Now Is The Opportune Time To Severely Strike Iran

Now is the most opportune time to attack Iran’s regime and its nuclear weapons program because the reasons for why Israel has not done so in the last few decades, detailed below, are quickly fading away from the new reality of the Middle East.

Iran directs and supports various terror groups throughout the Middle East in order to gain dominance in the region and to specifically destroy the State of Israel.  Despite the fact that Israel happens to be the one country in the entire Middle East capable of successfully destroying Iran both militarily and economically, Israel never opened any such direct military campaign against Iran’s regime itself.  The closest Israel and Iran have come to trading blows directly was in what Israel termed the “War Between Wars”, in which Israel’s security forces conducted various operations to stop Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps from transferring weapons to terror groups in Syria and Lebanon or launching attacks against Israel from those countries.  Iran decided to escalate from an indirect conflict to a direct one, when Israel identified and destroyed an Iranian command center adjacent to the Iranian consulate in Damascus, and launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel on April 13, 2024.  Even when Israel did finally attack Iran directly in April of this year, in response to Iran’s direct attack against Israel, Israel’s attack was mostly message rather than destruction insofar as Israel merely destroyed Iran’s most advanced air defense system that was protecting one of Iran’s nuclear research facilities.

There are a few reasons for why Israel has restrained itself from attacking the head of the octopus, despite Iran’s many tentacles via Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the various terror groups in Syria and Iraq that have been launching attacks against Israel.  First, while Iran has clearly stated throughout the decades its goal of destroying Israel, Iran’s own military has always been too weak and technologically lacking in any comparison with Israel to actually threaten Israel’s existence.  To overcome this issue, Iran has been developing its nuclear weapons program.  But, for decades, Israel could afford to delay striking Iran because Iran was far from achieving the necessary steps to produce a functional nuclear weapon.  However, in recent years Iran reached the final stages necessary for producing a nuclear weapon such that they can break out with a nuclear weapon within a month from receiving the order from the regime to produce the bomb and the detonator device necessary to activate the bomb is so easy to develop without anyone else seeing it, this can be done in any small civilian room anywhere in Iran – Iran could already have developed it and we would not know.  Thus, Iran’s military is now on the brink of becoming a true existential threat.

The reason Israel has not attacked Iran sooner, before it could reach this level of threat, is because Hezbollah in Lebanon has been built by Iran to deter Israel.  Aside from Iranian financial assistance and training for Hezbollah, Iran helped Hezbollah to amass an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles and more recently a smaller number of unmanned drones.  Much of this vast arsenal is far more dangerous than anything fired by Hamas from Gaza in the past because Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles do not just carry powerful explosives but also have guidance systems and can accurately hit their targets in Israel.  Furthermore, much of Hezbollah’s vast arsenal has a range of hundreds of kilometers, such that Hezbollah can hit any part of Israel even from the farthest points of Lebanon.  Moreover, given the number of launchers that Hezbollah possessed, it was believed they could rain more than enough rockets and missiles to overwhelm Israel’s air defense systems.  Thus, Iran’s “insurance policy” against an Israeli attack on Iran’s regime or nuclear weapons program was a large scale attack by Hezbollah against Israel’s civilians in their homes, insufficiently protected from the air against such an onslaught.

However, today Hezbollah is quickly losing its ability to fire its arsenal against Israel.  Israel has already destroyed tens of thousands of these missiles and rockets and Hezbollah has fired (completely unprovoked by Israel) around ten thousand rockets, missiles, and drones beginning on October 8, 2024.  Furthermore, Israel has destroyed a large number of Hezbollah’s launchers which means Hezbollah’s ability to launch a large volume of rockets or missiles at any one time is significantly reduced to the point that either Hezbollah already cannot overwhelm Israel’s air defense systems or, with some additional attacks by the IDF, Hezbollah will lose that ability.  Most importantly, Hezbollah is currently unable to make any bold decisions against Israel because Israel has decimated Hezbollah’s command and control with the targeted killing of Hezbollah’s senior and mid-level leadership, causing the organization to become so paralyzed that Hezbollah failed to resist the Israel Defense Forces entry into Southern Lebanon on the morning of October 1, 2024.

