War on Iran: The Axis of Resistance Has Broken

 THERE IS A HISTORICAL inevitability about the war in Iran, or at least a his­torical cycle that is coming to a close. It is almost 50 years since the Iranian Revolution, and in a very real sense, that revolution will have ended with this war. That is appro­priate in many ways because though we talk about the revolution of 1978 and 1979 and the ouster of the Shah as being the main event historically, in fact, the current radical Islamist clerical regime re­ally dates to the early 1980s, the period when it was consolidated in the crucible of the war against Iraq, an immense conflict in which a million people were killed or wounded that was the longest last­ing war and most murderous for many, many de­cades in the Middle East. It is therefore, in a strong historical sense, right that a regime that was forged in a war should eventually end in a war.

It is of course much too early to say that the end of this regime is imminent. But whatever happens, it will be a hugely altered regime and a hugely altered Iran in a very different region that emerges when we reach, as we will have to do, a point where the guns at least are quieter even if they do not fall entirely silent.

One of the mysteries of this conflict will be why the Iranians were apparently caught by surprise on that Saturday (February 28) morning. It seems astonishing. We know now that the nego­tiations on Thursday (Febru­ary 26) went badly. There are reports that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was shouting at Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the two envoys sent by US President Donald Trump when they laid out the American demands. This would have been report­ed to Tehran. It must have been clear that war was then inevita­ble and would come very soon.

As a journalist, I was already making plans to get to Jerusalem to cover the story from there well before the negotia­tions ended, and it became clear to me that I needed to move fast the moment the reports came through that the talks had broken up, apparently so acrimoniously. So, one can only imagine that in their almost delusional world where impressions of events are filtered through a shared groupthink and ideology, the leaders of Iran decided that they had more time than they actually did. Certainly, a decision to come together and meet and thus provide an obvious target to Israel and the US was a rash one. Perhaps they believed that Israel’s reluctance to kill heads of state might protect them. If so, this was a dreadful misjudgement.

Since the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023, Israel has funda­mentally changed its security doctrine. No longer is deterrence through strength the watchword but the pre-emptive oblitera­tion of threats is its core principle. Israel holds Iran responsible for the October 7 surprise attack, even if Tehran’s role was in reality secondary. As a consequence, having dealt with Hamas and Gaza in the most brutal fashion possible, Israel was always likely to ap­ply a similar set of tactics with a similar lack of restraint to the lead­ers of Iran’s radical regime. Another consideration for the Israelis may well have been to make a distinction between the Iranian people, whom they view as potential allies, and the leadership. To assassinate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not just to remove their own great historic enemy and an existential threat, as they see it, but to remove one from the Iranian people too.

There is also the question of how the Israelis were able to find and kill Khamenei. There will be many who will come up with their own pet theories. Some will talk about human intelligence and a supposed source within the close entourage or even the family of the Supreme Leader. Others will mention technologi­cal prowess, with stories about traffic lights being hacked by the Mossad or other technological sophistication. The truth is that no one source would ever provide that kind of information and that it would have come from multiple sources. Human intel­ligence would provide some elements, perhaps. Intercepts of communications would provide others. Surveillance, perhaps of people peripheral to the Supreme Leader’s circles, but whose movements might have been nonetheless significant, could have been crucial. Here, the daily routine of a driver or a caterer or a cleaner could be more useful than those of a general. What is most important is how all of these dif­ferent streams of information are reconciled and turned into some­thing that is usable. Once this was done and a window of opportu­nity identified, that information would then have been offered to decision-makers, in this case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, of course, Presi­dent Donald Trump, who would make the ultimate choice.

The question, however, is whether such assassinations in gen­eral, or this assassination specifically, is a sensible thing to do, par­ticularly at this stage of the conflict. Despite the hopes of some Israeli and many US officials and analysts, there appears no sign that there will be a broad uprising among the repressed Iranian masses in the immediate future. Anyone who expected to see ministries stormed, the lynching of senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders and the prisons sprung open this week is likely to be disappointed. Many people in Iran might well be willing to take over government, but they are certainly not able to now. And to go into the streets would risk an appallingly bloody contest with security forces who remained well armed, well disciplined and highly committed. This would be an almost suicidal venture. One of the aims of the bombing in recent days has been to degrade this security establishment. But that is a hard task.

