How Biden pushed Israel to calibrate its strikes
28/10/2024 5:56
Hours after Iranian
missiles rained down on Israel on Oct. 1, President Joe Biden's
administration sent an urgent message to Israel: Take a breath.
Israel, Washington argued, owned the clock and had time to
decide on how to best respond to an Iranian strike that the
United States assessed could have killed thousands if Israel,
with U.S. military support, hadn't been able to defeat its
long-time foe.
Such a massive Iranian attack had the potential to trigger a
sharp, rapid Israeli response that, weeks before the U.S.
presidential election, could push the Middle East closer to an
all-out regional conflagration, officials feared.
This account from current and former U.S. officials explains
how the United States sought to influence Israel during the more
than three weeks before its military finally retaliated on
Saturday with airstrikes that were far more tailored toward
military targets than Washington initially feared.
They destroyed key Iranian air defenses and missile
production facilities, weakening Iran's military. But,
importantly, they avoided Iran's sensitive nuclear sites and
energy infrastructure, meeting Biden's two top demands.
"U.S. pressure was critically important," said Jonathan
Panikoff, a former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer for
the Middle East.
"Israeli decision-making would have been far different had
the Biden administration not taken measures to push Israel not
to strike nuclear or energy sites."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied that
Israel avoided striking Iranian gas and oil facilities because
of U.S. pressure.
"Israel chose in advance the attack targets according to
its national interests and not according to American dictates,"
he said.
The first move by Biden's administration was to acknowledge
that Iran would have to pay for the Oct. 1 attack, officials
say.
"In the hours after that attack, we promised serious
consequences for Iran," according to one senior Biden
administration official.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin held around a dozen
calls with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, since Oct. 1.
Austin, a retired four star Army general, and Gallant would
discuss the possible response.
"We knew they were getting ready to do something, and he was
pushing for it to be proportional," one U.S. official said of
Austin's conversations with Gallant.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, like other senior
administration officials, worked the phones, speaking with
European and Arab allies in the days after Iran's Oct. 1 attack,
explaining that Israel would have to respond but assuring them
that Washington was working to calibrate it.
But what would be a proportional response that could deter
another Iranian attack?
Although Iran's Oct. 1 strike only killed one person, a
Palestinian who died from falling debris, many of Iran's
missiles were not intercepted by Israeli or U.S. air defenses.
Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies, said that analysis of
satellite imagery showed at least 30 impacts at Israel's Nevatim
Airbase alone.
That could suggest that Israel was either trying to conserve
dwindling air defenses or simply thought that the hardened
facility would be less expensive to repair than to repel each
projectile fired by Iran, Lewis said.
"Israel may have decided that the stockpiles were running
low or that interceptors were just too expensive to use on
ballistic missiles," Lewis said.
AIR DEFENSES
When the administration first started speaking with the
Israelis, among their potential targets were Iran's nuclear
sites and oil sites, one U.S. official said, although
underscored that Israel had not definitively decided to go ahead
with these targets.
But U.S. officials worked to present an alternative
option that included a set of different measures: Washington
worked to impose oil sanctions targeting Iran's so-called "Ghost
Fleet" to offer an alternative measure to the Israelis who
wanted to damage Iran's oil revenues with a kinetic strike.
The senior Biden administration official said the United
States worked to bolster Israel's air defenses ahead of its
Saturday strike on Iran. That includes a rare U.S. deployment of
the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, to
Israel along with about 100 U.S. soldiers to operate it.
Before deploying the system, the United States wanted to
know Israel's attack plans.
Biden held a call with Netanyahu on Oct. 9, which gave the
United States an understanding of what the Israeli response
would look like, allowing the THAAD deployment to go forward,
officials said.
As Iran warned Israel's supporters could be targeted in
response to any Israeli strike, Gulf states emphasized their
neutrality.
Saudi Arabia has been wary of an Iranian strike on its oil
facilities since a 2019 attack on its key refinery at Abqaiq
briefly shut down more than 5% of global oil supply. Iran denied
involvement.
To address Israel's desire to punish Iran's oil sector, the
Biden administration rolled out sanctions. That included an Oct.
11 expansion of U.S. sanctions against Iran's petroleum and
petrochemical sectors.
Encouraging the European allies to impose penalties on Iran
Air, while at the same time deploying the THAAD system as a
deterrent and showing the world that U.S. had Israel's back were
other key elements of this "package" of alternative measures.
And this option, the administration argued, would still
be a powerful deterrent and effective in imposing costs on Iran
without engulfing the region into a wider war Washington
believed Israel does not want, officials said.
NUCLEAR NO-GO
In what many experts saw as a message to Iran, the U.S.
military also carried out a strike against the Iran-aligned
Houthis in Yemen with long-range B-2 stealth bombers.
Austin said at the time the strike was a unique
demonstration of the Pentagon's ability to strike hard-to-reach
facilities, "no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened,
or fortified."
As speculation swirled over whether Israel might strike
Iran's nuclear sites, Washington's message to Israel was that it
could count on its help should Tehran ever choose to build a
nuclear weapon, something the U.S. intelligence community does
not believe it has done yet.
Now was not the time.
"The implication was that if in the long term they want U.S.
help to destroy such targets - if a decision is made to do so -
they'd have to be more measured this time," Panikoff said.
For Blinken, a calibrated Israeli counter-attack against
Iran could open the chance for long elusive diplomatic goals in
a regional already convulsing from a year-old war in Gaza
between Israel and Iran-backed Hamas and an escalating war
between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah, another Iranian ally.
During a trip to the Middle East last week, Blinken told
Arab foreign ministers that U.S. discussions with Israel had
gotten to a place where Israel will only strike military
targets. Iran, in turn, should not do anything else, Blinken
said, in a message he hoped would make its way to Tehran.
On Sunday, as the dust settled on the attack, neither side
signaled further escalation. Netanyahu said his airstrikes "hit
hard" at Iran's defences and missile production. Iranian Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the damage from Saturday's
attack should not be exaggerated.
While it's impossible to predict whether Israel and Iran
will de-escalate, U.S. officials say the Biden administration
worked hard to create an opportunity for breaking the
unprecedented cycle of direct attacks and counter-attacks that
began in April.
"If Iran chooses to respond once again, we will be ready,
and there will be consequences for Iran once again. However, we
do not want to see that happen," the senior Biden administration
official said.
Biden's strategy of trying to restrain Israel has its
critics, including opposition Republicans in the United States
like Mike Turner, a Republican congressman who chairs the House
Intelligence Committee.
"They've limited the ability for Israel to really impact
Iran and its ability to continue to threaten Israel," Turner
told Fox News.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, said the result of the
back-and-forth strikes is, however paradoxically, an expansion
of potential risk tolerance in Israel that could further widen
if Republican candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump
wins the Nov. 5 presidential election.
"If Trump wins this election, I think that the Israelis will
perhaps even look for opportunities in the months ahead, now
that they've demonstrated that they can get away with
dismantling Iran's air defense systems and essentially doing a
good deal of damage," Miller said.
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