We may never know what exactly happened Sunday night at Parchin, but we certainly know that it will take hundreds more mysterious explosions to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.
[..] One of the main reasons that Israel’s purported strikes in Iran have been so lethargic is because the US opposes them. As we have seen in recent years, the Obama administration has been a sieve of information to the media about Israel’s alleged covert strikes in Iran. To successfully neutralize Iran’s nuclear facilities through acts of sabotage, Israel needs to hide its effort from the US as well as Iran.
In light of these constraints, Israel should consider expanding the goal of its policy towards Iran from merely debilitating Iran’s nuclear project to ending it entirely by overthrowing the regime.
There are many reasons to believe that overthrowing the regime is a realistic option.
First and foremost, to the shock and amazement of the entire world, following the stolen 2009 Iranian presidential elections, the Green Movement arose spontaneously and nearly overthrew the regime. Millions of Iranians from across ethnic lines and throughout the country rose up against the regime. They rallied around presidential candidates Seyyed Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and demanded that the mullocracy be replaced with a democracy.
Had the Obama administration backed the Iranian people rather than the regime, it is likely that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and supreme dictator Ali Khamenei would have been finished six years ago along with their nuclear program and worldwide terrorist network.
Dr. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been closely following the Iranian regime since he served in the Reagan administration in the 1980s. In 2009, he argued that even without US assistance, if Israel had been willing to help the Green Movement, with little effort, it could have empowered the opposition sufficiently to overthrow the regime.
In a conversation this week, Ledeen said Israel still has the capacity to provide opposition forces the tools they require to overthrow the regime.
Today, with Khamenei reportedly seriously ill, the widespread assessment is that Iran is already in the throes of a succession crisis. As Ledeen sees it, radical ayatollahs are vying with the IRGC and Khamenei’s family to succeed him. President Hassan Rouhani is also seeking to ascend to Khamenei’s all powerful throne.
At the same, time, as Iran enters into this period of political uncertainty, the regime itself is less popular than ever.
Rouhani was elected last year on the strength of his promise to expand freedoms in Iran. Since he took office, repression, not freedom has expanded.
Over the past year, the number of regime executions and mass arrests has skyrocketed. So too, the number of Iranian political prisoners subjected to torture has risen. Despite Rouhani’s promise to free them, Mousavi and Karroubi, who were placed under house arrest in 2011, have not been freed.
Last week, the family of Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi announced that the religious leader has been informed that he is about to be executed by the regime. Boroujerdi is serving his eighth year of an 11-year prison sentence for rejecting the religious legitimacy of the regime and demanding, in keeping with Shi’ite jurisprudence, its overthrow and replacement with a democracy in which mosque is separated from state.
Boroujerdi enjoys massive support in Iran. His bravery in the face of regime repression is breathtaking.
Since his arrest, Boroujerdi has been subjected to barbaric torture. And yet, rather than repent his ways, as the regime demands, he has smuggled letters to the world outside his prison exposing the dismal state of human rights in the Iran, and the heresy at the heart of the regime.
Ledeen claims that an Israeli campaign to highlight the suffering of Iranian political prisoners and dissidents that would include constant public condemnations of the regime, calls for the release of political prisoners, and support for greater freedom, particularly for women would have a major impact both globally and in Iran.
If such a campaign is coupled with the provision of communication equipment for the opposition to let its leaders and followers bypass the regime’s firewalls and communicate freely with one another, its chances of success would grow. So too, the provision of financial and other support for Iranian workers’ unions, including building international support for their rejection of the regime, and broadcast of accurate news, by among other things expanding the broadcast time allotted to Voice of Israel Persian service, could empower the regime’s opponents.
Ledeen scoffs at the concern that Israeli support for regime opponents will boomerang against them and strengthen public support for the regime. As he put it, “Opponents of the regime are always accused of being in cahoots with Israel and the US, so getting support doesn’t change their risk, and in fact will strengthen them… The opposition is probably amazed they are not getting help from Israel.”
