Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Senior Fellow and director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
Just as with the Hezbollah missile threat in Lebanon, completely eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat is not the best yardstick for Israel’s current campaign.
The prequel to the current strikes against Iran came last July, when Israel so degraded a decades-long threat from Lebanese Hezbollah that the group is now a shadow of its former self. Israel did not completely destroy Hezbollah then, and it is unlikely to completely destroy Iran’s nuclear program now. But those are not the yardsticks by which the Israeli operations should be measured. A better question is whether Israel significantly set those malign projects back and created opportunities to further constrain Iran and Hezbollah’s militancy. If that is the measure, both operations should be deemed successes...
