Designed to Fail

Iran’s Attack Seems Like It Was Designed to Fail. So What Comes Next?

Tehran’s first-ever attack on Israel was designed to be shot down. But Netanyahu could still turn it into a real war.

By MICHAEL HIRSH

Iran’s attack on Israel was dangerous, provocative — and seemingly all but designed to fail. None of the hundreds of projectiles launched at Israel hit a major target.

So, what was the point?

The latest crisis to erupt in the region left many longtime analysts wondering what Iran’s real intention was — whether the direct attack was mainly a face-saving exercise or a genuine effort to escalate — and whether the United States can still manage to prevent what it’s been trying to avoid for more than six months, a full-scale regional war.

Israel and Iran have been involved in a gradual, tit-for-tat escalation since Oct. 7. On April 1, the tensions worsened dramatically when Israel — retaliating for attacks on Israeli citizens allegedly orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps along the Syrian border — destroyed an Iranian consulate building in Damascus, killing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior IRGC commander, and seven other IRGC officers.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared afterward that Israel would be “punished,” according to the state-run IRNA news agency. And the Iranian response on Saturday — a direct hit on Israel launched from Iran — marked a dramatic and very dangerous departure for Tehran, which until now has preferred to operate mainly through proxies in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere around the region.

“There is a greater willingness to run risks by Iran than ever before,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an expert in Iran’s missile capabilities. “Until now, Iran had never directly targeted Israel from Iranian territory in an overt and attributable fashion,” said Taleblu. “The strike also was the first ballistic missile attack from Iranian territory against a defended target.”

“Iran wanted to break the taboo of targeting Israeli territory,” he said. “After being able to support the October 7 terrorist attack and orchestrate a multi-front proxy campaign against Israel and not have to pay the price, there’s no doubt Tehran was tempted to press its advantage.”

Until now Tehran has signaled that it doesn’t want an all-out war, having restrained its Hezbollah ally in Israel’s north from launching more than sporadic token attacks. But “Iran’s government appears to have concluded that the Damascus strike was a strategic inflection point, where failure to retaliate would carry more downsides than benefits,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group.

At the same time, Vaez added, Tehran’s choice of weaponry was cautious. “They could have used a much higher number of projectiles, synchronized drones and missiles in a way that would have swarmed the air defense systems, and could have fired their new hypersonic missiles,” he said. “They clearly wanted something spectacular but not fatal.”

Officials said more than 99 percent of the drones and missiles were shot down and there was only one reported injury, that of a 7-year-old Bedouin Arab girl who was hospitalized.

“The matter can be deemed concluded,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a post on social media platform X hours after the start of the operation late Saturday. “However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe.”

U.S. President Joe Biden is now in the tricky position of persuading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish war cabinet to restrain his response to avoid all-out war.

So far, Biden has aimed to deter Tehran by signaling that war with Israel also means war with the United States. In a statement, Biden said the U.S. military had “moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week” in anticipation of the Iranian attack, and “we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”

While some Republicans called for a tougher U.S. response, even some longtime critics of Biden on the right praised the president’s careful approach.

“I have to give the Biden administration credit. They have responded better than they did when Jerusalem whacked Zahedi in Damascus,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA official and a Farsi-speaking scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “When that happened, the White House was very quick to signal that the-Israelis-did-it-not-us; this time round, Washington ran towards Israel and has intervened on Israel’s behalf. This will induce greater Iranian anxiety.”

“Does Khamenei want to escalate against Israel? Yes. Does he want to escalate against the U.S.? No,” said Gerecht. “Unfortunately for the clerical regime, Israel is going to respond directly against it. They have to. The only open question is the magnitude. We are in an escalatory spiral that likely favors Israel more than Tehran in great part because the White House chose not to sit this out and now will be unable to change its commitment to Jerusalem.”

Even so, Biden reportedly told Netanyahu during a call on Sunday that he won’t support an Israeli counterattack against Iran. (Biden has said he would coordinate a diplomatic pressure campaign against Iran by the G7 nations.) Biden reportedly told Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win,” according to Axios.

Despite that, Israel’s hard-line government is all but certain to continue its habit of defying Washington and strike back at Iran directly.

Netanyahu is “a leader who simply would not want to be remembered for not having responded to a direct attack from Iran,” said Hussein Banai, co-author of Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict. He added: “A U.S.-led limited counterattack might be the best option in terms of escalation control; but that would mean getting to a consensus between Biden and Bibi, which may be hard to get at this time.”