Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have produced an extensive and detailed strategic  analysis of Israel’s offensive options regarding a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.   The 114 page study examines in exhaustive detail, all available data on Israel’s offensive capabilities, Iran’s arial defense capacities, Iran’s nuclear technology and the respective long range missile arsenals of both nations.

The report’s conclusion: “A military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities is possible … [but] would be complex and high-risk and would lack any assurances that the overall mission would have a high success rate”.

Complicating any military operation are the following factors:

1. Intelligence regarding underground or secret enrichment facilities is incomplete. As such, the strategic effectiveness of a 100% destruction of  known facilities cannot be precisely determined — since unknown facilities could potentially survive an Israeli strike.
2. Israeli intelligence regarding a completion date for an Iranian weapon is imprecise. Estimates vary between 2009 and 2012.   US intelligence estimates put a completion date closer to 2013.    The date is important because Israeli estimates favor a strike sooner than later.  The window of opportunity may already be closing.  It is widely agreed that no strike can or will occur after Iran has obtained a nuclear weapon.

While issue #2 above raises the question of “when”, it is issue #1 that presents the greater challenge:  Is any strike likely to be effective?

A Partial Strike?

To this question Toukan and Cordesman introduce the scenario of a partial strike:  What if only the three primary sites for nuclear research and refinement were destroyed?  Would there be any effective strategic result from a partial destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities?   The study examines a likely scenario involving the destruction of the installations at Arak (plutonium production), Isfahan (uranium enrichment) and Natanz (heavy water production).  The study estimates that the destruction of these primary facilities would set Iran’s program back by only a few years.

Offensive Requirements

The study estimates that a strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would require at least 90 aircraft in total, including:

1. All 25 F-15E’s
2. Approximately 65 F16I/C’s
3. 5 KC-130H’s for re-fueling
4. 4 B-707’s for re-fueling

Flight Routes

A detailed analysis of potential flight paths concludes that the likely flight path would follow the Syrian/Turkish border, traversing Iraq near it’s northeastern territory into Iran.  Additional flight routes over Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq were also analyzed — and although shorter, include more complex political issues.

We believe these political issues to be overstated in the report due to a shared Iraqi, Jordanian and Saudi fear over a nuclear Iran.

Defense Assessment

First, there are fortification issues at Natanz (The facility is buried 8 meters underground and is fortified with a 2.5 meter thick concrete wall.  The centrifuge facility is buried 25 meters underground and has a protective concrete wall which is at least several meters thick).  Israel possesses over 600 US made “bunker busters” which could be used to penetrate the fortifications — bit the efficacy of bunker busters is mitigated by the necessity for extreme pilot accuracy in deployment.

Secondly, there are there are Iran’s considerable arial defense systems.  These include:

1. Batteries of Hawk SA-5 and SA-2 surface-to-air missiles.
2. Rapier, Crotale and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
3. 1700 anti-aircraft guns directly protecting the strategic targets.
4. Iran’s 158 combat aircraft
5. The S-300V anti-aircraft defense system supplied by Russia to Iran last year.

The latter is a considerable concern as the S-300V is a highly sophisticated, modern anti-aircraft defense system which could potentially eliminate 20% to 30% of Israeli’s strike aircraft.

Collateral Damage

The report also notes that a strike on Bushehr would result in mass deaths due to radioactive contamination over 100’s of square miles.   Cancer deaths in later years would likely reach the hundreds of thousands.  Additionally, the environmental impact of radionuclides would extend north (due to wind dispersal) to Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE.

Military Response

Iran’s direct military response would likely include a counterattack with Shahab-3 ballistic missiles — which are capable of reaching 100% of Israeli territory.  (There is also a threat of a chemical warheads being used.)

Proxy attacks would also occur through Hamas and more directly Hezbollah — whose missile capacity has been more than restored since the cessation of hostilities during the last conflict.

In addition to the certainty of a direct military response, the report estimates that Iran’s nuclear ambitions would likely emerge undetered — if not accelerated.

Political Impact

The CSIS report summarizes the political fallout from a surprise Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities succinctly:

It is possible that Israel will carry out a strike against Iranian Nuclear Facilities, if the U.S. does not, with the objective of either destroying the program or delaying it for some years. The success of the Strike Mission will be measured by how much of the Enrichment program has it destroyed, or the number of years it has delayed. Iranian acquisition of enough Uranium or Plutonium from the Arak reactor to build a nuclear bomb.

The U.S. would certainly be perceived as being a part of the conspiracy and having assisted and given Israel the green light, whether it did or had no part in it whatsoever. This would undermine the U.S. objectives in increasing stability in the region and bringing about a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It will also harm for a very long period of time relations between the U.S. and it‘s close regional allies. [emphasis ours]

Arab States have become extremely frustrated with the U.S. and the West double standard when addressing the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East. Arab countries will not condone any attack on Iran under the pretext that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, whilst Israel has some 200 to 300 nuclear weapons, and the delivery means using the Jericho missiles. In addition to Israel still occupying the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights.

