BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — Cipher Brief Experts suggest a range of possible explanations for Iran's delay in delivering promised retaliation toward Israel after the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31. Those explanations include concerns over the strength of Israel’s powerful air defenses, the boosted array of U.S. military assets deployed to the region, the impact of ongoing ceasefire negotiations over Israel’s war in Gaza, and above all, the sheer difficulty of how to carry out an attack significant enough to match Tehran's rhetoric and satisfy Iranian hardliners – without also inviting a devastating response from Israeli and perhaps the U.S. as well.
Even by the standards of a historically volatile region, the assassination triggered high tensions and fears of an unprecedented round of conflict and violence. In April, Iran had launched a major drone and missile attack at Israel that was well defended; the worry now is that Iran’s response will be more powerful and harder to defend.
But three weeks later, the retaliation hasn’t happened. And on Tuesday, an Iranian official suggested it might be on hold. "Time is in our favor and the waiting period for this response could be long," said Iran's Revolutionary Guards spokesperson Alimohammad Naini. Why the wait? Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski posed that question to Paula Doyle, a former CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations; Norman Roule, former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI; and Ambassador Gary Grappo, former U.S. Ambassador to Oman.
THE CONTEXT
- On July 31, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, an assassination widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. Almost immediately, Iran vowed to avenge the attack; Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Israel would be dealt “a harsh punishment.” The world braced for the response, and a possible major regional war.
- The killing of Haniyeh came just one day after an Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb that killed Fuad Shukr, a top commander of Hezbollah, Iran’s powerful proxy in Lebanon. The assassinations represented multiple humiliations for Iran: two senior figures in its proxy orbit killed in two days; Haniyeh targeted in a Tehran guest house; and the fact that the killings had come on the day of, and day after, the inauguration of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian.
- The U.S. has deployed additional military assets to the Middle East to bolster defenses. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is replacing the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group in the region. The U.S. is also sending additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers, an Amphibious Ready Group, a fighter jet squadron consisting of F-22 Raptors, and a guided missile submarine.
- Several countries — including the U.S., U.K., France, South Korea, and Japan — have urged their citizens to avoid travel to Israel and to leave Lebanon amid the rise in tensions.
- Many airlines have suspended flights to Tel Aviv, Tehran, Beirut, and other cities in the region in anticipation of an Iranian attack on Israel.
- Iran has said only a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza could delay Iranian retaliation against Israel.
THE EXPERTS
These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why the delay?
Amb Grappo: I'm a bit surprised, but on the other hand, I think there are good reasons for the Iranians and their various proxies delaying any action against Israel.
There is the ongoing negotiation for a ceasefire in Gaza. Both the Iranians and Hezbollah in Lebanon would very much like to see that ceasefire take place. It would be a good rationale for the Iranians to use to say, OK, there's a ceasefire which they don't want to disrupt, and so they're going to hold fire.
Number two, the Israelis have far greater capabilities for striking Iran in a variety of ways than the Iranians do Israel. What we saw the Israelis do with Haniyeh – though of course they've never acknowledged the action – is remarkable, and speaks to the impressive capabilities that Israel has in terms of technology and in terms of their intelligence network and ability to penetrate what seems an impermeable security shield in Iran, to get not just into the country, but into a very high-security location to target one specific individual.
The Iranians most likely do not have that capability. So they can't go after a specific individual unless they were to try to do it outside Israel. And then they run into all kinds of complications in terms of another country, and the response that they might provoke.
Moreover, Iran’s weapons, although impressive and quite dangerous and threatening, lack the precision of Israel's. The Iranians cannot be sure that launching a number of rockets or drones or missiles at a target in Israel will actually hit the specifically intended target without causing collateral damage and the loss of lives.
If they want to hit a military base, most definitely they can do that, but now you're talking about lots of casualties. And the Iranians do not want casualties. They may want to hit one specific person, say a military commander, but nothing more than that, and certainly not innocent civilians or major infrastructure facilities. So those are the two principal arguments against a quick response on the part of the Iranians, in my view.
Roule: My sense is that we may be too bound by the idea that Iran’s response must be immediate. The primary issue for Iran and its proxies is likely less When do we attack? – but first, How do we want this crisis to end?
The next question is likely: What tactics and conditions are required to make Iran’s attack sufficiently successful to achieve its domestic and foreign goals without sparking a conventional war? And last, What can Iran’s proxies do, given their operational limitations and current U.S.-Israeli regional military capabilities?
A conventional war may be popular in some radical circles, but the region’s leadership appears to share a common view that such a conflict would inevitably threaten their strategic domestic political and economic ambitions. In addition to the human cost, wars risk devastating economic damage, including choking off foreign direct investment for years.
