Three events took place recently that have changed my view of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
For years now, I have answered the war-mongers and headline-grabbers who have gleefully touted impending Israeli airstrikes on Iran with caution. I have stated, with reason and facts in support, that Israel has demonstrated repeatedly that it has many ways of slowing down Iran’s nuclear weapons programs short of a kinetic military strike.
Why take the risk of airstrikes, which all the world will see, when you can slow down the program by other means that in addition are difficult to pin on Israel?
For example: for many years, under Mossad director Meir Dagan, Israel carried out targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear weapon scientists, acts that presumably had a deterrent effect on younger scientists joining the programs.
Israel collaborated with the United States in inserting computer viruses inside Iran’s uranium enrichment plants, causing high-speed centrifuges to crash and probably explode, leading to clean-up operations and repairs that set back the program by months and possibly years.
Israel also carried out the most audacious human intelligence operation in the history of modern espionage by locating Iran’s top secret nuclear archive in a nondescript suburb of Tehran, penetrating the building, breaking multiple bank vaults inside, and spiriting away hundreds of boxes of documents that detailed Iran’s lies to UN nuclear inspectors about its intentions. For well over a year, the Iranians had no clue that they had been penetrated– until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed the documents to the world at the UN General Assembly in New York.
But good – even great – intelligence operations have their limits. Great intelligence could never have stopped Hitler’s blitzkrieg into Poland. Once he had the tanks and the troops and had trained them in operations, Hitler could only be met with force.
Last week, we learned from the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Raphael Grossi, that Iran now has enough 60% enriched uranium to manufacture three or four bombs, should it choose to put that material into the final (and very short) enrichment phase to reach weapons capacity.
For months, unofficial experts, such as former IAEA inspector David Albright, have been warning that Iran was reaching such a threshold. But it’s one thing for a think tank to speculate on official information, with all its gaps. It’s quite another for the source of that information – in this case, the IAEA director – to make such a statement in his official capacity.
In the thirty-five years I have been tracking Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, which I write about in my latest book: And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies – this is the first time I have heard the IAEA make such a bold statement about Iran. Normally it’s all weasel words and schoomarm warnings to proliferators to mend their ways.
Grossi’s statement did not fall on deaf ears in Israel. Former Israeli Navy chief Vice Admiral (ret.) Eliezer “Chiney” Marom told an Israeli television network on Jan. 26 that this latest information showed that Iran had become a “threshold” nuclear weapons state.Iran has turned off IAEA surveillance cameras and Israel has limited insight into its nuclear weaponry group, he said. “And when those two will be close one to the other, the moment to jump from threshold to holding nuclear weapons will be very, very short… and therefore I think the time to attack….means in the coming year.”
Marom made sure his statement was crystal clear. “We have to stop this program and sooner is better than later,” he said.
Also last week, the U.S. and Israel conducted their first-ever joint military exercise to test the interoperability of their air-land-sea-and intelligence capabilities, Juniper Oak 2023. While they did not explicitly demonstrate an attack on Iran, watching Israeli and U.S. fighter jets line up in delta formation behind B-52s sent a clear message to the mullahs in Tehran.
(The U.S. and Israeli militaries have held Juniper Oak exercises for the past twenty years, but never on this scale and never to test interoperability).
I have long been worried what the response of the Biden administration would be to an Israeli strike on Iran. The fact that the two countries carried out military exercises clearly crafted to send a message to Tehran eases those concerns, despite the ongoing love-affair of Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan with the mullahs of Tehran.
Anyone remember the policy debate following President Trump’s decision to take-out Iranian terror-master Qassem Suleymani, the diabolical and charismatic head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force?
The pundits were wringing their hands, and Cassandras of all sexes were bewailing the impact of Iranian regime counter-strikes.
I was asked my opinion of the Iranian regime’s reaction to a (then) hypothetical U.S. strike against Suleymani, and I told my government interlocutors: hit them hard, as hard as you can, and they will do nothing.
That was the lesson of Operation Praying Mantis, when in 1988 President Reagan sank one-third of the Iranian navy and attacked vital Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf in response to Iranian aggression against international shipping.
A nuclear-armed Iran is a far greater threat than the terrorist wasp that attacked us in the 1988. The time to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is now. The U.S. needs to lead the charge and ensure that it is effective. With the benefit of first-rate Israeli intelligence and deep-penetration U.S. weapons, together we can knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, possibly for good.
Kenneth Timmerman was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize by former Swedish deputy premier Per Ahlmark in 2006 for his work on Iran. His latest book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, was published by Post Hill Press.]
For years I have been hearing that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear state. That being said how come they have not bought nuclear weapons from other nuclear powers? If they want to destroy the United States and Israel so badly why not just purchase the means from other rogue powers?
Don’t forget that Israel did the world a huge favor by finding and assassinating Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – Iran’s top nuclear scientist.
(I’m sure the bitch Ilhan Omar disagrees.)
Israel should do whatever whenever and however it is necessary to take out the Iranian unclear threat
Please, please, please bomb the H–l out of them.
Remind our country what good people do when faced with evil.
Hear, hear! 🍻
(I hope Israel does to those scumbags what *Biden fantasizes about doing to us at a schoolboard meeting.)
Given their hesitation in dealing with a. Chinese surveillance balloon, I have no confidence the US military is willing to go after Iran’s nuclear project.
I say Israel should bomb Iran back into the stone age. Check THIS out > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDO_xVL1lAg
I think the Biden maladministration has no intention of participating in, or allowing Israel to engage in, a strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It is just jollying Israel along until Iran crosses the nuclear threshold at which point it will say, “Too late. Iran’s now a nuclear power and a strike would present too many dangers. Good luck to you, Israel. You’re on your own.”
The US has stolen and passed along Israel’s signals before to help the Muslims in wartime.
