(LONDON) — The repercussions of Israel’s surprise campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and military leadership launched last Friday were evident within hours.
“We are racking up achievements,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the opening salvo, which appeared to have devastated Iran’s anti-aircraft defense network and decapitated its military, killing many among the top brass, according to Israeli officials.
Netanyahu, his top officials and the Israel Defense Forces have made clear some of their war goals — the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program plus the erasure of the country’s ballistic missile arsenal.
But, as in Israel’s operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, there are already signs of “rapid mission creep” in Iran, Julie Norman, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in the U.K., told ABC News.
Iran’s weakened defense has prompted fresh questions about “regime change” — long a priority for Iran hawks in Israel and the U.S. seeking to topple Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the theocratic system he heads. Critics of such a policy, though, warn that government collapse in Iran could unleash regional chaos.
“The record of regime change is not great, to say the least,” Yossi Mekelberg of the Chatham House think tank in the U.K. told ABC News, warning that the regime’s collapse would more likely produce a dangerous power vacuum in Iran than a coherent and pliant successor.
“You want to experiment with chaos? Well, good luck,” Mekelberg said.
The nuclear front
Netanyahu faces significant challenges to achieve his two expressed goals — an end to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile threats.
On the nuclear front, Israel has inflicted damage at several of Iran’s key sites. The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported damage to surface facilities at the Natanz and Isfahan enrichment sites. On Tuesday, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said the body “identified additional elements that indicate direct impacts on the underground enrichment halls at Natanz.”
But Israel does not have the capabilities needed to destroy the Fordow enrichment plant — where the IAEA says no damage has been reported — which is built deep inside a mountain outside the city of Qom. Only American strategic bombers could deliver a payload capable of punching through up to 300 feet of mountain to reach the underground facility.
Netanyahu is trying to press the White House into intervention.
“Today, it’s Tel Aviv, tomorrow, it’s New York,” the prime minister told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl on Monday.
Trump responded to Israel’s opening attacks by calling for Iran to return to negotiations over its nuclear program. He has since dismissed talk of a ceasefire, said he wants a “real end” to the Iran nuclear issue and warned residents of Tehran — of whom there are around 17 million in the wider metropolitan area — to evacuate.
On Tuesday, Trump raised the prospect of killing Khamenei and wrote on his social media platform that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” while lauding the impact of U.S. weaponry. The president has also demanded “unconditional surrender,” a concept Iran’s supreme leader rejected.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the U.S. has not joined Israel in attacking Iran offensively. Last year the U.S. twice assisted Israel in helping to shoot down Iranian drones and ballistic missiles Iran had launched in retaliation for Israeli attacks in Syria and Tehran. This marked the first time the U.S. actively participated in Israel’s defense, which has historically taken the form of weapons sales, transfers and intelligence sharing support.
As the conflict escalated this week, the U.S. deployed additional fighter jets and refueling tankers to the Middle East. The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier has also been diverted to the region, to join the USS Carl Vinson carrier which was already deployed there. The deployments, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, are “intended to enhance our defensive posture in the region.”
President Trump told top advisers Tuesday that he approved attack plans for Iran that were presented to him, but said he was waiting to see if Iran would be willing to discuss ending their nuclear program and has not made a final decision on US involvement in the conflict, sources familiar with the matter said. The news of the attack plan approval was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“As President Trump said himself today, all options remain on the table,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
Without destroying Fordow, Mekelberg said, the job of neutralizing Tehran’s nuclear program will be incomplete. “If you want to set it three years back, that is not a good enough reason to go for a war of such scale,” he said.
“If the idea was to push Iran to the negotiation table and to scare them — the Iranians are not easily scared. They fought eight years with Iraq in a much inferior situation, and they prevailed. This is not Hezbollah, this is not Hamas, this is not Islamic Jihad.”
Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy think tank, told ABC News that Israel and the U.S. — if Trump opts to engage militarily against Iran — could face a “quagmire.”
“To verifiably destroy what they’ve said they want to destroy, they need boots on the ground eventually,” Toossi said, referring to Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Ballistic missiles
Erasing Iran’s ballistic missile threat is another key goal, Netanyahu has said. The IDF claims to have destroyed at least one-third of Iran’s launch vehicles, along with an unknown number of stockpiled missiles.
The IDF estimated that Tehran started the conflict with 2,000 missiles and as of Tuesday had fired around 400 toward Israel. The number will have been further eroded by ongoing IDF strikes across the country.
“That capacity is going to be weakened,” Norman said, though added that Iran has “a pretty deep arsenal, and I think those will keep coming for some time.”
Toossi noted that American involvement would raise the stakes for Tehran, which still has the capacity to hit American and allied targets in Iraq, across the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. If faced with an existential conflict, “they can inflict a lot of damage in their periphery,” Toossi said.
As time wears on, the burden on Israeli and U.S. anti-missile systems will grow, Toossi said. Interceptor missiles are finite and expensive, plus their production takes time. “There’s an economics to this warfare right now that’s not necessarily in the favor of Israel and the U.S..” Toossi said.
“I think there’s sometimes an overestimation as to how quickly other groups will surrender, or in this case other states will surrender,” Norman said of Netanyahu and his government. While Israel sees its conflicts as existential, so do its enemies, Norman added.
Regime change
Pushing for regime change — a goal the IDF has explicitly denied and Netanyahu has dodged questions on — might prove the biggest gamble of Israel’s attack, experts told ABC News.
Such a policy makes two assumptions, Mekelberg said. “First, that you can bring down the regime, and second, that you’ll get the people that you want.”
Indeed, the 1979 revolution that birthed the Islamic Republic “started with the liberals, not with the religious,” Mekelberg said. “Look how it ended.”
“In any such episode, there is the best case scenario — which usually doesn’t happen — and there is the worst-case scenario,” he said. “And in between, there is the war with its own dynamics and momentum.”
Even if the regime is at risk of collapse, it would be hard to say when. Israel, Mekelberg said, will need to be prepared for an open-ended war of attrition with levels of destruction inside the country that “people are not used to seeing.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly appealed to the people of Iran to act against the government in Tehran. “This is your opportunity to stand up,” he said over the weekend.
But a population under fire may have different priorities. “People are going to be focusing on surviving and getting out, not on starting a revolution,” Norman said.
Continued attacks may also produce a rallying effect. “Many people do not like the Islamic Republic, the theocracy. But Iranians, despite their disgruntlement with the government, when it comes to Iran, its sovereignty, its stability, its territorial integrity, there’s a strong sense of nationalism across the board from secular to religious, to young to old,” Toossi said. “And that is really being stirred right now.”
Skylar Thomson of the Human Rights Activists in Iran NGO — which is based in the U.S. — told ABC News there is a “real atmosphere of fear” among Iranians she is in contact with.
“In the initial days, people were seeing the assassinations of these Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders that were notoriously cruel” and considered “the leading oppressors in their world,” Thomson said. But fear and uncertainty have spread as hospitals, residential areas, infrastructure and other non-military targets have been attacked, she added.
“You’re talking about a population of people that are already struggling because of external matters,” Thomson said. “And this is just another layer of that.”
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
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