Israel’s latest unprovoked attack on Iran began on June 13 with the bombing of the nation’s nuclear and military facilities — as well as targeted assassinations of at least nine Iranian nuclear scientists, along with several key figures in Iran’s military and intelligence leadership. Iran reported on June 16 that at least 224 people, mostly civilians have been killed and 1,400 injured in Israel’s attacks, while Iranian retaliatory missile strikes have reportedly killed at least 24 Israelis and injured more than 500.
Israel’s air assault was launched just two days before representatives of the U.S. and Iran were scheduled to meet to continue negotiations on reaching an agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capacity. While Israel justified its attack by asserting Iran was very close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, U.S. intelligence agencies had reached a very different conclusion finding that Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon, and was up to three years away from having that capability. In his social media posts, President Trump has made conflicting statements on the U.S. role in Israel’s offensive and said he was considering an option to order the Pentagon to assist Israel in using powerful bunker buster bombs to destroy Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility built deep inside a mountain.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jennifer Loewenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who assesses the rationale and consequences of Israel’s attack on Iran, the Trump regime’s apparent role in the assault and the threat that this conflict could trigger a wider regional war involving the U.S.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: The current crisis is something that I viewed a couple of months ago as inevitable because anyone who has followed the career of Netanyahu will know that he has wanted to bomb Iran for the last 30 years, and that he has been pressuring successive U.S. governments to do so. With the second Trump administration, I think he assumed he would have his opportunity.
But to be fair, Trump actually didn’t want Netanyahu to bomb Iran initially. He wants to be, he’s a very vain man. He doesn’t really have any loyalty to anyone or anything but himself, and he was going on for awhile about how he wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize and be the great peacemaker. He was going to talk to Putin and Zelensky on the Ukraine War, he was going to have a ceasefire in Gaza, and he was going to prevent any outbreak of war within Iran.
But a lot of elements in his own government and within the Israel lobby and from Israel itself have been pushing him to abandon that stance and to take a hard line on Iran. They succeeded, not because he finally saw the light, they succeeded because Trump is essentially a stupid man who doesn’t know the first thing about foreign policy, let alone Iran. He knows nothing. And he was basically pressured to believe that an Israeli strike on Iran at this time could actually pressure Iran into agreeing to the terms that were finally set out for this new agreement — which would be no enrichment, that Iran could not enrich uranium past its present levels and Iran of course would never agree to that. It’s a red line for Iran, so that would never happen.
So that’s how we got where we are today. There’s no question that what Netanyahu would like now more than anything else would be for the United States to join in this war full force on Israel’s side.
SCOTT HARRIS: Jennifer, if Israel’s attack fails to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and capacity, could this attack expedite the Iranian government’s decision as well as its political will to arm itself with a nuclear weapon?
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s something that most analysts who really understand Iran are saying today is that nothing will push Iran closer to wanting to build a nuclear bomb then the destruction of its nuclear facilities and an Israeli-American attack on the country.
What’s ironic is that some people may have seen that apparently Israel had planned to assassinate Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, but the Trump government said no. And I think this is really ironic because of course — I don’t know how well the Trump administration understands this — but Khamenei is the one person standing between Iran and a nuclear bomb. It’s because Khamenei, the Supreme leader views nuclear weapons as satanic that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. With him gone, the door would be open for any number of people within Iranian civil society and political and military society to step in and say, “Hey guys, look what’s happening. The only way we will ever have deterrence against Israel-American actions would be to have a nuclear weapon.”
If the United States comes in and starts bombing Iran, surely Iran is not going to stand up militarily next to the United States, but I think at that point, we’re going to start seeing the Iraqi groups getting involved, Syrian Alewite groups getting involved, Hezbollah getting involved. I mean, all of these people are suddenly going to step in and it’s going to be a regional war.
I should note that the Pakistani defense minister today weighed in when he was talking about the shah’s son wanting to become the new leader of Iran. This is the Pakistani defense minister, not a natural ally of the Iranians. He called the Shah’s son a “bloody, parasitical imperial whore.” That gives you a sense of how much anger there is in the Islamic world towards the West.
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