Five Errors About Iran’s War on Israel, America, and the West
On June 22, in the early morning local time, the United States inflicted “severe damage” – confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Association – on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear installations at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. This marked a turning point in Iran’s war against Israel, the United States, and the West. One day later Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire following a 12-day battle in which Iran incurred extensive military setbacks and Israel – while suffering 28 civilian deaths and more than 3,000 civilians wounded, and incurring more than a billion dollars in property damage – did not lose an aircraft or a fighter.
Iran is the aggressor
Many critics of Israel and the Trump administration remain unwilling or unable to grasp that Iran is the aggressor. This contributes to the critics’ failure to appreciate the lawfulness of Israel’s and the United States’ strikes on Iran. And it renders the critics oblivious to how Israel and the United States have advanced the free world’s interest in thwarting the pursuit of nuclear weapons by the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism, and the world’s leading state-sponsor of anti-American terror.
On June 21, more than a week after the expiration of President Donald Trump’s 60-day deadline for reaching a negotiated settlement, Iran reiterated its rejection of talks with the United States unless Israel agreed to a ceasefire. By the time the sun rose the next day on Tehran, Iran found the third of its three key bargaining chips, like the other two, greatly diminished.
The story of Operation Midnight Hammer
Building on Israel’s Operation Rising Lion – which since June 13 had eliminated most of Iran’s air-defense systems, damaged its nuclear installations, hit command and control centers belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and killed top nuclear scientists and military commanders – America’s Operation Midnight Hammer inflicted devastating blows on three key Iranian uranium enrichment facilities.
Over the previous nine days, Israel also had substantially degraded Iran’s capacity to produce ballistic missiles and had blown up more than half of Tehran’s missile launchers and a sizeable portion of its missile stockpile. And since Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Israel had significantly diminished the “ring of fire” that Tehran had built over decades to destroy the Jewish state. The Israel Defense Forces not only battered Hamas in Gaza but also struck forcefully against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, targeted Iran-backed Houthi assets in Yemen, and contributed to the downfall of Iran’s Syrian client, dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The dismantling of much of Iran’s nuclear program, missile program, and ring of fire strengthens Washington’s position for further negotiations – now in their 12th year – with Iran.
Despite these achievements, several errors – of commission and omission – hamper appreciation of Israel’s bold military operation against Iran and of the justification for America’s decisive intervention.
Israel acted in self-defense
First, Israel’s military operation did not involve an illegal “preventive war,” but rather constitutes a legal act of self-defense in response to Tehran’s decades-long effort to eliminate the Jewish state. The critics, however, contend that Tehran did not pose an “imminent threat” to Israel, which would have justified a permissible “preemptive war,” since Supreme Leader of Iran Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had not ordered the assembly and deployment of a nuclear weapon to attack the Jewish state.
That, though, is a preposterous way to assess imminence regarding the development of a weapon of mass destruction by a fanatical Islamist dictatorship that for more than 40 years has resolutely pursued its oft-repeated vow to wipe out the Jewish state. One doesn’t wait for a self-declared assassin in a suite overlooking a presidential speech to assemble his weapon, load his bullets, aim his gun, and put his finger on the trigger to neutralize him.
Recent Israeli intelligence determined that Iran had achieved the ability to “enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level for 15 bombs ‘within days.’” This comports with recent IAEA findings.
Evidence against Iran
“This year the IAEA accused Iran of operating three other sites that were covert bases for uranium enrichment, to which inspectors had no access,” according to John Miller in the Wall Street Journal. In addition, troubling developments occurred at official sites to which the inspectors had access. “The IAEA reported that Iran had exceeded the agreed limits, quantity of uranium, enrichment levels, the number and types of centrifuges, and the continuing research and development of metal compounds used in missile development,” writes the former New York City Police Department deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. “No country without a nuclear-weapons program,” he added, “operates facilities buried under remote mountains and strives for faster centrifuges and more-highly enriched uranium. None of that makes sense for civilian energy programs.”
