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WHY DID ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN NOW?  
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Marc Lynch
June 13, 2025
The Ghost of Abu Aardvark
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_ Under any interpretation, Israel's attack is clearly illegal under
international law, not that anyone seems to care anymore. Israel's
attack on Iran is best understood as a continuation of its attempt to
remake the Middle East through force. _

Iran's Press TV highlights the civilian damage of Israel's first
strike,

 

_What is it really trying to achieve... and can it succeed?_

Last night, Israel launched a major military strike against Iran,
killing a number of its senior military commanders and taking shots at
key nuclear sites. The strike came only days before the sixth round of
the US-Iran nuclear talks in Oman, and days before the convening of a
major UN conference on a Palestinian state spearheaded by France and
Saudi Arabia. Israel has stated that this will be a multi-day war;
Iran threatened retaliation, but thus far has only sent a small drone
attack that Israel easily countered. There's a lot we don't know, and
this is only the beginning of what will likely be an intense and
unpredictable week. It's way to soon to render any verdicts on the war
or its implications. For now, I just wanted to throw out a few
preliminary thoughts that might be relevant to those trying to make
sense of Israel's attack based on what we know now: this was not a
pre-emptive attack, but rather the expansion of an ongoing regional
war; regime collapse, not the nuclear program, might be Israel's real
goal; and whether Israel had American support probably depends on if
it succeeds.

FIRST: ISRAELI SPOKESMEN HAVE CALLED THIS A PRE-EMPTIVE ATTACK, BUT IT
WAS NOT. Pre-emption means responding to an immediate threat of
attack, striking first before getting hit yourself. Israel's strike
was perhaps a _preventive_ attack, aimed at a building but not
imminent threat of Iranian nuclearization. This is reminiscent of
1967, when Israel similarly claimed to have launched a pre-emptive
strike against Egypt even though the peak of that spring's crisis had
long passed, Egyptian forces were not preparing an attack, and
everyone was working on a diplomatic solution; its motivation was to
to prevent Egypt from locking in an advantageous position in the Sinai
and the Red Seas through diplomacy, not to forestall an impending
Egyptian attack. Israel argued that its war was pre-emptive rather
than preventive because it understood the implications under
international law: states have the right to pre-emption, while
preventive war is illegal. That has implications for legal arguments
about the status of the occupied territories which continue today
nearly sixty years later.

Even calling it a preventive war in this case is a stretch, though.
It's true that the IAEA declared Iran as non-compliant with its
nuclear obligations the other day, and it's true that reporting has
indicated that Iran has enriched enough uranium to produce multiple
nuclear warheads. But Iran was also deep into negotiations with the
United States over a return to the nuclear agreement that the Trump
administration tore up seven years ago without justification or cause.
The sixth round of talks was scheduled for this weekend in Oman, and
while the public signals coming out of both Washington and Tehran
about the talks were pretty negative they still continued. If Israel
was preventing anything with this attack, it was preventing diplomatic
progress between Washington and Tehran – while likely throwing into
disarray next week's plans for the UN meeting on Palestine where
multiple countries were reportedly set to recognize a Palestinian
state. It almost certainly also was intended to prevent movement on
any of Benjamin Netanyahu's many personal political crises, as he has
done throughout the Gaza hostage/ceasefire talks. Under any
interpretation, Israel's attack is clearly illegal under international
law, not that anyone seems to care anymore.

Israel's attack on Iran is best understood neither as pre-emptive nor
preventive, but AS A CONTINUATION OF ITS ATTEMPT TO REMAKE THE MIDDLE
EAST THROUGH FORCE. Israel has been escalating its shadow war with
Iran dramatically over the last year, most notably with the
decapitation and devastation of Hezbollah in Lebanon but also with
assassinations, bombings and strikes against Iranian assets around the
region and inside Iran itself. In each of these attacks, it has
demonstrated astonishing degrees of military capability and
penetration of its adversary's communications and organizational
networks, and in each case has faced little by way of serious
retaliation (though, as I wrote a couple of months ago, it
remains unclear
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Iran actually threw everything it had at Israel in the two rounds of
missile strikes or was calibrating its response). That military
success and lack of meaningful response has clearly emboldened
Netanyahu and the IDF, which seem to believe that they can strike
anywhere with impunity and that they can safely ignore critics at home
and abroad. And the reporting that this attack on Iran has been some
nine months in the making, and involved pre-deployed drones smuggled
into Iran, suggests that the timing is based on opportunity not
imminent threat.