Yes, during the Hussein Obama administration. But Israel has always been on its own, and the US, its allegedly greatest ally, has proven fickle and arrogant from the start. Israel knows this, and one hopes that it will do what it has to to protect itself and its people regardless of what the US — and the world — says.
Israel has every ethical and practical to bomb be it nuclear armed missile production and other deadly weapons manufacturing stations in the aggressive and hostile “mullah regime” of Iran that have intention of destroying the Jewish State of Israel.
Therefore, Israel is right and righteous and just a strike force in self-defense.
As the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, wisely, had declared “The right to self-defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals.”
If Israel attacks Iran it might just destabilize the Mullah regime. That would be a great gain for the Iranian people.
That fiendish President of Iran ,Raisi in power in that tyrannical Islamic regime of Iran it’s now a rather appropriate time to bring out the fact that if the founder of the current Islamic tyranny ,Ayatollah Khomeini would still be alive today ,he would spit on those Westerners who say that “Islam is a non-violent religion.
For as Ayatollah Khomeini had clearly announced that “Those who know nothing about Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war….There are hundreds psalms and hadiths urging of Muslims to value war and to fight. …I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” [1] So if he was alive today who would spit on those Westerners who say that “Islam is a non-violent religion.”
There are also many places in the Qu ‘ran that instruct in violence and killing for the cause of Islam.
As found in ,for example Surah 2:191. 4:89.. 5:33. 9:5, 111,112 ,123. 47:4.
[1] THE ISLAM IN ISLAMIC TERRORISM by Ibn Warraq page 339.
Israel must bear in mind the power behind the Biden administration is OBAMA, an imposter President ( NOT a born American but a Kenyan ) schooled by a Communist husband and wife in Chicago when got into America via Hawaii as a teenager , is a Muslim, as said on Egyptian Tv when in that country, never got HIS Agreement with Iran signed by them nor approved by the Senate and NO friend of ISRAEL !
Only one other country ever announced that it intended to rid itself and neighboring countries of Jews. The world didn’t didn’t believe it. Not until they discovered the monumental production line of death that the NAZIs created and maintained right up to the end of the war.
The Dictator of Iran and his round table of sociopaths has stated that Israel will be removed from the planet. I think we should take Iran at its word.
Send in 3,000 cruise missiles to remove the leadership- all of them- and their Guards, and then send in Wild Weasels to remove the anti-aircraft batteries, then send in 500 bunker-buster armed B-52, B-2 bombers with 500 fighter escorts to seal the atomic labs for the next 100 years.
With the leadership gone and with the Guards gone, the Iranian people will take back their country. Let’s help them as soon as possible.
Dream on. I cannot imagine an American administration that would have the cojones to do that, not even Donald Trump. That kind of thinking and action unfortunately went out of fashion by 1955.
The IAEA hasn’t been able to inspect all Iran’s nuclear sites or centrifuges. It’s just a matter of time before Iran decide to go ballistic, and look at Putin as well with this threats. I believe that God will Guide Israel, the pieces of the puzzle are coming together, we are definitely in End Times with possibility of nuclear war ramping up, and very depraved leaders at the helm. It’s the Convergence of The Axis of Evil. President Reagan knew all about this, and it’s now. a reality. Thats why he spoke of Star Wars Technology to take out ICBMS before they reached their target.
Airstrikes, targeted assassinations, poisonings, bb guns, bow and arrow, nukes, crocodiles, turn lions loose. All the above. I say do it all to the “mullahs” and their flying monkey hoard.
The world is now involved in an ongoing conflict between the countries in which there is respect for freedom and individual rights, primarily America and Israel although one might include a few other G7 nations, and countries such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, which are outright slave states and which do everything they can to destroy freedom and individual rights. The Israelis should bomb Iran’s nuclear capacity and destroy it utterly. Anything else risks nukes in the hands of the vicious, nasty degenerates who run Iran. Biden and his merry band of fellow dealers in socialist poison will probably make things more difficult for Israel but the Israelis should ignore them and act as a matter of survival.
The Iranians and their Demonic leadership MUST be Stopped, period. MOST so called fit Ben Franklin’s excellent quote: WE are all born ignorant , but must work hard to remain STUPIDS.. T Roosevelt said,” Speak Softly and carry a BIG Stick.”
MOST diplomates love the chatter but are fearful of the FORCE when necessary. #46 is a Puppet. He does not make decisions but listen to a GAGGLE of Anti-AMERICAN HATERS.l.
Iran will NOT change. IRAN is EVIL. Iran should not be allowed to go NUCLEAR.l
DOESA? #46 have the COURAGE and STRENGTH to do what is necessary and RIGHT? The time is NOW.
Thank you for your dedication and support Mr. Timmerman!
america cant even work out whether they should shoot down a balloon , with dementia joe at the helm the only threat he and the woke military are concerned about is orange man and his supporters . the left are authoritarian as are muslims , strange bedfellows . now that the congress is infested with muslims the only place america is going is just like the titanic , straight to the bottom .
Israel will continue with its pin prick strikes and raids which is a way of saying something is being done while nothing is done.
Ive been hearing about this issue for decades now, with Iran perpetually on the brink of “breakout within months”.
Israel will have to learn to live with a nuclear Iran.
The Word of the Lord against Iran. Its coming.
PROPHET JEREMIAH 39:35 Judgment on Iran. The LORD says….. “Behold, I will break the bow of Elam, The foremost of their might.” (The something that is angering the Lord is related to Elam wanting to launch something against somebody.) Elam is part of Iran today, and thats the area where Iran’s nuclear facilities are located.
The Lord is fiercely angry with Elam because of the bad leadership from the Ayatollahs. Elam is Iran today. Iran has one of the most repressive regimes in the world.