The victory of the military option
I do not recall a season in which so many of the brightest minds spent so much time philosophizing about the concept of victory. The days of victory are over, Ben-Dror Yemini wrote. Naftali Bennett fired the first shot: Netanyahu does not know how to win. Nahum Barnea also weighed in this week on the subject of victory. They talk about it a lot on the federal channels. Where were they over the past 20 years?
In Iran's case, victory is the outcome. The ceasefire will hold. One problem will remain, and that is the lack of enough reliable information about the significance of the enriched uranium in Iran's possession. But they no longer have the capability to develop nuclear weapons.
The fact that a weakened mechanism remains, one still capable of firing a missile at Israeli civilians or at one of the Gulf states from time to time, does not diminish the victory. Not much is left of the Iranian state. According to an IDF source, the Israeli Air Force and intelligence agencies eliminated dozens upon dozens of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and thousands of the organization's terrorists. The mission for which we gathered was accomplished. Maybe not completed, but accomplished. The criterion is very simple: does Iran still have the ability to move forward toward obtaining a nuclear weapon, and does it still have a missile-launching capability that creates deterrence? Missile-based deterrence means that the US and Israel would give up the military option entirely. Those basic capabilities were taken away from Iran. Its missile-production capabilities were destroyed, so it is less important how many missiles it still has in its hands. The Iranians agreed to a ceasefire because of Trump's threats, but they did not surrender.
What happened was that two unique leaders made a courageous decision. From Israel's standpoint, the decision Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to launch "Rising Lion," and to launch "Roaring Lion," was the boldest and most courageous decision since the War of Independence.
Iran's missile wall has been greatly depleted, and Iran's entire nuclear production system has been neutralized. Official Israeli sources are not willing to speak about the achievements in this field or about what still remains to be done. But even without knowing what is happening with the 450 kilograms of enriched uranium, at this stage Iran has no ability to produce a nuclear device. Every production line, every part and component, and the entire manufacturing chain, from the factories and laboratories in which Iran advanced toward a bomb, was destroyed. Trump did not carry out his threat to destroy the energy facilities, but under cover of those threats Israel did a great deal on that front, chiefly the destruction of the petrochemical industries.
The important thing is this: the two leaders broke the barrier of reluctance to use a military option against a nuclear threat. Twice. The Carter-Obama legacy is out. The Trump-Bibi legacy is in.
The Pyongyang test
Perhaps the most positive and meaningful sign is the report that North Korea is distancing itself from Iran. For many years people said that Iran's distance from the bomb was the flight distance between Pyongyang and Tehran. Now it turns out that the North Koreans are getting the impression that with the late Khamenei, and with the nearly late Khamenei, the ceiling is lying on the floor. In objective, matter-of-fact terms, North Korea and its path to nuclear weapons are the model for assessing the joint US-Israeli campaign. There were only a few analysts in the US who bothered to analyze the history of the North Korean nuclear affair. They pointed to the dual process in which the North Koreans, between negotiations and agreement, between joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and withdrawing from it, crept through the 1990s toward nuclear capability. It was all in the same style we later came to know from Iran. At the same time, the North Koreans built a massive artillery force that directly threatened, at relatively close range, the South Korean capital of Seoul. A decision to strike North Korea's nuclear facilities meant the destruction of Seoul.
At a certain point, President Bill Clinton concluded that the military route had to be taken, and the Americans prepared a military operation to destroy North Korea's nuclear program. But then the destructive figure of the late President Jimmy Carter entered the scene. Taking advantage of a standing invitation from Pyongyang, he flew there on his own initiative to meet North Korea's leaders and cut a deal with them. The dubious agreement Carter engineered like a modern-day Chamberlain caused Clinton to back away from the military option. The end is known. In 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush, North Korea detonated its first nuclear device. According to assessments, North Korea today has about 50 atomic bombs.