SECOND: THE NUCLEAR PROGRAM IS A TARGET AND A TRIGGER, BUT THE ATTACK
MIGHT HAVE BIGGER GOALS. It has long been conventional wisdom that
Israel could not seriously set back the Iranian nuclear program
through unilateral military action. Bombing and assassinations would
set the program back for a few months, even a year, but that Iran
would quickly recover. The risk of "mowing the lawn" to buy time in
Iran was always triggering an Iranian dash to test a nuclear weapon.
It would not surprise me if that's what Iran now does – though I
would be shocked if Israel hadn't prepared for that contingency as
well. The limited damage reported at Iranian nuclear sites today
offers nothing to contradict that, but it's early – one lesson of
the attack on Hezbollah is that Israel seems to have extreme degrees
of visibility into these things, and has developed novel methods to
attack them.

The pattern of attacks in the first day of Israeli strikes actually
suggests that the target of the attack is the regime itself, not
necessarily the nuclear program. A few months ago, I wrote this:

The collapse of regime military forces — in part because smothering
sanctions had hollowed out the Syrian state, years of conflict had
degraded the willingness of conscript soldiers to fight for the
regime’s survival, and Israeli military strikes had suddenly shifted
the balance of power by decimating Hezbollah and taking out Iranian
assets across the country — had to send warning flags about Iran’s
own stability.

Perhaps Israel hopes that a decapitation strike against Iran's
military leadership, in the wake of repeated rounds of popular
uprisings and the ongoing economic effects of American and global
sanctions, will trigger a popular uprising in Iran as well and the
collapse of the Iranian state? That seems highly unlikely, and it's
not even obvious that a regime which emerged from the rubble of
Iranian state failure or regime collapse would be better. But it can't
be ruled out as either a goal or as a high-impact/low-probability
outcome. Most likely, the Israeli attack has two tracks, giving top
priority to setting back the nuclear program, but hoping that the
process could trigger Iranian regime collapse.

THIRD: ONE OF THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS RIGHT NOW IS WHETHER ISRAEL HAD
AMERICAN SUPPORT AND PRIOR APPROVAL FOR THE ATTACK. The reporting on
this is all over the place, likely intentionally so. A day before the
attack, the reports circulated that Trump had told Israel not to
attack until the talks had failed; later reporting claims that this
had been intentional disinformation designed to keep Iran from
mobilizing and hiding its assets. Early reports (and official
statements) suggested an American effort to distance itself from the
attack – the famous line from 1967, "you will only be alone if you
go it alone" even made an appearance – but more recent comments
suggest more coordination.

It does seem hard to believe that the US would endorse an attack in
the midst of its own showcase negotiations, but perhaps Trump somehow
thought that it would improve his bargaining position by sending the
Iranian leadership a message about the costs of the talks failing –
which would be a profound misunderstanding of Iranian calculations,
but one could see Trump talking himself into it. I thought that
Netanyahu was bluffing because Trump really seemed serious about the
nuclear talks (for more serious than I expected) – and because the
Gulf states, whose leaders and money he loves, had made clear that
they did not want a war with Iran at this time.

I suspect that the absence of any serious American foreign policy
apparatus gave Netanyahu an opening. Who speaks for the US or shapes
its decisions with the NSC disbanded and half its experts fired, no
National Security Advisor (unless you count Rubio's multiple hats),
the State Department and intelligence agencies debilitated and cowed,
and Trump's White House utterly consumed with its efforts to provoke
constitutional crisis and even civil war through its ICE raids and
deployment of the National Guard and Marines to California (not to
mention Saturday's big stupid military parade in DC)?

I strongly suspect that Trump's meandering, incoherent messages
talking to Netanyahu gave Israel the leeway it needed to make the case
that there had been no "red light". Their gamble is that if they
succeed, Trump will take credit; if they fail, Trump would probably
hang Netanyahu out to dry politically, but after endless American
support for their war crimes in Gaza they don't really worry about any
serious American aid cuts or response. But if the war goes south, Gulf
states and oil shipping get targeted, missiles and other Iranian
retaliation attacks start getting through, and the lack of an endgame
become clear, Trump will take no responsibility (as is his way) and
make sure that everyone blames Netanyahu for it.

More as things develop...

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by Marc Lynch. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the
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* Israel
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* Iran
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* nuclear power
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* Netanyahu
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* Middle East
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* Palestine
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