It is doubtful that an Israeli strike on Iranian Nuclear Facilities would bring Syria into a direct conflict with Israel. Syria knows very well that alone it‘s military forces are no match to Israel. However, proxy actors such as Hizbullah would engage Israel in ant-symmetric attacks, with Syrian and Iranian assistance.

Threat Assessment

Somewhat disturbing in our minds is the report’s assessment of overall risk to Israel in world with a nuclear-capable Iran.  The report weights heavily the deterrent of mutually-assured-destruction should a nuclear capable Iran conduct a nuclear first-strike on Israel, and concludes that even if Iran had nuclear weapons it would likely never use them.

While we agree with Toukan and Cordesman that the threat of a direct nuclear exchange between a nuclear armed Iran and Israel would be mitigated due to the threat of mutually-assured-destruction, one must consider firstly, that Iran’s preferred method of military confrontation with Israel  has been indirect and by proxy of well-known extra-national military groups; and secondly, that proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East is in and of itself deeply threatening to Israeli security and would represent a new and extraordinarily dangerous phase for Israel.

US Foreign Policy Today

Last Thursday, US State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly reiterated the desire for a “multilateral track” for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

“We believe that the multilateral track is the way to go…  Our goal is to make them abandon their nuclear program in a verifiable way, and we will continue with this track. We decided that we want to let Iran get back to the table, to engage them, because the previous approach of isolating Iran didn’t work. But we don’t have a clear timetable.”

Ha’aretz reports today:

U.S. President Barack Obama has sent a message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanding that Israel not surprise the U.S. with an Israeli military operation against Iran. The message was conveyed by a senior American official who met in Israel with Netanyahu, ministers and other senior officials. Earlier, Netanyahu’s envoy visited Washington and met with National Security Adviser James Jones and with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and discussed the dialogue Obama has initiated with Tehran.

The message from the American envoy to the prime minister reveals U.S. concern that Israel could lose patience and act against Iran. It is important to the Americans that they not be caught off guard and find themselves facing facts on the ground at the last minute.

We find this response from the White House to be somewhat lacking in any real policy initiative.  It is also hard to interpret concepts like “last minute” and “caught off guard” when the issue of a rapidly approaching nuclear Iran has been on the radar of policy makers for years now, and all efforts to use diplomacy, incentive, inspections, sanctions and threats have failed to deter Iran’s progress.

In an excellent piece published in Foreign Policy, historian Niall Ferguson illustrates the broad geopolitical ramifications of economic decline.  Ferguson contrasts the willful malice of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil”, against the less intentionally destabilizing influence of regimes undergoing waves of political and fiscal turbulence.

Ferguson’s “Axis of Upheaval“, as he calls it includes Russia, Somalia, Mexico and other nations desperately fighting to stay afloat through the gale-force winds of  political instability:  An instability magnified by a world undergoing economic deflation.

Now the third variable, economic volatility, has returned with a vengeance. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s “Great Moderation”—the supposed decline of economic volatility that he hailed in a 2004 lecture—has been obliterated by a financial chain reaction, beginning in the U.S. subprime mortgage market, spreading through the banking system, reaching into the “shadow” system of credit based on securitization, and now triggering collapses in asset prices and economic activity around the world.

After nearly a decade of unprecedented growth, the global economy will almost certainly sputter along in 2009, though probably not as much as it did in the early 1930s, because governments worldwide are frantically trying to repress this new depression. But no matter how low interest rates go or how high deficits rise, there will be a substantial increase in unemployment in most economies this year and a painful decline in incomes. Such economic pain nearly always has geopolitical consequences. Indeed, we can already see the first symptoms of the coming upheaval.

As the economic conditions within his “Axis of Upheaval” disintegrate rapidly, so too do the socio-political moorings of society –  A deterioration which will likely result in radical power-shifts, militarization, social divisions and other bad eggs which are often mitigated during eras of economic prosperity.  Ferguson also points out that these ill-effects are compounded by our decreasing ability to intervene through the traditional means of financial incentive or military intervention:

The problem is that, as in the 1930s, most countries are looking inward, grappling with the domestic consequences of the economic crisis and paying little attention to the wider world crisis. This is true even of the United States, which is now so preoccupied with its own economic problems that countering global upheaval looks like an expensive luxury. With the U.S. rate of GDP growth set to contract between 2 and 3 percentage points this year, and with the official unemployment rate likely to approach 10 percent, all attention in Washington will remain focused on a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package. Caution has been thrown to the wind by both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. The projected deficit for 2009 is already soaring above the trillion-dollar mark, more than 8 percent of GDP. Few commentators are asking what all this means for U.S. foreign policy.

The answer is obvious: The resources available for policing the world are certain to be reduced for the foreseeable future. That will be especially true if foreign investors start demanding higher yields on the bonds they buy from the United States or simply begin dumping dollars in exchange for other currencies.

Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now.

Ferguson’s essay is an excellent read and highly recommended by The Analytic:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4681