Ledeen’s policy involves a program of nonviolent, open Israeli political and financial support for regime opponents.
A different policy of regime overthrow was put forward by Nicholas Saidel in an article published last month by Mida online magazine. Saidel recommended that Israel adopt a more involved policy of directly supporting minority liberation movements operating inside Iran. Saidel noted that oppressed, irredentist minorities – including the Azeris, Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs and Baluchis together comprise more than a third of Iran’s population. He suggests that the regime should be overthrown and Iran should be carved up into a number of smaller states that will be too weak to threaten Israel.
Saidel notes that all four minorities have in the past cooperated with Israel. Some have spoken openly in favor of Israel. Israel, he argues, has the wherewithal to help them today in significant ways that will, at a minimum, significantly weaken the regime and so limit its ability to harm Israel.
Of the two options, the potential downside of Saidel’s is far higher. The specter of small, powerful jihadist forces along the lines of Islamic State and the Taliban being installed in power in Iran is distressing. But even in this case, the payoff of destroying the regime, and so ending Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship with Hezbollah, Hamas and other jihadist terror groups would be enormous.
Regardless of how one assesses the risk of either policy of supporting regime opponents, given the risk a nuclear armed Iran will constitute for Israel; the Obama administration’s obvious preference for a nuclear armed Iran over an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations; and the ever growing threat posed by Iran’s terrorist proxies, it would appear that the risks attached to adopting either Ledeen’s approach, or Saidel’s approach, or both, are far smaller than the risk of letting Iran take out membership in the nuclear club.
Distressingly, Israel’s security brass seems utterly bereft of creative or even three dimensional thought in regards to Iran. In an interview with Ma’ariv published last Friday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz claimed that international sanctions convinced Iran that its nuclear project was harming its regime.
What the sanctions actually convinced them was that it was worth their while to pretend to be interested in a nuclear deal in order to loosen or end the sanctions. Acting this way would not prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons but would restore Iran’s economic viability.
Over the past decade, attempts to get Israeli military leaders to even consider a program of assisting the regime’s opponents have come up empty.
The time has come to reconsider this refusal. In his recent public remarks on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued repeatedly and rightly that the Iranian regime is more dangerous to global security than Islamic State. But he has abstained from mentioning that the Iranian regime is as dangerous to those living under its jackboot as Islamic State is to those who come under its power.
Had Netanyahu raised Boroujerdi’s plight in his speech at the UN, it would have weakened Rouhani.
And for his part, Boroujerdi would not have been any more imperiled than he already is.
So too, the seven young Iranians who were sentenced last month to suspended jail sentences and 91 lashes for daring to post an Internet video of themselves singing Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy” will not be any more unhappy and oppressed if Israeli leaders stood up for their right to be happy.
Ledeen remarked, “I’ve rarely seen a policy that was both strategically and morally imperative, but [supporting the Iranian regime’s domestic opponents] is certainly one of them.”
We may never know what exactly happened Sunday night at Parchin. But we certainly know that it will take hundreds more mysterious explosions to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. And even if such explosions take place, so long as the regime remains in power, there is every reason to believe that such achievements will lack significance in the long term.
Iran is Israel’s greatest foe. Between its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and its nuclear program, it threatens Israel more gravely than any other state today. The best way to end these threats is not to fight another round against its proxies. It is to go to the source of the problem.
Caroline Glick is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.
carolineglick.com
There are dangers with analogous thinking, but in the case of Iran and its willingness to engage in destructive behavior, we may analogize that no one lets children play with matches with the hope that they will not burn down the house.
This analogy fails quickly, however, because there is no parent around who is willing to short-circuit their potentially destructive behavior. It seems that no one is willing to risk the quick anger of the child in order to obtain long-term safety for the family of man.
Indeed, there are some powerful people who believe with all their hearts that there are too many people in the world and it could use a bit of mowing. They would not do it personally, but if someone else did the mowing for them, they could sit quietly, Buddha-like, and contemplate the new eco-friendly environmental balance. Following such a conflagration, these people would not let the crisis go to waste and would insist that one-world government should be implemented immediately. I believe with all my heart that our dear president is among those people.
