Since Friday, Israel has been waging a preventative war against Iran, meaning one based on a hypothetical threat rather than a pre-emptive one involving an imminent danger. Israeli propaganda deliberately confuses these things so as to claw back the role of victim rather than aggressor.
Israel has combined air attacks designed to suppress Iran’s air defences and then to kill key figures in Iran’s military and scientific establishment (in other words, tactics it used against Hezbollah in Lebanon) with the Ukrainian-style use of drones inside Iran operated by Mossad sabotage teams.
This approach has since expanded to strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure: gas terminals, oil refineries and power plants.
Iran’s response has been shaped by Israel’s earlier destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the advent of a new Islamist regime in Syria which is hostile to Iran, meaning Iranian resupplies can no longer reach Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Both Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani have warned Iran’s local proxies not to court disaster for their fellow countrymen.
The only remaining part of Iran’s regional axis of resistance – the Yemeni Houthi – is too distant and underpowered to seriously threaten Israel with rockets.Since Iran’s air force is semi-obsolescent, this leaves the Revolutionary Guard’s Missile Force as the only effective response to Israel’s aggression.
It can be satisfied with the results since, clearly, several ballistic missiles have got through Israel’s layered defences, with 500kg of explosives hitting residential areas in and around Tel Aviv and a refinery in the port of Haifa.
Evidently, Iran’s surviving cadre of new leaders can exert command and control despite Israeli air supremacy.
In justifying a war he has sought to wage for decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has falsely claimed that Iran is on the verge of making 10 or so nuclear bombs, though even as recently as March, US intelligence was of the collective view that there are no signs of it doing so.
Equally fancifully, Netanyahu now hints that regime change is his ultimate objective, with a restive Iranian population rising up against an unpopular and senescent regime.
If only Donald Trump would get off the fence and deploy massive military power to finally crush the Ayatollahs. But alas, the exiled 64-year-old Shah, Reza Pahlavi, is just another pointless spare royal, hoping to return to a republic with no enthusiasm for monarchy; while the exiled Iranian resistance group Mujahadeen-e-Khalq are a murderous Islamo-Marxist sect-based in Albania.
Trump himself is one of the main reasons Israel has acted now. For the last couple of months, the self-styled peace-maker president has been conducting talks in Oman with the Iranians to defuse the nuclear issue.
In Netanyahu’s mind, this conjured up a nightmare scenario whereby Trump achieved a deal remarkably similar to Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and imposed five, 10 and 15-year checks, backed up by sanctions, on its nuclear activities.
Netanyahu moved heaven and earth to wreck Obama’s deal only to discover that Trump might do the same, merely putting his own stamp on it. However, the fact that this involves Trump would represent a very different problem.
He was elected to end costly Middle East interventions, and he would much prefer to rake in trillions of dollars from his princely friends in the Gulf to bailing out Israel. Speaking of whom, the Gulf autocrats are urging Trump to resume his diplomacy, not least because many of them are invested in recent rapprochements with Iran.
Netanyahu would be stupid to try to undermine Trump in Congress, and he knows that the latter’s Maga base has more isolationists loath to go to war for Israel than neo-con hawks who want to destroy the Islamic Republic.
That would include his acolytes Tucker Carlson, Senator Rand Paul, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Rightly, they think Trump should remind Netanyahu “who is the fucking superpower” as Bill Clinton once crisply put it.
By collapsing Trump’s peace talks – Israel has just killed Iran’s top negotiator Ali Shamkhani – Netanyahu risks making the volatile US President look ridiculous.
Pictures of those killed in Israeli strikes on Iran are displayed on a street in Tehran (Photo: Wana News Agency)So what happens next, and how might this conflict end? Or rather, how does it slide back into a permanent state of tension with periodic flare-ups?
The first option is that Iran conducts enough high-visibility military strikes on Israel, claims to its own people that it has punched back and bloodied the Israelis, but quickly accepts US and international efforts for a ceasefire.
In short, a grudging surrender with a facade of face-saving.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff seems to have been ready to allow Iran 3.67 per cent uranium enrichment, rather than to press a “solution” whereby Iran would abandon all nuclear activities in perpetuity despite it having every right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaties (which, ironically, nuclear-armed Israel has never signed) to enrich uranium for civil and medical purposes.
