Israel's Attack on Iran-What's In It for Me?

It looks increasingly likely that Israel will attack Iran and that it will do so, not only without American support but with America’s disapproval. I don’t have inside information and don’t presume to be able to gauge when the probability passes 50% and becomes “more likely than not.”

I’ve always been skeptical about Israel going it alone against Iran. Iran is far. That matters a lot. It means that attacking Iran will place a great strain on the IDF, its pilots and aircraft. It means you have to invest a great deal of planning and effort in Israel to get even a modest result over Qom or Tehran. It means that the United States can bring the attack to an end whenever it wants by cutting off the flow of spare parts—send an F-15 out twice to Tehran, and you have to stuff hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of replacement parts into it even if it the enemy doesn’t lay a finger on it. Even if Saudi Arabia gives the IAF landing and refueling rights for this adventure the picture doesn’t change much.

And how do you bring such a war to an end? It’s sure not going to end with an Israeli armored division grinding through the ruins of Tehran. Iran is a large and populous country with over twice Israel’s GDP. What if they chuck a few missiles—conventionally-armed ones—at us every day? For ten years? How will ordinary Israelis stand up to that?

On the other hand . . . When people ask me whether Iran will use nuclear weapons on Israel and invite nuclear retaliation that will be ten times as deadly, I say “I don’t know.” I was trained as a Sovietologist and I knew how the Soviets thought. Their military developed theories of nuclear warfighting but their civilian leadership dreaded the notion. I rated the chances of a Soviet-initiated nuclear war as vanishingly small.

But Iran? Does anyone in Israel understand the Iranians as well as the United States and the Soviet Union understood each other? I certainly don’t. Recently Ali-Reza Forghani, a close associate of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, blogged that it was imperative for Iran to destroy Israel and outlined a plan for doing so by missile in 2014 (sorry, the link is to a British newspaper report, I don’t read Farsi). Given what we know about Iranian nuclear and missile technology, the plan and the timetable are entirely plausible. If Iran did that, then within three hours (Israeli cruise missiles are slower than Iranian ballistic missiles) twenty million Iranians would be dead. Are the ayatollahs deterred by that prospect? I honestly don’t know.

What if Israel does attack? It’s very likely that Israel will then be under massive attack from conventional missiles from Gaza and Lebanon. The solution for this in Lebanon is ground attack to take over the areas where the missiles are launched, after which Israel should destroy the missiles and go home; for Gaza it would be sufficient to take over permanently the southern part of the strip, cutting off the rest from Egypt. But this will take time. During the interim, for a week, or two, or four, things could get very badly disrupted:

The ports could be closed or only partially functional. Ditto with Ben Gurion Airport. These are the “lungs” through which Israel’s economy and civil society “breathes.” Everything, from oil and gas for power generation to flour and motor fuel, steel and wood, comes through those ports. The Reading power station could be damaged and offline.

I’ve been seriously thinking of doing something about it.

Item: Install two one-ton water reservoirs on our third floor. MAKE SURE to install them on one of the reinforced-concrete structural crossbars that hold up the third floor or you’ll have two tons of water crashing down through the ceiling of your bedroom. It’s enough to for everyone in the household to drink and wash hands, and to flush the toilets once a day for twenty days. Maybe even take a shower or two or do a laundry each week. If there’s no electricity there’ll be no pumped water in my town, Maale Adumim. Ah, and how do you run a washing machine?

Item: Household electric generator capable of producing 16 amps at 220 volts, to be run two hours a day. That’s when we’ll do the washing and cooking—the stove is electric. Item: 250-500 liters of gasoline. That’ll ensure we can put a few tankfuls in the car when gasoline deliveries stop. How does one safely store gasoline?

And the rest of the day—and night? Item: 200 candles. Emergency electric lighting, to be charged when we run the generator.

The cooktop runs on natural gas. Item: Four new 12-kilo bottles of cooking gas.  Hey presto, you can make yourself coffee in the middle of the day.  Item:  thirty liters of high-temperature preserved milk (and another thirty of soymilk for the kid with milk allergy).  We weren't thinking of running the refrigerator and there'd be no way to stock it anyway.

Item: 2500 calories per person per day, ten people, twenty days. Including flour, canned beans, canned meat, canned fruit, dried fruit with the vitamin C still active, ten boxes of cornflakes. . . . etc etc etc.

Item: 100 rolls of toilet paper and 10 liters of liquid hand soap.

Item: Battery-operated radio sets. Rechargeable batteries.

Item: If we have all this stuff and the country is disrupted, how do we defend it? Given my personal record of political activism I’ll never get a weapons license.

Item: $20,000. All this stuff can’t cost much less.

That’s what I’m thinking about these days.