Only one part
Furthermore, building a nuclear weapon was only one part of Iran’s multi-year and multi-front war against the Jewish state.
Since the Islamic Republic of Iran’s 1979 founding, its leaders have been calling for Israel’s annihilation. Tehran has funded, armed, and trained proxies – in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – to execute the genocide. In November 2024, Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the situation is fragile and hostilities frequently flare up. The Houthis in Yemen continue to fire missiles at Israel. And the Jewish state is still fighting Hamas in Gaza. Weakening the military capabilities of Hezbollah’s, the Houthis’, and Hamas’ chief benefactor is a vital part of Israel’s exercise of its fundamental right of self-defense, affirmed by Article 51 of the UN Charter, against Iran’s decades-long efforts to eliminate it.
Iran war crimes – and Trump’s constitutional authority
Second, though few of Israel’s critics seem to notice, Iran commits war crimes with the vast majority of the approximately 1,000 ballistic missiles that it has launched at the Jewish state since April 2024. They lack Israeli munitions’ pin-point accuracy, but Iran’s missiles are accurate enough for Tehran to distinguish unlawful civilian targets from lawful military ones, which Iran does by choosing to overwhelmingly target civilians and civilian infrastructure. The international legal scholars and pundits who promptly and wrongly decried as unlawful Israel’s surgical strikes on military targets in Iran have shown scant interest in Iran’s blatantly unlawful scattershot attacks on Israeli noncombatants and urban areas.
Third, President Trump did have constitutional authority to strike Iran. Top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, swiftly condemned Trump for unlawfully bypassing Congress. With characteristic rashness, progressive favorite Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that the attacks constituted grounds for impeachment. But as National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy pointed out, the American commander in chief had two independent legal grounds to hit Iran. First, “Trump had authority under Congress’s post 9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (September 18, 2001) in light of Iran’s aiding, abetting, and harboring of al-Qaeda jihadists.” Second, “with Iran’s proxies, the Houthis in Yemen, firing at U.S. military targets just a few weeks ago, the president had authority to strike at their sponsors, Iran, which has a long history of using proxies to murder Americans.”
Benefits throughout the region
Fourth, Israeli and American military operations against Iran benefit not only Israel but also moderate Gulf Arabs, America, and the West. In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman reaffirmed to Norah O’Donnell on “60 Minutes” that Ayatollah Khamanei was “the new Hitler of the Middle East.” MBS added that “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb. But without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we would follow suit as soon as possible.”
The UAE and other Gulf monarchies would probably do the same, perhaps also Turkey. Nuclear proliferation in the Persian Gulf – through which flows 20% of the world’s oil – and the wider Middle East can only harm America’s interest, and that of friends and partners, in global order. Consequently, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of an Iranian theocracy that for decades, aided by proxies, has attacked Americans and America’s friends and partners in the Middle East and has plotted to assassinate President Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo protects American security and prosperity.
Israel knew what it was doing
Fifth, the considerable risks did not undermine Israel’s rationale for striking Iran. Israel knew it would face sustained missile barrages. Iran might have closed the Straits of Hormuz or ignited a regional war by attacking Gulf Arab states. If the United States does not negotiate effectively, Iran may well redouble its determination to obtain nuclear weapons as regime hardliners will insist that if Iran already had a bomb, Israel and America would have been deterred. Iran may activate sleeper cells in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. And other nations could supply Iran with nuclear warheads.
The costs of inaction, Israel concluded, outweighed the costs of action. As Israeli journalist Ari Shavit emphasized in a Yedioth Ahranoth column that appeared hours after the American strike, Israel’s campaign against Iran was a necessary war in response to an existential threat. A nation-state undertakes such necessary wars, writes Shavit, “not in order to accomplish a national goal but rather in order to preserve the nation’s existence.”
In determining whether to honor his longstanding promise to ensure that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons, President Trump also was compelled to consider the tradeoffs. He chose lawfully and well.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
