Small Wars Journal

'Green light' for an 'air raid' is not enough

Tue, 07/07/2009 - 1:52pm
Has Israel received a "green light" from both the U.S. and Saudi governments to execute an air raid on Iran's nuclear complex? Those were stories that came out over the weekend, one from a television interview of Vice President Biden and the second from The Times that reported that the Saudi government had given permission to the Israeli air force to overfly Saudi Arabia en route to Iran.

Since Monday, the Obama administration has made a somewhat confusing attempt to walk back Mr. Biden's statements. As for the alleged Saudi "green light," I will say more in a moment.

Destroying the Iranian nuclear complex will require not an "air raid" but a prolonged air campaign. Those who have in mind Israel's 1981 strike on Iraq's reactor at Tuwaitha and the 2007 strike against Syria's reactor at Dayr az-Zawr do not appreciate the scope and dispersion of Iran's nuclear complex. As this report from Brookings explains (see chapters four and five), destroying Iran's nuclear complex requires attacking dozens of targets amounting to many hundreds of bomb aim points. Since many of these facilities are hardened and defended, the air campaign target list would necessarily extend to Iran's leadership, command and control, air defense, and communications systems. This would likely extend the bomb aim point list into the thousands. Israel has very few aircraft with the range necessary to reach these targets. Thus, on paper, and with conventional munitions, it would take weeks for Israel to service the target list.

It strains credulity to believe, as The Times reported, that the Saudi government has given a "green light" to this concept, at least at this juncture. Once such a campaign had begun, it is impossible to guess which direction it would swirl. Saudi decision-making is too cautious to take this risk.

Under current circumstances an Israeli air campaign against Iran does not seem realistic. For now, Israel's strategy is political, with two elements. First, it is attempting to raise global awareness of the Iranian threat. A second longer-term aspiration may be to achieve some level of coordination with the Sunni Arab states against Iran. The last thing Israel wants is to be left alone with the Iran problem.

POSTSCRIPT

The conventional wisdom is that an air campaign against the Iranian nuclear program would only delay the program for a few years. Most analysts assume that Iran would be able to reconstitute the program within a few years after its destruction.

In his book Fiasco, Tom Ricks discussed the surprising long-term effectiveness of the three-day 1998 Desert Fox air campaign against Iraq's WMD programs. Ricks reported that Iraqi scientists and engineers working on the program were so demoralized by the Desert Fox strikes that Iraq's WMD programs never revived. Ricks discussed Desert Fox in order to demonstrate that containment, sanctions, and an occasional air campaign precluded the need to invade and occupy Iraq.

This is not an argument for an air campaign against Iran. But those who say it is a futile idea will also need to explain why it was not futile in the case of Iraq.

Comments

Fred Talpiot

Sat, 07/11/2009 - 7:43pm

Israel doesn't actually have to bomb it all; Both the yellowcake storage <i>and</i> the centrifuges. One or the other will do. It won't last forever, but Israel can re-bomb every 4 years or so until the Mullahs figure out they're boxed in.

There are more optimistic views on what Iranian facilities would need to be destroyed. Check out "Osirak Redux" in International Security.

Tom F (not verified)

Tue, 07/07/2009 - 7:01pm

Just to refine things... no pun intended... you could actually accomplish much the same effect by striking Iran's oil export terminals and refining capacity.

Hard to run a nuclear program if you have no income to pay for it and that drops the target list down to about 5 major oil export terminals accounting for almost all of their export capacity and nine refineries account for all their capacity.

That drops the target list down to a managable number of very large targets and may actually have the added effect of keeping the Saudi's semi happy as one can imagine what it would do to oil prices.

Greyhawk

Tue, 07/07/2009 - 3:26pm

Whether or not a "green light" has been given will be based on the results of any attack. (And perhaps - with a nod to Desert Fox - on what the headlines would have been otherwise.) Hopefully there will be no such attack and our measured and cautious approach will be validated.

We've also told the govt's of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that we're with them all the way, unless they can't keep the violence down.

Essentially we've gotten away from the sort of absolutism in foreign policy that brought so much condemnation on the previous administration. I'm not sure why there should be any confusion on that point.