A second possibility is that Iran absorbs the shockwaves and fires and even gets in a few blows against Israel – whether in the form of terrorism, missiles that make it through Israel’s defence, or other means – while international pressure builds on Israel to halt the war.
Its nuclear facilities at Natanz and elsewhere sustain damage, but Iran is able to make repairs relatively quickly. An older generation of military and IRGC commanders (all veterans of the 1980-88 war with Iraq) is easily replaced by younger men, who, like Stalin’s new commanders after the 1930s purges, might be an improvement on the old guard.
Whether this would in turn lead to successful diplomacy largely depends on Trump and whatever mood he is in amidst the Canadian Rockies, where his G7 allies will try to prompt him to decisive action.
He has also had a long call with Iran’s ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has similarly offered his services to bring about a ceasefire.
Trump has already called for a return to negotiations after the strikes, writing on Truth Social: “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
While Iran may well decide to salvage something before it is too late, perhaps allowing Russia to remove their modest stocks of highly enriched fuel, its leadership cannot simply surrender the right to enrichment, which they view as a national project.
Given the general failure of Trump’s half-cock diplomacy to resolve three major conflicts at once, it is equally likely that this current round of fighting will escalate into a wider war.
Before the Israeli strikes, Iran threatened to attack US bases in the Middle East – attacks that, if they occurred, would make it far more likely that the United States would join in the bombing, using huge penetrative munitions to get at underground facilities at Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, north-east of the Iranian city of Qom.
Many powerful voices in Tehran will claim that the US has colluded in Israel’s attacks, with negotiations acting as camouflage for Israeli military preparations. Normally Iran’s responses are incredibly calibrated.
When they last fired missiles at US personnel in Iraq, they warned the Americans via Swiss diplomats of the timing, so that the effects on US troops were minimal. This time they might not.
Conceivably, if their backs were really against the wall, Iran could interdict the Straits of Hormuz too with sea mines and land-based missiles.
The United States, for its own reasons, may also escalate the conflict. US officials of a hawkish disposition may view Israel as having done half the job already, and feel the United States can finish it, bombing Fordow with deep penetrating munitions and otherwise taking care of what is left after Israel’s initial attacks.
While such views are generously represented in Congress, the neocons are in a weak position inside this administration following the sidelining and demotion of National Security Council Advisor Mike Waltz and the firing of many of his key staff.
square MICHAEL BURLEIGH The unintended consequences of Israeli strikes on Iran
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A final possibility is that the war doesn’t ever end – at least not in a formal sense. Trump has virtually said this, using the same childhood playground metaphor he has used to describe the war in Ukraine. Boys will be boys, and they just need to slug it out before shaking hands.
Although the waves of massive Israeli strikes might stop at some point, a lower-level conflict might continue for months to come. Israel might launch the occasional missile or airstrike on Iran, along with its long practice of assassinations and sabotage in Iran itself. Iran would fire salvos at Israel from time to time, along with terrorism and other attempts to strike back. It’s not an all-out war, but it’s not even an uneasy peace.
Amid continued back-and-forth attacks and responses, Iran may develop a clandestine nuclear programme outside of arms control commitments and international inspections, using Israeli strikes as justification. If Israel does not hit all three enriched uranium storage locations, this task will not be difficult for Tehran.
They are well-versed in the difference between Libya and North Korea when it comes to voluntarily surrendering an incipient nuclear programme. If they get to half a dozen bombs and test one of them, they would be home and dry, whereas Israel is the size of New Jersey and Iran is a huge place with 91 million people.
Combinations of outcomes are possible. A US-brokered ceasefire might be a first step towards a larger semi-durable nuclear deal of the kind achieved by Obama 10 years ago. Iran may concede in the short term but believe revenge is a dish best served cold, launching cyber and terrorist attacks in the months to come by way of retaliation while pumping de-sanctioned oil revenues to rebuild its crippled proxies, and thus accepting a tit-for-tat forever war in a more violent key than the one fought in the shadows for three decades.
Meanwhile, international focus will revert to Israel’s 21-month campaign in Gaza, the Iran crusade having very temporarily eclipsed the salience of that murderous conflict.
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