Israel has eliminated many of the brains behind Tehran’s nuclear programme. But don’t expect the regime to back down
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his is a war 30 years in the making. Benjamin Netanyahu was talking about the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb back in the 1990s and he has scarcely let up since. For decades he has believed that a nuclear Iran would represent the one truly existential threat to Israel and that military force is the only sure way to prevent it. Several times during the many years in which Netanyahu has sat in the prime minister’s chair, an all-out strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been weighed up, debated and planned for. In the early hours of this morning, it finally happened.
Netanyahu will be pleased with the early results, including the elimination of key Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists. But the ultimate consequences could look very different. By his actions, he may only have accelerated the very danger he has feared for so long.
It’s not hard to see why Israel’s PM struck and struck now. The motive remains the same as it ever was, with Netanyahu’s statement overnight invoking the darkest chapter in Jewish history to insist that Israel would never allow itself to be vulnerable to a “nuclear holocaust”. But the timing was down, in part, to the fact that the Iranian regime is in a state of strategic weakness.