Furthermore, now that the Israel Defense Forces has entered Lebanon, the IDF is able to physically root out all of Hezbollah’s fighters from the border of Israel as far away as Israel determines is sufficient.  Israel’s military spokesman stated that the IDF’s ground operation in Lebanon will enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which requires that Hezbollah not be located anywhere south of the Litani River (i.e. around 30 kilometers from the border with Israel).  While this resolution is less relevant in connection with Hezbollah’s missile arsenal now that Hezbollah possesses many long range and mid-range missiles, enforcement of this resolution would render a large portion of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal irrelevant as Hezbollah’s short-range rockets cannot reach Israel from the Litani River.  This is significant because that would further remove Hezbollah’s ability to overwhelm any of Israel’s air defense systems (not to mention it would absolutely remove Hezbollah’s ability to commit October 7 style attacks against Israel’s northern towns on the border with Lebanon).  Clearly, the Israel Defense Forces can further degrade Hezbollah’s military infrastructure anywhere in Lebanon and completely defang Hezbollah’s arsenal as a threat to Israel with the additional destruction of Hezbollah’s remaining launchers.  There is no better time to do this than now, while Hezbollah is leaderless and already significantly de-fanged by the loss of so many of its missile launchers.

The only other reason Israel has restrained itself visa vis Iran is political rather than military.  The U.S. Administrations of the past and present have sought to prevent war from breaking out by promising Israel that the U.S. would not allow Iran to achieve its goal of acquiring a nuclear weapon.  However, the current administration has failed to prevent all foreseeable military disasters such as the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in the U.S.’s hasty withdrawal in the summer of 2021 and the failure to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine despite Russia’s telegraphing of that intent for several months before it happened and despite the Budapest Memorandum that was executed by the U.S. assuring Ukraine that the U.S. would secure it from attack.  In connection with Iran the Biden Administration could be considered to have significantly bolstered Iran to proceed with its plans in the Middle East by releasing huge sums of money  to the Iranian government, lifting sanctions placed previously against Iran, and failing to level any military consequences on Iran despite its terror proxies’ attacks against the U.S. troops in Iraq , Syria, and Jordan.  With the election just one month away, and the election polls consistently showing for several weeks now that Kamala Harris is leading Trump by a few points, it is reasonable to foresee Israel will have an even less friendly administration in the United States for the next four years.  No sovereign country can rely on others for its security, or before long such a country will not have security, and Israel cannot rely on any promises from anyone – even the United States – and certainly not from the same people who were responsible for every foreign policy disaster we’ve seen these last three years.

With the Israel Defense Forces on the verge of de-fanging Hezbollah as a threat, either by way of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal or Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border, Iran no longer has the single most potent threat that deterred the IDF from acting against Iran’s nuclear weapon sites or the Iranian regime itself.  The possible loss of Hezbollah, as a result of the IDF’s entry into Lebanon this week, is therefore an existential threat to Iran.  That is why Iran launched a large scale ballistic missile attack against Israel, immediately after the IDF entered southern Lebanon.  And that is also why now is becoming the most opportune time to strike the Iranian regime, the head of the octopus rather than deal solely with its tentacles in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, etc.  Israel has the capability to strike anywhere in Iran, including its top leadership like the Ayatollah Khamenei or Iran’s nuclear sites where the regime is on the threshold of making nuclear weapons.  Furthermore, now is becoming the most opportune time not simply to strike once but to initiate a long-term campaign of militarily degrading the Iranian regime itself by destroying Iran’s life-lines such as Iran’s oil fields, ports, factories, power plants, its military bases, its navy, all the things the regime needs to oppress its population and fund the regime’s activities including the regime’s terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

Such a campaign may or may not lead to a toppling of the regime in Iran by the Iranian opposition, but such a campaign would definitely end the regime’s ability to threaten Israel or any other country in the world such as currently occurs daily via Iran’s proxy terror groups attacks in Yemen against world commerce via one of the most vital global sea lanes and against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria (as shown in the links above).  To live in a world with a de-fanged Hezbollah for several weeks, but not use this moment to remove Iran as an existential threat, would be a fatal mistake in Jewish history.  Fortunately, the people writing what happens next are those leading the State of Israel – the Jewish State of the Jewish people.  We know how to end a good movie.