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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Wars are unpredictable. Even the Israelis and the Iranians cannot know how their current conflict will end.
However, there are a number of analogies to take into account. The first is the six -day war of 1967. The second is the Iraq war of 2003. A third scenario is a new kind of conflict in which Iran uses unconventional means to return against Israel and the West. This could turn into a hybrid war that may affect terrorism or even weapons of mass destruction.
The Netanyahu government would love a repetition of 1967, in which an Israeli preventive strike destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on site to prepare a quick victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Israel has certainly achieved quick and spectacular early successes in this conflict. But the nuclear program, which is distributed from Iran, a large part of the underground, is much more complicated than the destruction of goals on site.
Some criticismEspecially in the United States, we fear that we will experience a repetition of the early stages of the Iraq war of 2003. This was also supposed to be fought for the prevention of the nuclear distribution, with the background to prevent the regime change. After the first success for the coalition led by the USA, it became a bloody swamp.
However, it is most likely that the Israel Iran War will follow its own way. A scenario in which western security officers affect a desperate Iranian regime that decides to reverse unconventional means.
As a high -ranking political political manufacturer puts it: “The reason why this has not yet been transformed into the Third World War is that Iran has very limited means to reverse conventionally.” Another high-ranking civil servant says that the ability of the Israeli government to continue to fight in this intensity continues to give restrictions, since his country only has a limited “magazine depth” (arms camp in non-jargon).
If the Iranian regime believes that it still takes a bad defeat in a conventional conflict, it would have a difficult choice. The situation could accept the situation and try to stay out of difficulties. Or it could escalate with unconventional means. This threshold is rather crossed when the regime believes that it is about survival and that the Iranian people and the world must demonstrate its strength. Anger and the desire for revenge should also not be underestimated.
In Washington and Brussels there are concerns that the Iranian regime is desperate when it is driven into the tightness.
In the recent past, the United States has accused Iran to have hidden biological and chemical weapons programs. If these fears are correct, Tehran may have the funds to string back to Israeli or American goals in a fatal but dark way.
The international nuclear energy agency has also explained that Iran has a considerable uranium stock that is enriched to 60 percent. It is generally assumed that Tehran would have to achieve an enrichment of 90 percent in order to produce a nuclear weapon. This could be done within days – although the weapon would take much longer.
However, arms experts point out that it is actually possible to design a rough nuclear weapon with an enriched uranium at 60 percent. David Albright and Sarah Burkhard from the Institute for Science and International Security Tank, write That “an enrichment of 60 percent is sufficient to create a relatively compact nuclear explosives; a further enrichment of 80 or 90 percent is not necessary.” This type of weapon is suitable for “delivery by a raw delivery system such as an aircraft, shipping container or a truck that is sufficient to establish Iran as an nuclear power”.
Iran could choose to demonstrate a rough nuclear weapon to make Israel to end the war. Another option is that it could actually trigger a “dirty bomb” – the conventional explosives used to the scattering material. The type of scenario that experts worry about is the use of a ship to detonate a device near the Israeli port of Haifa.
These are the considerations that are weighed – not only by Israel, but by the USA. It is generally assumed that only America has bombs that are powerful enough to have the chance to destroy the underground nuclear system of the Iranian nuclear in Fordow.
There are many in Washington who believe (or fear) that the United States will join a second stage of the bomb campaign to destroy Fordow and end the Iranian nuclear weapons program. But there would be no guarantee that even an attack on Fordu led by America could achieve this. Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, writes: “The truth is that even the Americans cannot delay Iran’s arrival in nuclear weapons by more than a few months.”
Barak argues that the only way to ensure that Iran never becomes nuclear is that the United States and Israel “explain the war against the regime itself until it is depressed”.
But Donald Trump has repeatedly undertaken to be a peace pier and asked Iran and Israel to make a deal. Only last month he gave a pioneering speech in Riad despised The idea that outsiders can bring positive changes to the Middle East through violence. It would be a highest irony – and a terrible political failure – if Trump got into another war against the change of regime in the Middle East.