Outside of Hamas, the primary players in the region tend to think strategically and apply some degree of restraint to ensure they don’t lose influence over escalation.
Doyle: Rather than looking for what will the retaliation look like, it might be a good moment to say, What's in it for Iran to retaliate? What's in it for them?
Right now, they just have a lot of things to think about that they don't control. They created and launched proxies because they know they can't control second- and third-order effects if they launched attacks from their own country, which is why what they did a few months ago against Israel was shocking in every way, shape and form. Because the natural reaction is, If you hit me from your own country, I'm going to hit you back in your own. And this tit-for-tat eventually leads to full on warfare.
It’s also important to remember that in this case, inaction is action. Inaction is a specific decision. Sometimes they do it when they don't know what to do, and they simply wait for an opening. So it's a strategic pause. We should not take it to mean nothing.
How the April strikes changed the equation
Roule: Since the April Iranian attack on Israel, the world is quite different, both in terms of Iran’s capabilities and defenses. Prior to April, Iran felt free to attack Israel routinely via its proxies. Tehran enjoyed the ability to be seen as the enabler of the attack at no cost. In this way, attacks were attributable but diplomatically deniable.
Iran’s attack on Israel erased a historic red line. Proxy attacks will likely remain the mainstay for Iran, but direct attacks – perhaps not at the same scale as in April – are now possible. Iran can now threaten a direct response and put Israeli defenses on alert for days or even weeks. Proxies now openly work together against Israel. These are new tools for Iran.
But the last few months have also seen significant downsides for Tehran. Its proxy capabilities have been severely diminished or confirmed to be of limited utility. Hamas and the Houthis (in Yemen) have been defanged as strategic threats. Israel continues to grind away against Hamas, and the U.S. conducts operations on an almost daily basis to degrade Houthi capacity. Syria has shown itself to be irrelevant to the conflict and no longer a main player in Iran’s “axis of resistance.” Hezbollah’s massive rocket and missile array remains, but the group has endured an extraordinary loss of dozens of its most experienced officers in an Israeli campaign.
Israel continues to show that it can deftly blend its impressive intelligence and air superiority into a surgical offensive tool at will. The idea that Tehran and Beirut would begin a conflict with Israel with several days of Hezbollah fighting alone must be rather unattractive to the Hezbollah leaders who would face Israeli retaliation.
Amb. Grappo: Until the events in April, when the Israelis took out a very high-level IRGC commander in Damascus and the Iranians responded with this wave of missile rocket and drone attacks, which were largely repelled by Israel with the help of the Americans, the British, French and some Arab support as well, we have not seen Iran proper threatened the way it conceivably could be now. Before April, the Iranians were able to play this game of using their proxies to go after Israelis, to go after Americans and others.
This situation now raises the potential of a direct attack against Iran. And the Iranians are well aware of the capabilities, most certainly of Israel and most definitely of the United States. So I think they're having to weigh this very carefully. They do not want to provoke an escalation. I can't say for certain, but they may have reached the maximum escalation point. And that would require some careful reflection now on how they're going to behave, because certainly the Israelis now they have Iran in their sights when they deem it necessary.
And you've got a new president in Iran who has promised to commit himself to improving economic conditions in the country and to addressing some of the social problems. The Iranian leadership is now at its lowest level of popularity in the country, and the leadership cannot be ignorant of that. And so for a whole host of both external and internal reasons, provoking a major confrontation with Israel and or Israel in the United States and maybe others is not in Iran's interest.
The only thing they would have to be concerned about is the pushback from hardliners, of which there are not a few.
A U.S. and Israeli show of force
Amb. Grappo: Hezbollah gazes west and sees this array of U.S. naval vessels – there's one vessel that's carrying a unit of Marines, not necessarily meaning that they would be deployed on land, but they're there. And then a whole retinue of fairly sophisticated fighter aircraft. F-35s and F -18s, also nearby Air Force F-15s and 16s, maybe some F-22s.
And then the Iranians gaze off to their south to the Indian Ocean, and they see vessels there. And then somewhere lurking among all of these is a U.S. submarine, carrying pretty advanced cruise missiles. And so they have to be thinking about their exposure level and probably their inability to defend against these weapons. And of course, the Israelis have their own nearly equal – maybe not in numbers, but certainly in quality – to what we have.
And so that's weighing heavily on the minds of the decision makers, the key one most definitely, the Supreme Leader, and particularly given the wealth of targets in Iran that are pretty well exposed.