Through his North Korean operation, Carter became the godfather of two regimes of terror: the ayatollahs and the Kims. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will be remembered as the men who chose a path opposite to that of Carter, Obama and Clinton: to sever Iran's military buildup in the Middle East and its path to the bomb. That buildup took place alongside long years of negotiations, reluctance and avoidance of military action, and a preference for the 2015 nuclear deal. It is clear that Iran will be finally and fully stripped of its nuclear ambitions only when the regime is replaced. But even what was achieved is enough. More than enough for an Independence Day parade of Netanyahu's shoe-shiners, joined by all his detractors and all those who have thrown sticks in the wheels.
Lost Guards
Day and night, nonstop, the "metro trains," as they are known, went out along the aerial routes to hunt the launchers and return again to carry out the grueling mission of sealing the missile tunnels. Across vast Iran there are about 20 launch sites. A metro train is usually made up of four to 12 aircraft, and this is their standing mission. Based on intelligence, the circle is closed and the launcher is destroyed, or the Iranian effort to clear the blockages on the deep tunnels protecting the missiles is foiled.
According to the standard Israeli Air Force calculation, the output is as follows: about 200 launchers were destroyed in plain sight, or their destruction was verified through intelligence. Another 150 launchers are sealed inside tunnels, and about 150 are roaming outside, as of the beginning of the week.
The Americans speak in terms of some 5,000 missiles. That may also include short-range missiles that threaten only the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. From Israel's standpoint, the relevant number is about 2,000. It is difficult to know how many were fired and how many were destroyed. According to an IDF source, the operational output was 10 or 20 times greater than in "Like a Lion." The sense I heard from an IDF source was that if Trump decides, as he in fact did decide, that he is ending the war and everyone is going home, it is something one can live with. On the eve of the ceasefire, the picture was that the list of targets was being rebuilt all the time, and there was ostensibly still more work to do. Trump, with his declarations about destroying the energy facilities, in effect gave Israel legitimacy, and it indeed struck parts of the energy industry. The Americans struck on Kharg Island. That is a severe blow to Iranian revenues. Trump's decision not to carry out the threat spares the Iranian people a great deal of suffering and should keep the civilians on our side.
It may be that the most significant blow has been to the physical strength of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In the first weeks, the Israeli Air Force struck the Guards' headquarters and hit nearly all of the senior leadership. As a result, midlevel commanders, from captains to colonels, scattered in every direction simply so they would not be concentrated in one place. With the help of extremely high-quality intelligence, that midlevel command echelon was also eliminated. They began operating while hiding in safe apartments. Then they were taken out one by one in pinpoint strikes, in the safe houses from which they were operating. In addition to those successes, thousands of Revolutionary Guards fighters were also eliminated. The severe American strikes on Revolutionary Guards strongholds at the end of last week, during the search for the American navigator, are causing a further significant weakening of this apparatus of darkness.
In the Lebanese thicket
At the start of the week, Prosper Azran, the man from Kiryat Shmona, published a very harsh Facebook post. The implication of his remarks is that the IDF has failed in its handling of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization. After more than a month of activity against the terrorist organization, Kiryat Shmona and the frontline communities should at least have been partially freed from the nonstop fire, and it is hard to understand why that did not happen. In any case, the result is far short of the expectations created by Northern Command before the confrontation began. The remarks made by the head of Northern Command in a conversation with residents of Misgav Am also projected weakness. First they said there was no air force. Then they said Hezbollah was stronger than we thought.
But there is an air force. It knows how to allocate the necessary air power. A great many assets are assigned to the north, and cooperation is excellent, the IDF says. Yet in order to thwart the launches, there are launch zones that have to be reached on foot. Hezbollah is indeed taking extremely hard blows. Many senior figures and terrorists have been eliminated, and the organization is in the worst condition it has ever been in. And yet it is functioning at a level that is causing severe distress in the northern communities. Israel is still operating by means of "applying pressure" and is not carrying out a decisive move to bring the campaign to an end.
