NETANYAHU IS PUSHING FOR A PREVENTIVE WAR AGAINST IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES
We are currently witnessing an exceptional warmongering discourse in Israel. The discourse centers on the urgent need to initiate a preventive war against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The leading headlines in news broadcasts and newspapers, appear in identical formulations based on hints provided via government and military briefings: “the next mission: the Iranian nuclear facilities”. Reporters, commentators and politicians are openly speaking of the one-time opportunity that cannot be missed. According to these reports, Israel is accelerating its preparations for a preventive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities following the opening up of the Syrian corridor to Iran with the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the destruction of the majority of the Syrian air force and air defenses.
Reports from the Wall Street Journal (13 December 2024) that President-elect Trump and his team are considering an aerial preventive strike to stop the Iran nuclear program will not have been a surprise to Israel. The reports noted that Trump had already consulted with Netanyahu and expected from him proposals for preventing nuclear weapons in Iran. For Netanyahu the clear answer is the implementation of the action for which he has been aiming for years: a preventive strike to dismantle and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. After pushing Trump to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 during his former presidency and striving for its dismantlement, Netanyahu is asking that the work now be completed by enlisting Trump and the US military in a joint attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Netanyahu’s increased confidence in recent weeks might to lead to a first unilateral Israeli strike intended to draw the US into the arena and oblige it to intervene.
Netanyahu has not hidden his intentions. In public appearances and speeches, he has emphasized the new strategic environment and the freedom of action that has opened up for Israel to attack anywhere in Iran. In his speech to the nation who had been waiting expectantly for his words on a ceasefire in Lebanon (26 November), Netanyahu noted that the first reason for the ceasefire agreement with Hizballah and the cessation of the launching of ballistic missiles on Israeli towns was the urgent need to focus on Israel’s highest priority – the Iranian nuclear threat. Netanyahu harked back to his “Protector of Israel” speeches from before the Gaza war, and proclaimed his intention to fulfill his historic destiny – to remove the existential threat and to prevent a second holocaust.
In Israel, unlike in the US, it is not customary to publish unclassified versions of military intelligence assessments made by the IDF Military Intelligence (which is responsible for the National Intelligence Estimate) and by the Mossad. We therefore cannot know on what intelligence basis the politicians and commentators relied when they called for a preventive war. It appears that they relied mainly on IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi’s warnings of an acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program. In an interview with Reuters on the margins of the security conference in Bahrain, Grossi warned of a dramatic acceleration in the rate of uranium enrichment up to 60% purity. From a monthly production rate of about 5 kg to a rate of 34 kg per month. According to the NPT, a state is permitted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes subject to IAEA monitoring and compliance with the central obligation of the NPT not to produce nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. There are other states which enrich uranium, but Iran is the only non-nuclear weapon state in the world which enriches uranium to such a high level that it is close to a nuclear weapons level.
The IAEA Director General who is the international actor closest to the nuclear developments in Iran (other than classified intelligence reports) referred to the dangerous connection between accelerated enrichment in Iran and the Israeli discourse on a preventive war. He warned that this could lead to an uncontrolled escalation. In a discussion with a BBC reporter at the conference in Bahrain, Grossi warned of the serious consequences there could be to the Israeli public calls for an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. For example, the possibility of an Iranian retaliatory military attack and a change in its nuclear doctrine in the direction of developing nuclear weapons.
Grossi also referred, in an unusually direct manner, to the Israeli attack discourse. In a press conference, during the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in November, Grossi responded to claims Netanyahu made in a Knesset speech that a recent Israeli strike also attacked “a specific component of the nuclear program” at the Parchin facility (according to satellite images). Netanyahu’s statement was a hint at the circumvention of President Biden’s opposition to a strike against nuclear sites, and an indication of future intentions. Grossi was quick to react. According to the IAEA Director General, the Parchin facility was indeed involved in the past with forbidden nuclear activities, but for the IAEA it is no longer a nuclear weapons facility and there is no information relevant for the IAEA that confirms the existence of such activity. Grossi’s comments do not align with the media reports, mostly in Israel, about weaponisation testing activities at the Parchin facility.
Why is this important? Here we return to the National Intelligence reports whose contents bind the US President. The July 2024 assessment caused surprise: for the first time, the DNI report did not include its most significant component, a fundamental element, that had appeared for years in the first paragraph of the US intelligence assessment that “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device”. No explanation was provided for the change in the DNI report. Commentators in the US and especially in Israel rushed to relate this change to new information that warned of research and other weaponization activities in the field of nuclear weapons. Activities that violate the NPT and IAEA monitoring regime would oblige the US President to take action.
But the story is not so simple. Already in a Wall Street Journal article (beginning of August 2024) that presented the surprising July DNI Report, an unusual addition was made which downplayed the alarmist tones: the DNI spokesperson told the reporter that “Iran does not have an active military nuclear program”. In the months following the publication of the July DNI Report further intelligence indications appeared. At the beginning of October, CIA Director Bill Burns said in a television interview that the US had no proof that Iran had decided to build nuclear weapons: “we do not see evidence today that the supreme leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program”. The intelligence community continues to estimate that there has been no new decision to renew the nuclear weapons program which ceased in 2003. The change in the Iranian decision could take place within a short time, but US intelligence estimates that it would detect this at an early stage. The Pentagon Military Intelligence Report on Global Nuclear Challenges that was published in October, succinctly says that “Iran almost certainly does not have nuclear weapons”.
This brings us to the November 2024 National Intelligence Assessment on nuclear Iran published in early December 2024. The main point which we should note in the November 2024 DNI report is the clear statement in its opening lines: “The Intelligence Community continues to assess that as of 26 September 2024, Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. This formulation bring us back to the conclusion made in previous reports that Iran is not engaged in nuclear weaponisation. This is the paragraph that was left out of the July 2024 report. The basic element of the US intelligence assessment on the Iranian nuclear issue has been reinstated. In the following paragraphs, the DNI report emphasizes that Iran is carrying out activities that place it in a better position to produce a nuclear weapons if it decides to do so. The report describes the increase in the stockpile of high level enriched uranium and the number of advanced centrifuges. This would enable it to produce more than a dozen bombs. The report warns of risks of the expanding public discourse among Iranian elites on the importance and the utility of a nuclear deterrent and the need for a new defense doctrine in the nuclear direction following the Israeli attacks.
This will probably be the latest DNI report on the Iranian nuclear issue that will be placed on President Trump’s table when he enters the White House. It contains the latest summary of the Iranian threat. But the immediate importance of the report is the return of the central motif that was the core of the DNI reports for years. The national intelligence assessment which determines that Iran is not building nuclear weapons binds the US President, and does not allow him to initiate a preventive war on Iranian nuclear facilities. The bitter lesson of the preventive war and the 2003 military invasion of Iraq based on the false belief and perception that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons. The US National Intelligence Assessment is, in my view, the barrier and central explanation for the opposition of past US Presidents to grant Netanyahu authorization to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities.
We do not yet know what form the US intelligence system will take once Trump enters the White House. We are dealing with an unpredictable President. It is possible that Netanyahu is hoping that the new US President will ignore the DNI reports that have blocked moves for a preventive war against Iran. But Trump will also have to take into account – in addition to his unwillingness to become entangled in another war in the Middle East – the warnings of US National Intelligence Assessment that attacking Iranian nuclear sites will likely lead to a counter reaction of the enrichment of uranium to 90% nuclear weapons level, Iran exiting the NPT, and the expulsion of the IAEA monitors. We are entering a danger filled new Middle East reality.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst. Graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a former IDF and Tel Aviv University researcher.