[Hac-announce] Israel Had the Courage to Do What Needed to Be Done

[Manny Sholem Ratafia]

Thoughtful and pragmatic analysis by Bret Stephens in the New York 
Times.--Manny

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/opinion/iran-israel-strikes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare 



  Israel Had the Courage to Do What Needed to Be Done

June 13, 2025

By Bret Stephens <https://www.nytimes.com/by/bret-stephens>

Opinion Columnist

It may be months or years before we’ll know the full results of Israel’s 
attack on Iranian nuclear and military targets, which began early Friday 
morning and could last for days or weeks. But critics of the strike — 
and already they are 
<https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1933345572443783580> vocal 
<https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strike-conflict/card/sen-jack-reed-denounces-israeli-strike-31Papxe9dxHuKkpryJtz?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAiq-yeHeDrmgWWbHE79oQIwxjU37La7NuN-bOJ05VZcyiUyGOkZVVoozJnaIxs%3D&gaa_ts=684c4f3d&gaa_sig=S3rN4zppZnY1V9pdUcS2fjf8vU3_GjKiRsyWfUOw97Fdb0V-CNXJ26g3zLIABtZv4D5jVsLu8sd-H-JONISGlQ%3D%3D> 
— might at least ask themselves whether Israel had any realistic 
alternative against an adversary that has repeatedly vowed to wipe it 
off the map.

Barely a day before the strike, the board of the International Atomic 
Energy Agency, representing 35 nations, declared that Iran was in 
violation of its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. The agency’s 
technical report 
<https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-25.pdf> points 
to “rapid accumulation of highly enriched uranium,” a failure by Iran to 
provide “technically credible answers regarding the nuclear material at 
three locations” and Iran’s “insistence on a unique and unilateral 
approach to its legally binding obligation.”

In plain English, Iran has been deceiving the world for years while 
gathering the means to build multiple nuclear weapons. In a better 
world, diplomacy would have forestalled and perhaps eliminated the need 
for Israeli military action.

But President Trump, who tried to dissuade Israel from striking, failed 
to get a deal after five rounds of negotiations and noted this week that 
Tehran had become “much more aggressive 
<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5342152-trump-iran-nuclear-deal-negotiations/>” 
in the talks. Make of his testimony what you will, but it’s worth 
recalling that a much more pliant and patient Biden administration spent 
years trying to reach an agreement, and also gave up 
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-administration-cold-water-prospect-renewed-iran-nuclear-talks/story?id=113189046> 
in frustration with Iran’s repeated prevarications.

As for other alternatives, the clandestine means of sabotage and 
targeted assassinations that Israel had long used, and which probably 
delayed Iran’s nuclear breakout moment by years, had plainly run their 
course — otherwise, Israel would have continued to use them rather than 
risk Iranian retaliatory strikes using drones and missiles that could 
overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Those strikes have begun. But they underscore, from an Israeli point of 
view, how crucial it is that Iran be prevented from being able to mount 
any of those missiles with a nuclear warhead. Academic theorists in, 
say, Chicago may be convinced that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons 
would merely help create a stable balance against a nuclear-armed Israel.

Yet that fails to take into account the millenarian 
<https://www.memri.org/reports/former-iranian-president-rafsanjani-using-nuclear-bomb-against-israel> 
mind-set of some of Iran’s theocratic leaders, for whom the ideological 
objective of destroying Israel may be worth the price of mass martyrdom 
in a nuclear exchange. It also ignores the prospect that an Iranian 
nuclear bomb would lead Saudi Arabia 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/21/crown-prince-confirms-saudi-arabia-seek-nuclear-arsenal-iran-develops-one>, 
and perhaps Turkey 
<https://www.iar-gwu.org/blog/erdogans-nuclear-itchstrong-strongwhy-turkeys-nuclear-program-is-a-threat-to-regional-stability-and-the-international-nonproliferation-regime> 
and Egypt 
<https://www.memri.org/tv/egypt-military-analyst-gen-samir-farag-if-iran-gets-nukes-we-want-them-too>, 
to seek nukes of their own. How stable is a balance of terror if there 
are three, four or five nuclear powers in the world’s most volatile 
region, operating in uncertain diplomatic combinations, each at daggers 
drawn with the others?

Still, even if Israel had no better options against Iran, it’s no 
guarantee that the strikes will succeed, either in the short or long 
term. Besides a direct retaliatory strike on Israel, Iran will be 
tempted to hit back at other targets: ships transiting the Strait of 
Hormuz, Jewish sites in faraway places 
<https://apnews.com/article/argentina-amia-attack-terrorism-iran-milei-israel-war-memorial-b1094f4e38ba33f1c7e13c9cbd5fbbce>, 
U.S. diplomatic or military installations in the region. The Israeli 
strike may also drive Iran’s nuclear programs further underground, 
figuratively and literally, accelerating its effort to get nukes while 
making future attacks more difficult to carry off.

Those risks can’t be ignored. But it’s worth noting that Iran was doing 
many of those things without the pretext of an Israeli strike, sometimes 
directly and sometimes through proxies, such as the Houthis and Hezbollah.

Also worth noting is that Hezbollah has been quiet since Israel’s 
attack. That could always change, but it’s a result of its swift 
decimation at Israeli hands last September. That, too, was denounced by 
Israel’s critics as dangerously escalatory. But now it’s paying 
dividends in the form of constricted Iranian retaliatory options, the 
end of the pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the first 
possibility in two generations for the Lebanese people finally to govern 
themselves.

Sometimes military strikes end with blowback. But sometimes they 
accomplish their goals — as Israel showed when it took out Syria’s 
nuclear reactor in 2007 and Iraq’s in 1981. Neither regime, thankfully, 
ever acquired nuclear weapons.

As for the prospect of Iran now racing toward a bomb, evidence suggests 
it was already doing so anyway. It will take time, probably years, for 
Iran to regain its former pace, and it will do so in a severely weakened 
military, technical and economic state. And it can always be hit again.

It also matters that Iran’s leadership has again been bested on its home 
turf, not by the “Great Satan” of the United States but, much more 
humiliatingly, by the “Little Satan” of Israel. The weaker and more 
uncertain the regime looks in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the 
likelier it will spark the kinds of mass protests that nearly brought it 
down in 2022. An end to the regime that has inflicted so much misery on 
so many people for so many years offers the only sure route to ending 
the nuclear crisis for good.

I’m writing in the first hours of a conflict that surely still has many 
surprises in store. It’s far too soon to say how it will end. But for 
those who worry about a future in which one of the world’s most awful 
regimes takes advantage of international irresolution to gain possession 
of the most dangerous weapons, Israel’s strike is a display of clarity 
and courage for which we may all one day be grateful.

//

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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about 
foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook 
<https://www.facebook.com/Bret-Stephens-1897344563844527>

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 3 of 
the New York edition with the headline: Israel Had the Courage to Do 
What Needed to Be Done. Order Reprints 
<https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/> |

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