Will Israel send its air force out to flatten as many military and civilian targets as it can, as some members of Israel’s War Cabinet favor, or will the response be carefully thought out to achieve the maximum results in the short and longer terms?
In other words, to clean up a well-known saying, will Israel follow its brains or its muscles?
The brains method means a reliance on cyberattacks, which could shut down Iran for weeks or months.
The muscles approach would bring some satisfaction and some chest-thumping, but it would miss other possible positive outcomes:
- Involving the coalition of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in an extended struggle against Iran
- Using the battle with Iran to leverage a solution to the war in Gaza
- Strengthening Israel’s alliance not only with its veteran treaty partners, Egypt and Jordan, but also with its newer ones in the Abraham Accords and potentially Saudi Arabia
Israel is a recognized world power when it comes to cybersecurity. But unlike the national tendency to claim noisy credit for its accomplishments, its cyber achievements are kept under tight censorship wraps. That has become a strategic error, depriving Israel of obvious, public deterrent capabilities.
For now, though, those of us writing from Israel have to attribute what we know to “foreign reports.” So please consider what you’re reading here as such. I’ve been playing that “game” for decades. READ MORE
