Here's why Iran missile strike against Israel was another strategic blunder

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Netanyahu said Israel should be supported as it tries to reshape the Middle East in positive ways

With hindsight, Iran made a major strategic blunder back in April, when it fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, only to see virtually all of them shot down or fail. Tuesday’s barrage, smaller in number but more potent, looks like another mistake.

Iran’s leaders had hoped to restore deterrence that had clearly failed earlier in April, when Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers were killed. Tehran’s response aimed to demonstrate power, without inflicting casualties that might force a potentially overwhelming Israeli retaliation.

The intended message was clear — we don’t want a real war, but if it comes to one, look what we can do. And yet the attack projected weakness instead. It showed Israel that Iran lacked either the capability or the willingness to hit back hard. The Israeli retaliation that followed — a single precision strike that destroyed air defense assets near an Iranian nuclear site — left no doubt as to Israel’s capabilities or intent.

 

Since then, the clerics in Tehran have had to look on as Israel decapitated and degraded Hezbollah, the most powerful asset in their so-called Axis of Resistance. As one Hezbollah commander after another was killed, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general was severely injured, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed while in Tehran, no less. Iranian leaders talked big about punishment, and then sat on their hands.

But the bunker-busting strike on Hezbollah’s Beirut headquarters that killed the group’s charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and yet another top IRGC general, was too much to ignore. The alternative was to be dismissed as a paper tiger, not just in the Arab world — as was already happening — but among its Axis clients and, worst of all, at home. For an unpopular, repressive regime that preaches revolution in the name of God, ridicule and perceived weakness can be fatal.

Early reports suggest that while many missiles were again shot down, more broke through Israel’s air defenses this time, which is as you would expect; there were no days of elaborate signaling beforehand, allowing Israel and its allies to prepare. The barrage also consisted of an estimated 200 ballistic missiles, which are much faster than the cruise missiles and drones that predominated in April. According to analysis by  Fabian Hinz, a defense research fellow at London's Institute for International and Strategic Studies, the ballistic missiles used  on Tueday were also more modern and sophisticated models than before.

 Yet Tuesday night’s volley seems likely to prove an even bigger mistake.

There were no immediate reports of fatalities, although two men armed with an assault rifle and a knife killed at least six innocent people in an apparently opportunistic terrorist attack in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. So if this Iranian attempt was aimed once again at restoring deterrence, without provoking the kind of state-on-state war it was unlikely to win, it was clearly a failure and a sign that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hasn’t been paying attention.

Israel’s official government Twitter feeds, from the foreign ministry to the Israel Defense Forces, were quick to stress that Iran’s missiles were targeting 10 million civilians. One picture of missiles flying high over Jerusalem’s holy places suggested they, too, were on Tehran’s hit list, even as their trajectory made clear they weren’t. The IDF’s spokesman promised significant retaliation. What form that now takes will be critical.

Israel has no choice but to respond, Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, told me, as soon as the barrage had ended. This time he expected it to be swift, and on a much larger scale than in April. It may be that nobody was killed in Tuesday’s ballistic missile attack, he said, “but this is not a video game.” Besides, Iran’s second miscalculation presents Israel with an opportunity it’s unlikely to resist.

The IDF can now force an even more acute dilemma on the Iranian regime. A bigger Israeli missile attack will destroy more assets and be much more publicly visible than April’s. Dismissing Israel’s drones as toys, as regime officials did last time, won’t work. Khamenei and his generals will have to decide whether to do nothing, and lose still more credibility and deterrence power, or risk a potentially disastrous war that could even draw in the US, by striking back.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has laid out his rationale for seizing this kind of opportunity. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, he said Israel should be supported as it tries to reshape the Middle East in positive ways, and that the road runs through the defeat of Iran’s clerics and their axis of proxies.

He painted a compelling picture. Israel is clearly having a lot of military success right now and Iran’s regime is without question a malign force for its people and the region alike. The temptation to press current advantages home may prove overwhelming. Moreover, Nasrallah’s death has stirred a chorus of support in Israel and among hawks in Washington — if not from President Joe Biden — to back him in finally dealing with Iran.

And yet previous attempts to reshape the Middle East haven’t gone so well, including those that featured an initial shock-and-awe military success; think back to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. This will be different, of course, because there would be no boots on the ground — at least in Iran itself. Yet how a policy of escalating to deescalate actually unfolds would still be difficult to control. “Reckless, just reckless,” is how Barbara Slavin, a skeptic and Middle East expert at the Washington-based Stimson Center, put it to me.

Reckless, Churchillian or both, the decisions that will shape both US actions and the course of the Middle East are now, as so often lately, squarely in the hands of Israel’s Netanyahu.

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Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper