Media: Vorsprung durch Technik

By Richard North - June 21, 2025

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by an Israeli TV station yesterday, we are told, although this report does not identify the station.

There is nothing particularly special about that but in this particular interview he was asked whether the uranium enrichment plant in Fordow could be attacked with or without US involvement. Netanyahu response was unequivocal: “We have the power to remove all our targets, all their nuclear facilities”, he said.

So, we have a senior Israeli official saying that “Israel has a plan for Fordow and the ability to carry it out on its own”, and now we have the Israeli prime minister saying the same thing.

Although the station isn’t identified and its report doesn’t show up in any of the search engines that I’ve looked at, I’m pretty sure it happened, not least because we get a tangential reference to it on Fox News.

The Times of Israel also refers to the report, which tends to confirm that the interview happened. Its own piece is headlined: “Netanyahu: Israel is capable of hitting all Iran’s nuclear facilities, including Fordo”, and it does identify the station. It turns out to be the Kan public broadcaster, and the interview is in the Hebrew language.

In the ToI report, we get a little more detail, with Netanyahu saying: “We will achieve all our objectives and hit all of their nuclear facilities. We have the capability to do that”.

Whether US President Donald Trump “wants to join or not – that’s entirely his decision”, the Israeli prime minister ventures, noting: “He’ll do what’s good for the United States, and I’ll do what’s good for the State of Israel”. He then adds impishly: “as the saying goes – every contribution is welcome”.

You don’t get much straighter than that but from the global media – Fox News apart, we get precisely nothing. Worse than that, we get an opinion from the Washington Post Editorial Board with the headline: “Netanyahu chose this war. Israel should finish the job itself”. The sub-head makes the position clearer: “It would be better for Israel and the United States for America to stay out of the Iran conflict”, the Board says.

In different times, this would have made a wonderful comedy sketch. “We’ll do it on our own”, says a grotesque “Spitting Image” rendition of Netanyahu. For the WaPo Editorial Board, we need the Muppet show, with Statler and Waldorf chuntering in their own inimitable fashion: “the Israelis should stop asking for help and do it on their own”.

But there is nothing so powerful as a narrative whose time has come. The great sage Max Hastings keeps us on track, declaring in The Times: “Israel is incapable of destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. Only the Americans have the bunker-busting technology which might achieve this”.

With the BBC still running its pompous “Verify” story telling us that only a US bomb could hit the site, what more do we need? The media hath spoken.

Actually, I debated with myself whether even to run this latest update, but I thought it worth doing to add to the list of all the people and organisations that are going to end up with egg on their faces when the Israelis finally move in and give the site the coup de grâce.

On this, debunking Hastings is going to be like picking wings off flies. Speaking of the Israeli prime minister, he argues that: “when he launched his air campaign against Iran, he could be confident that the air force had the intelligence and kinetic power drastically to degrade the mullahs’ defences, leadership and installations”.

“It has achieved this with awesome efficiency”, Hastings says. “The IDF seems likely capable of sustaining for weeks a 50-60 fighter rotation over Iran, two hours’ flying time from their bases”.

But then comes the Great Sage in full flow: “Netanyahu was also aware from the outset”, Hastings declares: “that he could not hope to destroy the underground nuclear facilities without a direct American commitment”.

“He and previous Israeli prime ministers have sought this from successive presidents, and been refused”, he says, then offering his “fair guess that he [Netanyahu] has acted now because he believes that by showing Donald Trump an open goal, the most powerful man in the world will find it irresistible to join the war; to drop the huge bombs that could extinguish Iran’s nuclear ambitions for years”.

Seriously? Netanyahu is going to risk all, embarking on a massive operation like this, which has been in the planning for years, in the certain knowledge that he cannot achieve his objective unless the volatile and unpredictable Trump steps in and orders the USAF to finish the job?

However, the Great Sage hasn’t finished. “The trouble is that we are still roaming a wilderness of “mights” and “coulds”. The media, he says – no names, no pack drill – has a blush-making record of succumbing to breathless excitement at the sight of war machines that offer scope for 3D graphics and lavish illustrations”. He tells us: “Stealth bombers, ballistic missiles, killer drones and now MOP GBU-57 30,000lb bombs appear invincible on the page or the TV screen”.

But, he observes, “All too often, however, these fabulous weapons systems fail to deliver all that they seem to promise”. He tells us that he has been influenced for decades by the memory of a deep red dawn on a US airfield in Vietnam, where he watched the take-off of maybe 50 helicopters – Hueys, LOHs, Cobra gunships, Chinooks.

As this majestic manifestation of might swept aloft, he thought: “How can these people lose?” And, indeed, the Americans thought the same thing themselves yet, says Hasting: “lose they jolly well did”.

“In every modern war”, he goes on to say, “notably including Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza, air power has delivered amazing things. But somehow it never accomplishes quite as much as is sought by those who unleash it. The most advanced American aircraft have failed to crush Yemen’s Houthis, who are menacing Red Sea commerce”.

Regarding Iran, he adds that his “military friends” have said for decades that the only way to be sure of destroying its nuclear facilities is to put boots on the ground. Yet that seems the one thing neither Trump nor Netanyahu have plans to do, thank goodness”.

And so we’re doomed, at least according to the gospel of Max Hastings, although he has no idea how this story will play out. People whom he respects, though, believe that, for all Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, he would still welcome a diplomatic outcome of the Iran crisis, rather than commit America to an air campaign that might well prove inconclusive.

There is a slim chance, he says, that other regional governments, notably the Gulf states, may be able to broker a return to negotiations; at least a ceasefire. But he concedes that such an outcome could prove unattainable, because the mullahs in their madness refuse to acknowledge their nakedness.

For all that, Hasting still argues that “jaw, jaw seems more likely to produce some sort of survivable modus vivendi than an absolute reliance on war, war, with diplomacy and political concessions denied even walk-on parts”. We are not talking solutions here, he concludes, “which is a silly baby word in the context of the Middle East. We are considering least bad options”.

But this “jaw, jaw” has been going on for 30 years, and the direction of travel is one where, inexorably, the “mad Mullahs” get closer and closer to making viable nuclear bombs. And, as the saying goes, they only have to succeed once.

For Israel, this is an existential threat. They cannot forever live on the brink in the expectation that, one day, Tel Aviv disappears under a mushroom cloud of radioactive smoke. If the embattled nation has a Vorsprung durch Technik option, it would be foolish not to take it. That Hastings, alongside the global media, cannot visualise that option, does not diminish the opportunity.