Roule: Iran’s April attack demonstrated that the indigenous and partner air defenses that protect Israel are extraordinary. Unlike in April, Israeli and partner air defense is tested and alert. The U.S. naval and aircraft defense assets in the region are the most sophisticated on the planet.
Doyle: The projection of U.S. military force closer to Iran’s proxies, and what we're doing in the Red Sea, is well within reach of any target we would ever want to reach inside Iran. And they know that.
President Pezeshkian has only been in power for a month. He's not going to have any say in this. It's going to be the Supreme Leader and the IRGC commander. I've got to imagine that we've got a pretty robust back channel open to Iran. We've had that open for a very long time. I can't imagine we wouldn't have it open now. And so if the president is saying, Look, if you do anything now to get in our way of the Middle East peace process, we will label you as getting in the way. If you unleash Hezbollah, we will have no choice but to respond.
The Gaza ceasefire factor
Roule: The ongoing ceasefire talks are an inevitable factor. Tehran is unlikely to launch an April-style attack that would shift attention from Israel and deny Iran the advantages it would find in a ceasefire arrangement.
Iran would have a handful of goals it would hope to gain as a result of a ceasefire. The survival of Hamas and its control over Gaza and Palestinian politics would be foremost. If a ceasefire is agreed, Iran’s propagandists can say it frightened Israel into a deal that saves Palestinian lives.
None of these gains would deny it an ability to maintain that it will punish Israel at a time of its choosing for killing Ismail Haniyeh.
Amb. Grappo: If we can reach a deal on Gaza, I think this will give (the Iranians) the off-ramp that they want. Then they can legitimately say – and everybody would accept it and would say it’s justified – that they want to see this ceasefire hold. They want to see the war in Gaza end and therefore they're not going to complicate matters by launching an attack against Israel. And I think it'd be welcomed in Tehran, it'd be welcomed in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, and certainly in Jerusalem as well, and most definitely in Washington.
I don't think there's a place on the planet where it won’t be welcome. The way to neutralize all of this is, you reach a ceasefire. It's to the good of everyone and most especially to the suffering people of Gaza and to Israel.
What comes next
Roule: A military response remains likely, but less so as long as the U.S. military presence is so robust. The original drivers for military action remain: Israel once again humiliated Iran’s security forces; and the Supreme Leader ordered a strike on Israel to avenge the death of a guest he had met a brief time before the attack.
The regime’s hardline base and Quds Force will press for revenge. Regional proxies will welcome Iran’s punishment of Israel. The lack of a military response – absent other gains – risks messaging to Israel, the Gulf, and others that the regime is a paper tiger.
Doyle: The Haniyeh assassination, and that it happened in Tehran during an inauguration, it all made Iran look so ineffective, so weak, so incompetent, that the other factor to consider is this: If you're (Hezbollah leader Hassan) Nasrallah, you're the king of the hill in Lebanon, you look at that event and you say, You (Iran) are not coming to save me, are you? It looks like I'm coming to save you.
Even the Houthis (in Yemen), they’ve got to look around their geographic borders and think, OK, I'm armed, I'm trained, I'm equipped. I’ve got money. I’ve got motivation. But is Iran coming to save me if the Americans decide to go full force against me? To me, what happened in Tehran last month has got to be causing the Houthis, Hezbollah, even the proxies in Iraq and certainly Hamas to question internally, Hey, wait a minute. These guys (in Iran) aren't that good. I might be a proxy, but I don't think they got my back.
Amb. Grappo: I think the American administration has reached the point where they have basically exhausted their patience. The next attack against an American, particularly if it involves an American casualty, maybe even a death, we're going to respond directly against Iran. They can't dismiss that. That changes their calculus. And they have not had to think about this until the last few weeks.
But it can't go on indefinitely. The Iranians at some point are going to have to respond in some fashion, whether it's themselves alone or along with Hezbollah. My suspicion is that Hezbollah is probably champing at the bit somewhat, too, but there are constraints on Hezbollah, given broader conditions in Lebanon at the moment and the fact that the broad swath of Lebanese people most certainly do not want another all-out Hezbollah-Israel war.
Doyle: The Iranians have one extra tool that we haven't talked about. We’ve talked about military retaliation, but they also have asymmetric capabilities in cyber. And the one thing that I can tell you about cyber operations is you launch them when they're ready, not before. And so it could be that they've done reconnaissance on targets, they know what they want to go after and they just haven't quite gotten there yet. And that's what I would add to the equation. The retaliation doesn't have to be in kind. It can be cyber. It can be assassination squads. It can be out of left field, and they've done that before.
And the other thing to consider is that there's really no cost to Iran to wait and see. There's no cost. There's a big cost to them if they retaliate and they get it wrong.
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