Edwin Black, author of Israel Strikes Iran: Operation Rising Lion: The 20-Year Backstory, and host of the weekly podcast The Edwin Black Show, spoke to an August 11 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
The conceptzia, “the concept,” Israel’s old worldview that miscalculated the enemy’s murderous intent, “died on October 7, 2023. The new conceptzia was born October 8, 2023, and it was held that it was better to be alive than to be loved, and that the manners and mechanisms of midtown Manhattan would simply not work in a volatile Middle East, which had been slitting throats for centuries.”
The new conceptzia was born October 8, 2023, and it was held that it was better to be alive than to be loved, and that the manners and mechanisms of midtown Manhattan would simply not work in a volatile Middle East.
Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel and subsequent massacre of the Jewish state’s civilians were followed by the determination that Iran “was just two weeks away from nuclear readiness.” The regime’s nuclear warhead, with its enriched weapons-grade uranium, was developed with knowhow from a Ukrainian nuclear scientist. It was about to be affixed to an “exospheric” space-launched missile designed to attack Israel from above and delivered at an oblique angle difficult to intercept.
Over 20 years of “meticulous planning and practice and practice” in Israel culminated in Operation Rising Lion. The hundreds of Israeli air assaults and drone attacks destroyed the Islamic regime’s air defenses. Iran’s “axis of resistance”—Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas—“fell completely silent during the conflict.” Israel had neutralized them, despite the billions of dollars provided to the regime by the “now defunct” Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was forced on the U.S. by former President Barack Obama. “That fatal pact” enriched the regime, providing the mullahs with funds for its proxy groups committed to killing Jews.
Working in tandem with Israel, President Trump resolved to set Operation Midnight Hammer in motion, unleashing massive ordnance penetrators against Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The two allies together “obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.”
The strikes neutralized Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as well as its ballistic missile arsenal. Although Iran retained 400 kilograms of enriched uranium that was not destroyed, the regime is not in a position to produce a nuclear bomb. The remaining enriched uranium—“that’s 820 pounds of 60 percent HEU—would be useless unless it could be further enriched to 90 percent by additional cascades of IR-six centrifuges and metalized into a core for further machining into a long, elaborate process that would take years to reassemble.”
The Israel-U.S. joint operations succeeded in disrupting Iran’s nuclear program and setting it back for years, but they have not dispelled the mullahs’ apocalyptic obsession with the “return of the twelfth imam.” In furtherance of that goal, “the fanatical theocracy in Iran is still shouting that it will rebuild its program and try once again to deliver its weapons of mass destruction.” The regime persists in its pronounced nuclear goal of eradicating the Jewish state despite the fact that Israel has “second-strike capability.”
If there is no regime change to remove the theocracy in Tehran, “we might well see Iran’s nuclear program or perhaps see another method of death and destruction not yet envisioned.”
Iran’s reaction to the strikes included an almost complete internet blackout, random confiscation of Iranian citizens’ phones, and issuance of a fatwa to assassinate President Trump. In addition, the regime arrested hundreds, targeting those who uttered “a syllable of criticism toward this authoritarian regime” and executing Iranians accused of working with the Israeli Mossad.
In the wake of the strikes, the mullahs have promised to re-enter negotiations over its nuclear program, “but only if its right to enrichment remains sacrosanct.” This is despite the Iranian parliament’s ban on all cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors. The regime’s resumption of developing a bomb and “facilitation of the suffocated ‘axis of resistance’ is now underway with hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled through Turkey to rebuild Hezbollah’s attack capabilities.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu promised to strike Iran if it reconstitutes its nuclear program. The latter compared Iran’s nuclear program to a “cancer that needs to be constantly monitored and possibly treated again and again.” Iran has 24 other “decentralized nuclear installations” where it could reestablish “its demolished centrifuge manufacturing.” If there is no regime change to remove the theocracy in Tehran, “we might well see Iran’s nuclear program or perhaps see another method of death and destruction not yet envisioned.”
The U.S. may exercise its influence in the region by pressuring the Iranian regime’s “important laboratory of destruction” in Yemen. Ultimately, President Trump “will have to be looking ahead to make sure he’s taking care of not only what’s going to happen during the next three years, but the four years after that.”