That being said, there are questions to be answered in regard to this Parchin explosion.
The conducting of important experiments is never done with the presence of only two people – those who Iran admitted were killed.
1) Were these people human sacrifices for those running the experiment from a remote location?
2) Did this explosion occur at night when everyone else was asleep, thus making these two people who were killed suicide bombers?
3) Were these experiments carried on with high explosives simulating the nuclear material, thus making the experiment overly successful? In other words, what was the nature of these “successful” experiments? What lessons did the Iranians learn from their debacle? Do they now have a new weapon configuration? What was the physics at play here?
4) Do we give too much credence to the idea that Iranians are very smart people? Perhaps they are merely large children with a perverse nature? Many people harbor fantasies of straightening out all problems of their world with a single blow. Perhaps the Iranians are more given to such daydreams!
5) Or, was this simply an excellent operation?
What happens if the Iranian Greens succeed in blowing away the ayatolist regime but that power in Teheran falls into the hands of a gang similar to the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, and they keep their nuclear weapons for future use, if and when they may think the time and circumstances are advisable?
Or, even worse, the nuclear weapons stockpiles fall into the hands of competing gangs whose use for such weapons would be to threaten anybody who might pull them down.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ yamit82:
Certainly under normal conditions Iran being part of the nuclear club would be routine. A normal GoI would move up the nuclear stock and proceed as you say.
The critical factor is that we do not have a functional GoI.
Islam rules those nukes in Iran, either bought or produced.
Should I be the commanding general in Iran, would I chose to run a known gauntlet including the Arrow? No.
There are other ways to get here or near enough.
A detonation worth 250 kiloton in Northern Gaza will wipe out everything up to at least Hertzliah.
One in the Lebanon Border, everything down to Hedera at the very least.
We cannot afford to take those chances.
Taking the WPS route is safer than assuming the enemies intentions on a single channel.
Iran’s nuclear ability must be terminated before it is armed, if not too late.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
Hypothetically Iran has long had the wherewithal to purchase off the shelf Nukes either from N.Korea, Pakistan or FSR’s.
Lets assume the have completed the chain and have the ability to assmble X number of nukes. They still would need to weaponize them and be confident of accuracy. They will need to test that ability and that test can’t be hidden very effectively. They know damn well whether they hit Israel or not Israel will retaliate with all she’s got. Even if the Mullahs were suicidal and I am convinced they aren’t they would need 10-20 Bombs fired at Israel simultaneously to ensure success. With the arrow system they cannot be sure of success and the consequences to themselves will be so devastating Iran will cease to exist. Would they chance it? Or leave Israel on the back burner for now and go after the Saudis and the gulf states first?
The bomb for Iran is their protection against American and Western dominance of the region Iran seeks for itself to be the dominant power broker.
Israel should bring her nukes up from the basement and start to rattle them. Announce pre set targets if Israel is attacked and have it on automatic firing at first radar sighting of anything coming our way.
I would put every European capital in that targeting along with all the oil fields and Islamic holy sites.
Let the world tremble and do do something to stop Iran.
Does anyone read actual information?
Even Arutz #7 now reports what I have been reporting for years. Iran itself accepts that it has tested explosive bridge wires used as part of the detonation system of nuclear bombs. Iran has enough core material for at least three bombs. The TRR, (Teheran Research Reactor made by Argentina and sold to Iran in the 70’s I believe, they had produced until 1993 at least 170 kilos of U 235 at 19.5% concentration. Since then and operating at 7 Mega Watt power level, another 170. 340 worth about 180 Kg of weapons grade Uranium or enough for six 250 KT blast power nuclear bombs each. Even if they do not detonate at total yield, even 50% would be enough to flatten all of us.
REGIME CHANGE!?!?!
Only all out preemptive destruction may, only may do it and Netanyahu cannot possibly be trusted to do it.