Ten Days in April

The Biden administration seeks to calm Israel and “slow things down,” after spectacular defense thwarting Iranian missile and drone attack.

Emotions--relief and anxiety--were high when President Biden got on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Saturday night.

Biden, who had returned that afternoon early from Delaware to manage the crisis, had been in the White House Situation Room with his team for most of the past five hours, watching in real time as Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and other coalition partners had been intercepting an unprecedented direct Iranian attack involving over 300 attack drones and missiles launched at Israel.

Netanyahu had been in his war room with his war cabinet, monitoring his country’s efforts to defend itself from the massive Iranian airborne attack.

“At one point, we knew there were over 100 ballistic missiles in the sky, a very short period of travel time to Israel,” a senior U.S. administration official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists on a call today. “A period of really minutes. And the results of the defenses of course, were unclear, until all was said and done.”

“As the results of defenses came in, which is when we knew the preparations and planning had succeeded, there was a bit of a relief,” the official said. “You can imagine those tense moments.”

Over the course of five hours, Iran launched over 100 medium-range ballistic missiles, 150 one-way attack drones, and more than 30 land attack cruise missiles at Israel, a senior U.S. military official on the call said.

“Israel and coalition partners were able to defeat 99% of these munitions,” the military official said. “There is virtually no infrastructure damage to Israel at all.”

When Biden got on the phone with Netanyahu at about 9pm DC time Saturday, “it was shortly after we believed the attack was largely defeated,” the senior administration official said. But “both leaders had just gone through ten days of preparations,” and hours of incredible tension.

“The results were just becoming to be known, and we were feeling pretty good about where we were,” the U.S. official said.

If it had not been successfully thwarted, Iran’s “attack could have caused an uncontrollable escalation, a broad regional conflict, something we have worked day and night to avoid since October 7, over the past six months,” the senior US official said.

Netanyahu had seen his country come under unprecedented direct attack from Iranian soil for the first time, amid increasing international condemnation for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, that has killed over 33,000 people, and which followed Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. Iran’s attack last night followed an April 1st Israeli strike that killed 7 senior Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in a building next to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, that Iran claims is a diplomatic premises.

‘Trying to slow things down’

In the immediate aftermath of the attempted Iranian attack last night, Netanyahu was apparently facing calls from some in his war cabinet to strike back at Iran immediately on Iranian soil.

President Biden, in the call, “had a discussion about trying to slow things down, and think through things, given what we just went through,” the senior U.S. administration official said. “Let’s kind of assess where we are.”

The administration official indirectly confirmed reports that the President told Netanyahu the United States would not participate in any Israeli offensive strike on Iran. “No, we would not envision ourselves participating in such a thing,” the senior administration official said.

“The President's been clear: we don't want to see this escalate,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told NBC’s Meet the Press today. “We’re not looking for a wider war with Iran. I think…the coming hours and days will tell us a lot.”

“What Israel demonstrated last night was an incredible ability to defend itself,” Kirby said. “Their own military superiority was quite remarkable yesterday. I mean, very little got through, and the damage was extraordinarily light. And … Israel demonstrated… that they're not standing alone, that they have friends.”

It’s not yet clear if Israel will feel compelled to respond militarily against Iran on its own, or if so, how and when.

Israeli leaders are likely to feel compelled to respond, but to try to design a response that will not cause significant further escalation, said Dana Stroul, the former top civilian Pentagon official on the Middle East.

“Though Iran is attempting to close this escalation cycle…, it is also trying to draw a new line: if Israel targets any of its officials abroad, even when those officials are engaged in terrorist activities, Iran will respond with attacks like we saw last night,” Stroul, now research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me today.

“Though Israel, working with the US and others, successfully defended its territory and people from Iran’s direct attack, Israeli leaders will need to respond to make it clear that Iran is denied the ability to set a new threshold,” she said.  “The key challenge facing Israeli leaders is to design a response that denies Iran the upper hand in moving the goalposts of the strategic conflict, but prevent opening a new escalatory cycle that tips into full scale regional war.”

She suggested that Israel might try to target Iranian military installations.

Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence Iran analyst, suggested that Israel may have more options, including for restraint, given its successful defense in coordination with international partners, and the widespread international condemnation of Iran’s attack.

“Israel can be content with the unprecedented interception rate, the extraordinary cooperation with the United States and Britain within a coalition framework, and above all, the fact that there was minimal damage from the Iranian attack,” Citrinowicz wrote in an analysis for the INSS Israeli think tank.

“Israel can respond in a limited way, especially when it seems that the Americans do not support an Israeli counterattack,” he continued.

“At the same time, this is an unprecedented event that may warrant a severe response in order to prevent such events in the future, and to draw a line in the sand for Iran so that it will not repeat a similar response again,” he wrote. “Nonetheless, any attack on Iran significantly increases the likelihood of a regional conflict, extending beyond just a scenario of Israel versus Iran. Therefore, it would be advisable to coordinate any response with the US administration.”

The missile defense technologies that the US and Israel have invested in and developed over years give space to think through how to respond, a senior U.S. defense official said.

“One of the great advantages of these (missile defense) technologies is not only…the lives that they save and the damage they prevent in defeating attacks, but in the flexibility they give leaders in how to respond to these situations,” the US defense official said on the call.

“It creates space and flexibility for decisions on next steps,” he said.

US and Iran acknowledge communications

Both American and Iranian officials today acknowledged using the Swiss channel and other means to communicate during the crisis over the past ten days, since the April 1 Israeli strike in Damascus, to avoid direct escalation with each other.

During the attacks last night, “we received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing through the Swiss basically suggesting that they were finished after this,” the U.S. administration official said. “But it was still an ongoing attack. So that was their message to us. I think they've said that publicly as well.”

But any Iranian public or private messages about avoiding targeting Israeli population centers or economic targets in their retaliation were contradicted by the scale of Iran’s massive attempted attack last night, he said.

“Iran’s intent clearly was to cause significant damage and deaths in Israel,” the senior administration official said. “We believe this requires an unequivocal condemnation from the international community.”

“As for Iran, the President has been clear that their actions end here,” he said. “And the same applies to Iran’s proxies. If they take action against us, we're fully prepared to defend our people, our interests and to hold Iran accountable, as we have shown a number of times over the last six months of this crisis.”

Both official and back channel diplomacy between the US and Iran since the Damascus strike helped to “prevent this crisis from spiraling out of control,” Suzanne DiMaggio, a veteran practitioner of track 2 diplomacy involving Iranian and western policy experts and current and former officials, wrote on Twitter.

“Early on, the US made clear that it was not involved in the strike,” she wrote. “Iran informed the US that retaliatory measures were inevitable, relaying the nature and scope of the response over time.”

“Both sides communicated they are not seeking a direct conflict or a wider regional war—a consistent message since Oct. 7,” she said.

At least so far, a catastrophic escalation has been avoided, she wrote. “We might not be so lucky next time,” she concluded.

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