redlightning
Banned
What if during the Iran nuclear crisis, Israel engaged in unilateral action to bomb and destroy it's facilities, even as the US is involved in Iraq? How would the global reaction be?
It wouldn't have come off.
Iran's nuclear facilities were distributed to somewhere between a dozen and thirty sites, hardened, with redundancies. They were all outside the range of Isaeli warplanes and bombers, and to have made an impact, they would have had to have bombed on a Desert Storm scale.
Which is the same situation that you have now.
What if during the Iran nuclear crisis, Israel engaged in unilateral action to bomb and destroy it's facilities, even as the US is involved in Iraq? How would the global reaction be?
If and it's a big IF the Israel's gained hard intel on an Iranian nuclear program about to succeed and the world stood by and did nothing they would do one of two things .
1. use their Air Force on flight that would be so risky they would have nearly no chance of success.
2. Use a combination of Cruise missiles from their submarines and either conventional or nuclear missiles from the Negev desert .
The only other possibility is to await the first terrorist nuc incident or Iranian missile launch at them .
There is no credible case to be made that any nuclear party is just going to hand a nuclear weapon over to a non-state actor of dubious stability. That's just not going to happen.
And there is no likelihood that Iran would, unprovoked, launch a nuclear weapon by missile.
Nuclear war though could conceivably break out by accident, if a military confrontation between Iranian and Israeli forces escalated rapidly and spiralled out of control. The danger isn't really the Ayatollahs going nuts, it's more Able Archer or the Indo-Pakistani border.
I guess we all need to keep an eye on the Israel-Iran Border.
There are Iranian military units active in Lebanon and Syria. It's not likely, but things could escalate.
Not unless Israel allies with ISIL
but these are two countries that do not get along,
Which is, more than anything, a sign that there's really no overlap or conflict in interests that would require them to talk to each other.do not have any clear diplomatic contacts (like the USSR and US did)
On the other hand, Iran hasn't actually attacked anyone for a few hundred years, and the only recent war it was in was one that Saddam Hussein started.and are both run by regimes with gigantic chips on their shoulder who use apocalyptic rhetoric.
In any event, we're getting a bit afield here.
The OP is that Israel attacks Iran in the 2000's. I think our mutual verdict is that the attack fails and the blowback is fierce.
At some point, it's going to be rolled back, likely predominantly by Iranian and Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.
Yeah, pretty much. Unless they go nuclear (which, unless we've somehow put Meir Kahane in charge is not happening), airstrikes will fail to do much damage, will kill scores of Israeli pilots, and will cause the region to go up in flames.
A former Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, revealed new details to his biographers about how close Israel came to striking Iran’s military facilities in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and why it did not despite his and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to do so, according to interview excerpts aired on Israeli television Friday night.
Mr. Barak, who also previously served as Israel’s prime minister, said that he and Mr. Netanyahu were ready to attack Iran each year but that in 2010, the military chief of staff said Israel lacked the “operational capability”; in 2011, two key ministers waffled at the last minute; and in 2012, the timing did not work out because of a joint United States-Israel military exercise and visit by the American defense secretary. He noted that the two ministers who balked in 2011, Moshe Yaalon and Yuval Steinitz, “are the most militant about attacking Iran” today.
So they didn't really come all that close; the politicians were interested, but the military demured and politics got in the way; its a bit of bluster, it could never have come off and would have been intensely stupid and death of their political careers and likely the US-Israeli alliance, not to mention everyone's economy.Actually, Israel almost did attack Iran in 2010, 2011, and 2012, it was just reported yesterday.
- The NYT
in 2010, the military chief of staff said Israel lacked the “operational capability”;[/quote[
That says it all right there. There sure as hell isn't going to be any handwavium of operational capabilities in 2011 and 2012.
And throwing the United States under a bus, probably not a good idea anyway.