In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) May 6 podcast (video), AJU’s Rick Richman moderated the first of a seven-part series of interviews titled “Israel’s Seven-Front War: Part One: Iran’s Attack on Israel.”
Guest speaker: Michael Rubin, director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.
The following summarizes his comments:
The three hundred “ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones” launched against Israel by Iran’s ailing octogenarian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a display of pride intended to signal to his base that deterrence was restored after Israel’s April bombing of an adjunct to Iran’s embassy in Syria killed two Iranian commanders. Prior to this direct attack, Iran had outsourced its attacks on the Jewish state to its proxies, which reflected Tehran’s “culture of plausible deniability.” The timing of Iran’s first direct attack against Israel is also a signal to Jerusalem post-October 7 that, as Israel turns its attention towards Hezbollah in Lebanon, Tehran is capable of shifting from its “shadow war” to directly protecting its proxies.
Khamenei’s weekly prayer sermon publicly broadcast to the Iranian people is meant for listeners to glean what is or is not permitted for them to do.
“This problem between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel isn’t a problem of grievance. It’s not about if the Palestinians have a state. Fundamentally, it’s about ideology.” Ultimately, it is about “the nuclear issue and deterrence” as Iran continues uranium enrichment towards a bomb.
Israel escaped Iran’s barrage nearly unscathed. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) responded by penetrating Iranian airspace “to knock out S-300 anti-aircraft missiles from around Isfahan.” Despite the interception of most of the missile barrage by Israel and its allies, seven got through. Israel’s counterstrike, considered by many as “a quiet victory” to restore its own deterrence, is tempered by the sobering what-ifs of “What happens if those missiles [the ones that got through] had biological, chemical, or nuclear warheads?”
Scrutinizing Iran’s strategy contains pitfalls for the Western mind which, in anticipating the regime’s next moves, is conditioned to mistakenly project a “mirror image [of] our own types of strategy.” Khamenei’s weekly prayer sermon publicly broadcast to the Iranian people is meant for listeners to glean what is or is not permitted for them to do. The breakdown of the population reveals that “10 percent of Iranians truly believe in the Islamic Republic. These are the so-called ‘hardliners.’ Another 15 percent think it was a good idea, but it’s gone off the rails, but it could still be fixed. These are the so-called ‘reformers.’ The other 75 percent have completely given up on the system.”
This means not that the Iranian people are revolutionary, as their last revolution (1979) sparked the Iran-Iraq War, which killed a million people. Instead, “it means they’re apathetic.” But there is nevertheless a “growing tendency toward outrage” that has led to a series of protests, most recently seen in the “Woman, Life, Freedom movement” (protesting the murder of Mahsa (Jina) Amini at the hands of Iran’s modesty police). “Clearly, the Iranian regime is a zombie regime; it’s lost all legitimacy.” But in the end, “it’s the guys with the guns that matter.”
“Clearly, the Iranian regime is a zombie regime; it’s lost all legitimacy.” But in the end, “it’s the guys with the guns that matter.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), “charged with defense of the revolution” against enemies external or internal, is also responsible for exporting the revolution in a “so-called ‘axis of resistance’” to those arenas Israel faces in its seven-front war. The ayatollah’s sermons direct the IRGC to do whatever they haven’t been “expressively” forbidden to do — a reminder to diplomats dismissing Iranian incidents as “rogue actions” that they need to think twice. When an attack like October 7 occurs, members of the U.S. intelligence community “try to find the smoking gun,” the “signals intercept” from a phone, or a document. But “we’re never going to find that because Iran essentially has a culture of plausible deniability,” so that “we’ve got to stop playing into their hands because they fundamentally do things a different way than we do.”
The IRGC system begins indoctrinating those within it from as young as eight years old, and continues it through school, in after-school programs, and on through its university system. In 2007, after the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the IRGC leader projected that the main threat to the Iranian revolution would come from within. As a preventive, “he put one [IRGC] unit in every province with the idea of keeping control on society.”
The IRGC would be the most trusted segment of the regime to control any nuclear weapon Iran develops. If uprisings were to continue and escalate to the point of endangering the survival of the regime, there is the possibility that the IRGC would launch a nuclear warhead towards Israel in an act of final desperation. Khamenei “wants to see the eradication of the State of Israel,” and his time is running out. Should Khamenei himself fall, “it’s going to be a mess” as potential successors “come out of the woodwork.” The IRGC could actually “have a cycle of reinforcement of the most hardline revolutionary values” as it “acts as the gatekeeper to the next Supreme Leader.”
“I would argue the best thing we can do is reimpose the maximum pressure campaign, and then if we want to negotiate around the margins, we can.”
The next four months before the U.S. elections are an opportune time for America’s enemies to take advantage, and “deterrence is not a reliable strategy.” “If you want your diplomacy to be effective, you need to have coercion.” “We don’t build leverage by giving them a billion dollars a month to come to the negotiating table.”
Sanctions as a next step have been shown not to work. A “counterintuitive” posture for the U.S. Navy, which would convince Iran to take our diplomacy toward Iran “seriously,” is to “take all our aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf” because it is “hard to maneuver” in a gulf that is “extremely narrow and shallow.” Instead, “park them 400 miles off the coast of Iran in the Northern Indian Ocean” where Iran can be hit without U.S. carriers’ exposure to “Iranian drones, small boats, mines, missiles, and so forth.” Unfortunately, “we don’t posture like that.”
As for effective policies, “If you actually line up the timelines, the Iranian enrichment program didn’t take off when President Trump left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It took off when Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ended the maximum pressure campaign.”
“I would argue the best thing we can do is reimpose the maximum pressure campaign, and then if we want to negotiate around the margins, we can.”
