By Dr. Dan Steinbock
The emboldened Netanyahu cabinet is in a war path, again. It is mobilizing to attack Iran and lobbying President Trump into a plan that presumably would use the ‘Mother of All Bombs.’
In a press conference with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “finish the job” against Iran with the support of President Trump.
Ever since his rise to power in the late 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has worked toward a war with Iran, presumably to demolish Tehran’s nuclear facilities but also to ensure its power projection in the region.
Now the emboldened Netanyahu wants to finish the job, decimate Iran’s nascent nuclear capabilities, undermine Tehran’s future and overthrow its rulers. After the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s neoconservative empire-builders are also back, pushing still another forever war for a “paradigm shift in the Middle East.”
The Israel-Iran scenarios
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has discussed with Trump several possible levels of American backing. According to Israeli observers, there are now four viable scenarios for an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, as seen in the light of US-Israeli relations. Let’s name them.
In the cooperative scenario, the US and Israel cooperate in an attack against Iran’s nuclear sites, which will be followed by Trump’s ultimatum that Iran must entirely dismantle its military nuclear program.
In the clash scenario, the Trump administration would build on diplomacy to seal a nuclear deal. Yet, Israel would attack on its own and thereby undermine Trump’s efforts causing a bilateral drift between the two countries.
In the investment scenario, Saudi Arabia would offer the US hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, to avoid a destabilization in the region that could undermine Riyadh’s 2030 modernization program.
In the solo scenario, Israel attacks Israel’s nuclear facilities without direct US cooperation, but with the tacit consent of the White House. This would happen after the Trump administration’s threats and coercive diplomacy against Iran.
Ultimately, US priorities will matter the most. But these can be elusive and contradictory. Some in the Congress have called for more US military action, including direct attacks against Iran. Others have echoed the Biden Administration’s calls for restraint and de-escalation.
Here’s the problem: any escalation with Iran, whether by the US, Israel or both would likely regionalize the Gaza devastation, which is mis-aligned with Trumps’ economic and geopolitical goals in the Middle East.
Targeting Iran
Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when President Carter froze billions of dollars in Iranian assets, Washington has sought to restore the status quo ante of the Shah that had made Iran safe to American capitalism.
In the 1980s, US intelligence and logistics played a vital role in arming Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, perhaps the most lethal conventional war between developing countries yet, with total casualty estimates up to 1 to 2 million. In 1988, the US launched an attack against Iran, presumably in retaliation for Iran’s laying mines in areas in the Gulf. In the mid-90s, the Clinton administration declared a total embargo on dealings with Iran.
In 2002, President Bush included Iran in his “Axis of evil” speech. Subsequently, US and Israel cooperated in training secessionist forces in Iran’s Kurdistan province. In 2007, US reportedly vetoed an Israeli plan to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, during the next three years, the US and Israel deployed the Stuxnet virus, the world’s first offensive cyber weapon, to destroy almost a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
In 2015, years of challenging talks resulted in a nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) between Iran, the US and a set of world powers. Despite Iran’s adherence to it, the Trump administration pulled the US out of the deal in 2018. As tensions escalated, the Trump administration assassinated Iran’s most important general, Qasem Soleimani, in a deadly drone strike in January 2020.
The longstanding quest for Iran War
While the covert war in the shadows has prevailed since the Islamic Revolution, US regime change efforts moved to a new stage during the Bush administration. Since 2003, US Army has conducted an analysis called TIRANNT (Theater Iran Near-Term) for a full-scale war with Iran. Reportedly, this plan (CONPLAN 8022) would be activated in the eventuality of a Second 9/11, on the presumption that Iran would be behind such a pivotal operation.
That may be one reason why Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan and PM Netanyahu explicitly compared Hamas’s October 7 offensive to the 9/11 terror attacks, which sparked the US. global war on terror. Concurrently, many in Washington sought a pretext for a link with Iran, to legitimize a major regional conflict. In contrast, the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence assessed that Iran had no foreknowledge of or involvement in the October 7 attacks.
For its part, Netanyahu’s government calculated that an Iran conflict could divert mounting negative public attention from atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank.
There were precedents. In 2011 Netanyahu had ordered the Mossad and IDF to prepare for an attack on Iran within 15 days. Yet, Mossad’s chief Tamir Pardo and chief of staff Benny Gantz, the opposition’s key member in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, questioned the PM’s legal authority to give such an order without the cabinet’s approval. Netanyahu had backed off.
A month after the Hamas offensive, Netanyahu’s Mossad chief David Barnea stated Iran had stepped up terror worldwide.” If Israelis or Jews are harmed, he added, Israel’s response would go to Tehran’s “highest echelon.”
Using October 7 against Iran
In April 2024, Israel bombed Iranian embassy in Damascus in which 16 people were killed, including the targets, half a dozen high-level officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The IRGC launched a broad retaliatory attack against Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with successive waves of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Giving full public notice that its response was on the way, Tehran designed it carefully as a show of force that would not trigger a wave of escalation. It caused minimal damage in Israel. However, as Israel would later acknowledge, despite containment efforts by the US, the UK, France and Jordan, some of Iran’s ballistic missiles penetrated Israel’s defenses, hitting the Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel.
Iran’s attack targeted Israeli territory as a warning shot. It demonstrated Tehran’s ability to counteract Israel’s huge air superiority, though lacking a modern air force of its own. It also highlighted Israel’s dependency on major Western powers to protect itself and the inadequacy of that protection.
So, how would Israel respond to a conventional “existential crisis” with Iran?
In late 2023, the hypothesis was tested in a high-level US war game. Intriguingly, initially the US participants presumed that self-restraint would prevail in this high-level war game. Yet, the simulation’s cold logic compelled them into a sequence of steps that quickly went nuclear.
“Mother of all Bombs” into nuclear facilities?
Until recently, Israel lacked “bunker buster” bombs and the capacity to mount a sustained air attack that would destroy Iran’s entire nuclear program. But perhaps not anymore.
Recently, German newspaper “Bild” revealed that the US envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, announced Washington’s intention to deliver one of the most powerful non-nuclear weapons systems to Israel, known as the “Mother of All Bombs.” Reportedly, Pentagon denies the story.
Weighing almost 10,000 kg, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb can destroy deep underground bunkers. The explosive yield is comparable to that of small tactical nuclear weapons.
In January, US military intelligence already assessed that, absent an agreement, Israel would probably strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, most likely the Fordow enrichment plant, an Iranian underground uranium enrichment facility 20 miles (32 km) from the city of Qom, in the first half of 2025.
First tested in 2003, the “Mother of All Bombs,” a 30,000-pound (14,000-kilogram) monster was used for the first time in combat in 2017 in Afghanistan by the Trump administration, despite the dire collateral damage.
Whether such use of the MOAB would spark a regional war or trigger waves of new terror and insurgencies in the Middle East is a matter of debate. But it would mean a potentially catastrophic escalation in the region and reshape geopolitical landscape in the early 21st century.
The original commentary was published by Informed Comment on Feb 16, 2025
About the Author
The author of The Fall of Israel (2025), Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
