Israel shields public from war
risks with Iran By Gareth
Porter
TEL AVIV - The government of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling
Israelis that Israel can attack Iran with minimal
civilian Israeli casualties as a result of
retaliation, and that reassuring message appears
to have headed off any widespread Israeli fear of
war with Iran and other adversaries.
But
the message that Iran is too weak to threaten an
effective counter-attack is contradicted by one of
Israel's leading experts on Iranian missiles and
the head of its missile defense program for nearly
a decade, who says Iranian missiles are capable of
doing significant damage to Israeli targets.
The Israeli population has shown little
serious anxiety about the possibility of war with
Iran, in large part because they have not been
told that it involves a risk of Iranian missiles destroying
Israeli neighborhoods
and key economic and administrative targets.
"People are not losing sleep over this,"
Yossi Alpher, a consultant and writer on strategic
issues and former director of the Jaffee Center
for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, told
Inter Press Service (IPS) in an interview. "This
is not a preoccupation of the public the way the
suicide bombers were a decade ago."
Alpher
says one reason for the widespread lack of urgency
about a possible war with Iran is that the
scenarios involving such a war are "so nebulous in
the eyes of the public that it's difficult for
them to focus on it".
Aluf Benn, the
editor in chief of Ha'aretz, told IPS in an
interview, "There is no war mentality," although
he added, "that could change overnight." One
reason for the relative public calm about the
issue, he suggested, is the official view that
Iran's ability to retaliate is "very limited".
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in Bloomberg on
March 20, "Some Israel officials believe Iran's
leaders might choose to play down the insult of a
raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv
as an angry gesture rather than declare all-out
war."
But Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of
Israel's missile defense from 1991 to 1999 and
presided over the development of the Arrow
anti-missile system, has a much more sombre view
of Iran's capabilities.
The "bad news" for
Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that
the primary factor affecting Iran's capability to
retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of
increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within
a very short time, Iran has already improved the
accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometers
from the target to just a few meters, according to
Rubin.
That improvement would give Iran
the ability to hit key Israeli economic
infrastructure and administrative targets, he
said. "I'm asking my military friends how they
feel about waging war without electricity," said
Rubin.
The consequences of Iranian missile
strikes on administrative targets could be even
more serious, Rubin believes. "If the civilian
government collapses," he said, "the military will
find it difficult to wage a war."
Rubin is
even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian
missiles improves further, which he believes is
"bound to happen", Iran will be able to carry out
pinpoint attacks on Israel's air bases, which are
concentrated in just a few places.
Some
Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could
hit Iranian missiles in a pre-emptive strike, but
Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being
able to hit Iranian missiles before they are
launched.
Iran's longer-range missiles
have always been displayed on mobile transporter
erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in
an article in Arms Control Today earlier this
year. "The message was clear," Rubin wrote.
"Iran's missile force is fully mobile, hence, not
pre-emptable."
Rubin, who has argued for
more resources to be devoted to the Arrow
anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only
limit the number of missiles that get through. In
an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system's
record of more than 80% success in various tests
over the years, but also noted that such a record
"does not assure an identical success rate in real
combat".
The United States and Israel
began in 2009 developing a new version of the
Arrow missile defense system called "Reshef" -
"Flash" - or "Arrow 3", aimed at intercepting
Iranian missiles above the atmosphere and farther
away from Israeli territory than the earlier
version of the Arrow. The new anti-missile system
can alter the trajectory of the defensive missile
and distinguish decoys from real missile re-entry
vehicles.
Until last November, the Arrow 3
system was not expected to become operational
until 2015. And that plan was regarded by US
Missile Defense Agency (MDA) as probably too
ambitious, because such a system would normally
take a decade from conception to deployment.
But Xinhua news agency reported in
November that Israeli Air Force officials said
they expected Arrow 3 to become operational by
mid-2013, cutting even that abbreviated timeline
for development of the system in half.
Nevertheless, the ability of the Arrow 3
system to shoot down an incoming missile still has
not been announced, although an Israeli official
said on March 1 that such a test would take place
after the meeting between President Barack Obama
and Netanyahu.
In December 2008, Western
intelligence sources were reported by Israel's
Ynet News as saying the improved version of the
Shahab 3 missile had gone into production earlier
that year and that Iran was believed to be able to
produce 75 of the improved missiles annually.
General Gabi Ashkenazi, then Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, told a
visiting congressional delegation in November 2009
that Iran already had 300 missiles capable of
hitting Israeli targets, according to a US State
Department cable released by WikiLeaks.
Those reports suggest that Iran now has
roughly 450 missiles that could reach Israel, half
of which were improved models with much greater
precision. Even if only one-fifth of those
missiles got through Israel's missile defenses,
Israeli cities could be hit by at least 100, most
of which would be able to hit targets with
relative accuracy.
The Netanyahu
government has sought to minimize the threat of
Iranian retaliation for an Israeli strike against
Iran in part by likening war with Iran to those
fought against Hezbollah and Palestinian rockets
in recent years, which have resulted in relatively
few Israeli civilian casualties.
That was
the message that Israeli military officials
conveyed to the Israeli news media after an
escalation of violence between the IDF and
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza earlier this
month.
Columnist Zvi Barel of Ha'aretz
speculated on March 11 that the purpose of the
escalation, provoked by the IDF assassination of
Zuhair al-Qaisi, the secretary general of the
Popular Resistance Committee in Gaza, was to show
the Israeli public that Israeli missile defense
system could protect the population against
rockets that the IDF linked to Iran.
Barel
went even further. "After Iron Dome demonstrated
its 95% effectiveness," he wrote, "there is no
better proof to Israel's citizens that they will
not suffer serious damage following an assault on
Iran."
The success of the Iron Dome
against short-range rockets from Gaza is
irrelevant, however, to what could be expected
from a relatively untested Arrow system against
Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli
targets.
Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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