The White House has just stated that Donald Trump will decide whether to join Israel's campaign against Iran within the next two weeks. This is effectively a deadline for the regime to surrender.
However, Israel doesn't really need American help in inflicting even more damage on Iran than it is doing on its own already.
It has achieved air dominance over the key sites in the country and is capable of striking any location it wants. Its intelligence is also so robust that it can target regime's leaders and take most of them out one by one.
Iran is helpless.
But the goal for Israel is to destroy Iranian nuclear programme – and this is where it might, reportedly, need American help, as it does not have sufficiently powerful bombs to penetrate the roughly 90 metres of rock covering the Fordow uranium enrichment facility buried underneath a mountain outside of Iran's holy city of Qom.
But this is where public statements stop making sense.
First of all, the 14 tonne GBU-57 heavy bunker buster is only capable of penetrating up to 60 meters into the rock – 30 short of the target. What's more, it has never been deployed in an actual attack and its performance in Fordow is a total unknown. Theory is one thing, practice is something entirely different.
Even in ideal circumstances the US would have to perfectly hit the target twice and hope all calculations find a reflection in real life performance. Some within the US administration have expressed doubts, suggesting that the facility might only be destroyed with a tactical nuke – something that is off the table (and unlikely to ever be realistically considered given the precedent it would set for countries like Russia, China or North Korea).
Finally, even if stars aligned and the bombs worked as intended, they may not provide a complete guarantee that some parts of the complex, equipment in the facility or fissile material present would not survive to be extracted and reused later in a race towards building a bomb and exacting revenge on Israel in the future.
The preferred solution
The best way to ensure that Iran's nuclear program is completely dismantled is... to dismantle it yourself, by hand.
The ideal scenario would entail regime's unconditional surrender and voluntary access to all of the sites so that they can be torn apart down to the last bolt. It's what Trump appears to still be hoping for (as it would also allow for a total victory without engaging the American military).
If the regime continues to resist, however, then the next best option isn't bombing its nuclear sites – it is to send troops to ensure nothing is left intact.
Israel has already done something of the sort in Syria, where it deployed 100 soldiers of its special forces to raid Iranian-funded missile manufacturing facilities last September.
90 meters of rock is no match for a group of highly-trained an well-equipped operators who can plant explosives and blow up everything from the inside, ensuring that all that's left behind is scrap and rubble.
Bunker buster ruse?
Governments say only what they want everybody to hear – including their enemies.
The threat of bombardment broadcasted by Israel and intimated by the US is likely aired to convince the regime in Iran that there is no hope for it to keep hold of its nuclear ambitions, and if it wants to survive at all it needs to voluntarily give them up.
While, as I said, this is the ideal scenario, it is also the least likely, as martyrdom might be preferable to the humiliating capitulation of Iranian hardliners bending the knee to Netanyahu and Trump.
However, as the world (and, perhaps, the regime as well) is occupied with discussing whether the isolationist US president is going to bomb Iran, the real preparations might be going on for Fordow to be taken out by Israeli special forces.
It's likely that such an intervention would be preceded by the killing of Ali Khamenei, whose usefulness ends at declaring surrender. If he does not, then his assassination (alongside possible replacements) could be used to sow chaos in the leadership, opening up an opportunity for Israel to use it as a distraction to raid Fordow before the remnants of the regime get to grips with what happened.
Israel has not started this war to walk away from a job half done. It cannot accept failure in the destruction of Fordow, without which Iran's nuclear program may only be delayed by a year or, at most, a few.
The political, military, and financial costs of the intervention are simply too great – and it wouldn’t have been undertaken if Netanyahu didn’t already have a plan to finish what he started, which surely is something more solid than Trump's unpredictable whims.
