Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime, protracted uncertainty or outright chaos should be expected in Syria. Among other things, assorted remnants of al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups will configure or reconfigure in the area, and Sunni Islamic states such as Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia could present Israel with a unique and unpredictable foe. Though Iran will suffer a temporary strategic loss from the defeat of its surrogate in Damascus, Jerusalem will not have to face any consequent nuclear threats. The core reason for this relatively good news lies in the Jewish state’s Operation Orchard, executed in September 2007.
Until then, Israel’s most visible effort to prevent an enemy nuclear state had been its widely remembered June 7, 1981, Osiraq raid against Iraq. Nonetheless, a later preemption was undertaken in Syria. Code-named Operation Orchard, it expressed Israel’s country-specific Begin Doctrine and also the general international law principle of anticipatory self-defense.
Meticulously planned, as was Operation Opera in 1981, Orchard represented a prudent defensive action against then-originating Syrian nuclear infrastructures. In essence, if the already-genocidal Damascus regime had not been the object of this 2007 Israeli preemption, nuclear weapons could eventually have fallen into the hands of Sunni jihadi terrorist organizations now beginning to contend for power in post-Assad Syria.
Israel’s first use of anticipatory self-defense against a potentially nuclear adversary in 1981 was directed at Saddam Hussein’s developing reactor near Baghdad. It was the broader international community’s failure to act in a similarly decisive fashion against North Korea that created still-expanding security woes with Kim Jung Un. Ironically, North Korea – which secretly built the Al Kibar plutonium-producing heavy water reactor destroyed by Orchard in 2007 – had been sending assembled nonnuclear arms to Syria. At that point, North Korean arms transfers supported Shi’ite Iran’s destructive influence in the region.
There are noteworthy regional intersections. Whatever the United States might assume about Pyongyang, it will be necessary to prevent Kim Jung Un from undertaking any North Korean aggressions against Japanese or South Korean nuclear power plants. In any such eventuality, especially in extremis atomicum, a further danger would surface: Unlike the Israeli preemptions against Osiraq and Al Kibar, which had been directed against pre-operational nuclear reactors, these prospective North Korean targets could suffer nuclear core meltdowns. Such events could produce calamities far worse than what was caused by the catastrophic accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
During the attack on Osiraq, Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor before it was ready to go “online.” Nonetheless, following the attack, the immediate global community reaction was generally hostile. In Resolution 487 of June 19, 1981, the UN Security Council indicated that it “strongly condemns” the attack and declared “Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered.” Largely forgotten is that then-US president Ronald Reagan took multiple steps to ensure the United States would vote in favor of this resolution of condemnation.
Preemptively striking when threat is imminent
International law is not a suicide pact. In jurisprudential terms, the UN and the United States were tangibly mistaken and misguided in 1981. Israel did not act illegally at Osiraq or (later, when there was no official UN reaction) at Syria’s Deir el-Zor. Under the long-standing customary right known as anticipatory self-defense, every state is entitled to strike first (within the boundaries of humanitarian international law) when the danger posed is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.” Significantly, this standard, dating back to 1837 in a naval incident known formally as “The Caroline,” is more compelling in the nuclear age than ever before.
In 2002, the United States issued a unilateral policy statement declaring the traditional right of anticipatory self-defense should now be expanded. Then, Washington’s strategic and jurisprudential argument hinged correctly on the expectedly unique dangers of any nuclear adversary. In 2002, The National Security Strategy of the United States was issued by the most powerful country on earth. In comparison, Israel, which in 1981 claimed a much more limited and moderate view of anticipatory self-defense, is small enough to fit once into a single county in California or twice into America’s Lake Michigan.
For Israel, there are pertinent and supportable doctrinal foundations. In regard to the 2007 Operation Orchard, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert unambiguously reasserted the 1981 Begin Doctrine. Several years later, in April 2011, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency expressly confirmed that the Israel-bombed Syrian site had been the foundation of a menacing nuclear reactor. Indisputably, Olmert’s decision, like Begin’s earlier on, was “right on the money.” Inter alia, in our continuously anarchic world system, one that began at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, international law is ultimately a “self-help” arrangement.
There is more. Israel’s 1981 and 2007 defensive strikes against enemy rogue states were not only lawful but law enforcing. In the continuing absence of any centralized global enforcement capability, international law must generally rely on the willingness of individual states to act forcefully on behalf of the world community. Such indispensable reliance was exhibited in June 1981 and in September 2007 by an existentially imperiled State of Israel.
As a fundamental principle of international law, anticipatory self-defense is grounded in years of refined military theory. “Defensive warfare... does not consist of waiting idly for things to happen,” counsels Carl von Clausewitz in On War: “We must wait only if it brings us visible and decisive advantages.” Prima facie, Israel chose not to wait in 1981 or, later, in 2007.
As an inconspicuous but vital result of Jerusalem’s preemption operations, the world needn’t have any of the nuclear fears about post-Assad Syria that it must still harbor about Iran. Owing to Israel’s widely overlooked Operation Orchard in 2007, the now-impending Syrian chaos may be deeply destabilizing, but it will plausibly be nonnuclear.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).