Former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman explains why Iran’s precision strike on Israel demonstrated its shift from strategic patience to active deterrence; and how “Iran has achieved the neutralization of American forces in the Persian Gulf that it long sought;” and that “from a strategic point of view, from a soft power point of view, it was a huge success. Iran accomplished its objective, and it left Israel with an intolerable dilemma. Israel cannot continue to behave as though it can act with impunity.” Video and transcript below.
Chas Freeman Biography
Freeman is not a vanilla ex-diplomat. He accompanied Nixon for his historic meeting with Mao and served as his principal interpreter, later as Director for Chinese Affairs at State (1979-1981). Freeman served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-92, a period that included the First Persian Gulf War. He knows the Middle East well. See bio at his page. Freeman is a bright and critical thinker.
Transcript
Well, I think one thing is clear, and that is that Israel no longer has any credibility at all. Anything it says is immediately suspected of being duplicitous and dishonest. But the United States is not far behind. Think about it. Israel attacked an embassy in Damascus. This is a violation of one of the very most basic norms of international relations, going back many thousands of years to the classical world, enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. And the United States, Britain and France vetoed the condemnation of that act. And then we have statements by people like Lord Cameron of Britain, the foreign secretary who who says that the very carefully contrived performative symbolic retaliation by Iran was disproportionate to the blowing up of the embassy in which a general and diplomats and others were killed.
And yet no one perished in from the Iranian attack because they very carefully signaled that they were going to do it. They gave 72 hours of notice. They used slow-moving drones to signal that they were engaged in an attack. They timed cruise missiles and ballistic missiles for the arrival of those drones. And they did all this aiming purely at military targets, no civilian targets. And actually they hit the military targets. We don’t know how severely because the Israelis are lying about the damage. But it appears that in the major base in the south where they struck, they were able to achieve a level of accuracy that was quite extraordinary. They seem to have hit the officers club swimming pool and then out building.
They didn’t kill anybody. They allowed the Israelis to move the F-35s that were stationed there and which conducted the raid on Damascus. And so what they showed was they had the capacity to clog and render Israeli defenses overburdened. They now know where all of the radars and anti-missile sites are. They have learned that they can send not their best missiles, but older missiles and strike an Israeli base. And they have now said, well, from our point of view, we’ve made our point. We’re not planning to do anything else. We don’t know what Israel is going to do, but Israel is threatening retaliation. Iran has said that if that happens, instead of 320 flying objects flying toward Israel, there will be 1,500. So basically, this changes all the rules of the game in the Middle East.
Iran had practiced a policy called strategic patience, which basically was passivity. If it was attacked, as it often was by Israel, if its officers, military, scientific, government, politicians were assassinated, as many were, it did not retaliate in kind. Sometimes it assisted its clients, other resistance movements in the region, Hezbollah, for example, in Lebanon, to carry out some kind of retaliatory act, but it never acted directly. Israel therefore felt that with American protection, to which I’ll come in a moment, it had a free hand in the Middle East. It could act with impunity. That is no longer the case. And I know that at the cost of maybe $20 million in missile firings, drones that cost a few thousand dollars, cruise missiles that cost a few hundred thousand dollars, and ballistic missiles that are more expensive, Iran probably cost Israel $1.3 billion in defense efforts, succeeded in panicking the Israeli population over the course of the weekend.
[Iran] demonstrated that it can overwhelm Israel’s defenses if it chooses to do so, and also that Israel cannot defend itself without the active participation of the United States, the UK, France, and in this case Jordan, acting against drones crossing its territory. A final point here is that there’s a great deal made of the so-called cooperation of Arab states with Israel against Iran. What was that? With the exception of Jordan, which did act to shoot down drones crossing its territory, the only participation was intelligence sharing. That is, Saudi Arabia and others informed the United States and Israel of the tracks of the missiles coming across their territory. At the same time, and this is very important, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and others informed the United States that they would not permit American operations against Iran from their territory.
And Iran warned those states that if they did, they would become targets. So in a sense, Iran has achieved the neutralization of American forces in the Persian Gulf that it long sought. So this is, as someone has put it, From a tactical military point of view, it was a nothing burger, to use an American slang expression. It didn’t amount to anything. Nobody was killed. Nobody was really damaged. The swimming pool may have a hole in it, and the air base. But otherwise, not much happened. But from a strategic point of view, from a soft power point of view, it was a huge success. Iran accomplished its objective, and it left Israel with an intolerable dilemma. Israel cannot continue to behave as though it can act with impunity.
And let me pose a specific question. If Israel now assassinates an Iranian, if President Raisi of Iran’s statement is to be believed, Iran will retaliate in kind. That should be sobering. It has not been the case. Iranian restraint has been broken. Furthermore, there are now people in Tehran who, for the first time, are saying openly, in order to counter Israel, we are going to have to go nuclear. So Israel has crossed a line. And let’s remember, despite all the spin in the Western press, this particular cycle began with an Israeli provocation, not an Iranian provocation. The Israelis attacked a sacrosanct target, a target that has political and diplomatic immunity, namely the embassy of Iran and Damascus. Iran was put in a position where it had to respond.
Apparently, the Israelis misjudged. They thought that as in the past, despite their escalation against Iran, Iran would continue to exercise strategic restraint. But I don’t think the Iranian populace would permit the government in Tehran to do that. And the government in Tehran also has clients in the form of resistance movements against Israel throughout the Middle East, which also would not be impressed if Iran failed to act. Now, some of those resistance movements, apparently agree with the spin in the West that, well, Iran didn’t do anything. It just showed it was incapable and lacked willpower. I don’t think that is correct. And I know that Hezbollah and others do not appear to share that opinion. So the next time Israel does something, and we don’t know what it will do, but it is saying now that it does not believe that attacking Iran’s clients, its proxies, if you will, in the region would be enough that it has to act directly against Iran. If it does that, we don’t know what’s going to happen. The final notion here is that Mr. Netanyahu failed to achieve his 35-year-long objective of generating a war against Iran, which would bring the United States in on Israel’s side to destroy the largely mythical Iranian nuclear program. Nobody believes that, except the politicians in Israel and on Capitol Hill in Washington, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. What it does have is a program to achieve nuclear latency in case a decision is made, no decision having been made yet, apparently, to build a bomb. And what we’re now seeing in Iran is a debate about making a decision to build a bomb. So from every point of view, this is a disaster for Israel, for the West, and it leaves the situation very uncertain.
Perspectives 