment altogether.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, Iran holds a much weaker hand, and it may be that accepting any sort of deal would be better than getting hit with the next several rounds of Israeli strikes. But for Iran to take such a deal would be tantamount to surrender\u2014it\u2019s the kind of demand that only a defeated power might accept after the end of a war\u2014and no leader, least of all the ayatollah, who calls himself the Supreme Leader, endowed with holy mandates, could do that and remain in power.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu no doubt knows this, which is why it\u2019s a fair inference that having launched Operation Rising Lion, he will push for the goal of his dreams\u2014the dismantlement of the Iranian regime. This could be accomplished in one of two ways, at least theoretically: the overthrow from within, as rebels realize the country\u2019s tattered military can no longer protect them, or more direct means. Whether or not this plan succeeds is another question. The regime is not popular with large segments of Iran\u2019s people, especially the educated urban population, yet foreign military intervention is less popular still<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that, whatever Iran decides to do, it enters this new stage of its venom-drenched relation with Israel\u2014dating back to the Islamic Revolution in 1979\u2014in a staggeringly weak state.<\/p>\n

In the past, Israel has been reluctant to attack Iran directly because Tehran\u2019s proxies along Israel\u2019s borders\u2014Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and various militias in Syria\u2014could retaliate with intense force, at very close range, on Iran\u2019s behalf. Over the last year, Israel has pretty much wiped out Hezbollah, decimated Hamas, and witnessed the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, Iran\u2019s ally, in Syria. Also, in October, during its last missile volleys with Iran, Israel destroyed the air defense systems protecting Iran\u2019s nuclear plants, air bases, and military infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu may have pushed for the attack now because he saw it as the last chance to get in a clean, massive hit before Iran reconstituted its air defenses.<\/p>\n

It is also the case that, especially since Trump started his negotiations two months ago, Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment program, to the point where it could achieve \u201cweapons-grade\u201d uranium in a few weeks. As Netanyahu admitted in his TV address Friday morning, it would take several months, possibly a year, for Iran to fashion the uranium into a weapon, but once the uranium was out of the reactors and into the various \u201cweaponization\u201d facilities spread out across the country, they would make for harder targets.<\/p>\n

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    And it\u2019s possible that Netanyahu feared Trump would actually make a deal with Iran, one that allowed some enrichment. This would actually be a reasonable outcome, possibly a good one, if it was coupled with tight inspections and other restrictions. This would also have made Trump\u2019s nuclear deal closely resemble Obama\u2019s\u2014which Trump has several times lambasted (incorrectly) as \u201cthe worst deal in history<\/a>\u201d and which the Israeli leader loathed.<\/p>\n

    For this reason, perhaps it was always unlikely that Trump would do a deal. Then again, having failed to end the Russia\u2013Ukraine war, to make more than one trade deal (much less the 99 that he promised to make in his first 99 days), or to make any of his threatened tariffs stick, Trump may have been desperate for some kind of win\u2014and Netanyahu, who has always opposed any kind of deal with Iran, fearing that it would draw Tehran into the international community, may have been fearful of just that.<\/p>\n

    Israeli officials said Friday morning that they acted now because they saw a \u201cwindow of opportunity<\/a>,\u201d militarily and diplomatically.<\/p>\n

    If all goes as Netanyahu hopes, Rising Lion might be seen internally and by Israel\u2019s allies as a bold, triumphant move that removes the final sources of the country\u2019s existential threats for years to come. If things don\u2019t pan out that way, it could mean an intensification of the wars that have embroiled the region\u2014and could now draw in the United States as well.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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