Israel is aiming to degrade or destroy Iran as a regional power in the Middle East, relying on the same military formula of relentless aerial bombardment used in Gaza and Lebanon.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel was justified in launching a surprise attack on Iran because it was close to developing a nuclear bomb. Yet in March, the Director of US National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.
In reality, the Israeli assault on Iran is more likely to encourage than to deter Iran and other states from deciding to develop their own nuclear weapon – though whether they succeed in doing so is another matter.
A triumphant Netanyahu has said that his war has the further objective of regime change in Tehran, calling for “the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime.” But no such outcome is likely in the tightly controlled Islamic Republic of Iran, which has a core of committed adherents as well as many dissidents. A far more likely outcome is a prolonged conflict – as in Gaza and Lebanon – in which Israeli airpower ranges freely and destructively over Iran, striking at will at political, military and economic targets.
Israel has once again had a spectacular intelligence-led military success, as it did against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, eliminating senior Iranian generals, damaging its nuclear facilities along with its ballistic missile launching capacity.
Yet Iran is a country of 91 million people compared to just 2.4 million in Gaza and six million in Lebanon of whom two million are Shia Muslims – the community from whom Hezbollah recruits its fighters. Given that Israel has not been able to end these small wars, it is highly unlikely to be able to win a decisive victory against a far larger and more powerful country like Iran.
For all their public alarm, G7 leaders gathering in Canada have been slow to take on board that what looks like another ‘forever war’ has started in the heart of the Middle East, a region which supplies a third of world oil exports. For all the calls from the G7 for de-escalation, the conflict is intensifying by the day.
Since Israel attacked early on Friday morning, Iranian air defence has been either destroyed or proved ineffective. Television screens are filled with pictures of destruction in Israel caused by Iranian missiles, but Iran’s capacity to retaliate is insufficient to deter Israel from stopping its much heavier bombardment of Iran. In Tehran, some 60 civilians were reportedly killed in a single apartment block which was hit by an Israeli missile.
Using the same threat as he previously used regarding Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli military spokesperson Col. Avichay Adraee warned all residents of Iran on Sunday to move away from areas housing Tehran’s weapons production for their own safety.
In an ominous development, Israel has started to destroy Iran’s energy industry, setting ablaze a giant gasoline depot and an oil refinery in the capital. Another attack was on South Pars, the world’s biggest gas field, which is located offshore in the Gulf in Iran’s southern Bushehr province and is shared with Qatar. Iran has partially suspended production there after the Israeli strike caused a fire.
The attacks on the Iranian energy industry are significant because Iran is unlikely to close the 35-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, so long as it can still export its own crude oil. But if the giant Iranian tanker terminal at Kharg Island in the north of the Gulf was destroyed, then Iran might close the Strait through which tankers carry 20 million barrels a day of crude oil.
Experts differ on how permanently Iran could choke off a significant part of the world’s oil supplies, but it could certainly do so for a time by use of sea mines, drones, missiles and torpedoes.
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Closing the Strait of Hormuz would be a weapon of last rest for Iran, since it would draw the US and other Western states into the war, but the prospect has come appreciably closer in the last twenty-four hours. An Iranian general, Esmail Kosari, said on Saturday that Tehran was reviewing whether to close the Strait of Hormuz, though actually doing so may be some way off.
Oil facilities everywhere in the Middle East are more vulnerable than in the past because the mass use of drones has become an omni-present weapon of war. In September 2019, a drone attack blamed on Iran hit oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, briefly cutting the Kingdom’s oil output by half.
President Donal Trump is pushing for Iran to negotiate a peace deal, but his backing for the Israeli assault and his shambolic and amateur approach to negotiations makes it unlikely that he could restore peace. The US clearly played a much larger part in the Israeli attack than it admits, reportedly delivering 300 Hellfire missiles last week.
To sustain its war effort, Israel must try to drag in the US as an active co-belligerent in the war, but even this may not produce a final victory for Israel over Iran – any more than the US succeeded in long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As for the prospect for popular uprising against the authorities in Iran, this is possible among minority communities like the Kurds, but such a rebellion would most likely be crushed in blood. Iranians may also have observed that Western backed insurgencies in Libya and Syria against despotic regimes succeeded at the cost of destroying both countries.
People who are being bombed seldom rise up at the call of those who are doing the bombing. As the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre once remarked about those invading other countries promising regime change: “No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.”
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