The security establishment is very large, very deeply em­bedded, with multiple layers ranging from secret intelligence services through various types of military, to clerical networks, the Basij militia, and of course the IRGC itself. None of these will cede power, influence, money and its hold on the population easily. There is also a substantial number of people in Iran who have been co-opted by the regime, or who endorse and support it, either for ideological reasons or for practical material reasons. Estimates vary as to how many people might be part of this bloc, but a conservative estimate would put them at maybe one in five or one in six of the population. Even the latter would be more than 15 million people. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are given to body counts as a marker of progress and eventual victory. In the Gaza War, they repeatedly gave figures for the number of Hamas fighters they had killed. It is difficult to see how they could do something similar with the IRGC or the Basij who, between them, number several hundred thousand.

Can airstrikes bring regime change? No one really thinks so. The only example of this happening was in Serbia in 1999. Even then, air strikes merely created the conditions for the Bulldozer Revolu­tion of 2000 to overthrow Slobodan Miloševi. Iran is a very differ­ent context with very different people involved and very different protagonists and forces. What is much more likely than an outright regime change is the emergence of new leaders with whom some kind of deal may be made. They may well be hardliners, and men with blood on their hands, but will have recognised that to survive, and to rebuild its capabilities, Iran’s regime must do a deal. Even Ayatollah Khomeini once, by his own admission, “drank a cup of poison” to end the Iran-Iraq war and admit, if not defeat, then a fail­ure to achieve Iran’s aims after tremendous losses.

Any deal is likely to be short-term but might just about stabi­lise a region that is on its way into violent chaos at a very rapid pace. To staunch the bleeding would be enough at this stage. In­tensive care would be needed to get this particular patient to any place that even resembled a state of health.

WHAT IS ABSOLUTELY clear is that we are now in the midst of the wider conflict that so many of us feared. Back in October and November 2023, I wrote of the potential of a coming regional conflict, a conflagration that would take chaos and violence and suffering from Gaza out in concentric circles through the Levant and farther. We are now in the middle of a conflict that has an extent greater than anything in the region since World War II. Attacks have hit Cyprus and they have hit the coast of Oman, 2,000 kilometres apart. There is every risk that this could continue for many days, weeks, and even sporadically for longer. The costs to the region are immense. Tourism will never be the same again. The image of Dubai has been dramatically and per­manently altered, for example. There is already an incipient energy crisis that could grow to resemble that of 1973. The consequences for the global economy, and thus geopolitics, are immense.

Will this influence Donald Trump? Quite possibly. He is the most transactional of presidents and is well aware of the damage soaring inflation could do him domestically before the midterm elections in November. On the other hand, he has shown megalo­maniac tendencies in recent months, which might lead us to expect irrational responses to the real emergencies that surround him. He appears to enjoy being a leader of a great power at war, even if that enemy is barely worthy of the enormous military force that it can deploy. Trump is, above all, a bully, and bullies keep bullying, even when it is harmful to their own prospects. Sociological studies have shown how bullies almost always have a circle of accomplices who aid and abet them, often encouraging their violence.

The accomplice here, of course, is Netanyahu, who has dedi­cated much of his long career to warning the world of Iran’s existential threat to Israel. He had long dreamed of convincing Washington to deploy its massive military might against Iran. And this is what he has achieved in the last year. There is no doubt that he honestly believes that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel. All the more so if it has nuclear weapons. Any independent analyst and observer can understand why. For decades, Israel and Iran have fought a cold war across the region. And it is unsur­prising that leaders of Israel and ordinary citizens take the slogan chanted by Iranians—“Death to Israel, Death to America”—as a literal expression of their desires. But Netanyahu also faces an election, and it is also true that a major victory over Iran, or at least the overthrow of the Iranian regime, would benefit him politi­cally. He knows that he can win elections to be held in Israel this year, or at least be able to form a coalition afterwards if he can convince voters that his successes since October 7 outweigh his failures before that dreadful moment in 2023. Sixty-five per cent of Israelis identify as righ­twing and half of them identify as Netanyahu supporters. He does not need to do a great deal to build this constituency into a winning coali­tion. And a war and a major victory over Iran, or at least achievements that he can sell as a major victory, might well be sufficient.

As for the rest of the world, we merely watch and worry. For some, the concern is greater than for others. For European powers, there is the constant need to triangulate between domes­tic sentiment, including strong currents that are anti-Israeli, the demands of international alliances, the demands of the continent’s trou­bled history, and the demands of local politics. There is also the growing polarisation around the issue of Israel and Palestine which is forcing European nations to confront deep cleavages within their own societies, as it is do­ing in the US too. But the greatest losers may well be Russia and China, who have both made much of their ability to protect semi-client states in the Global South, recruiting those who are antipathetic towards the US for historical or other reasons. They have done little, if anything, to help Iran, and their failures will hardly reassure others in the face of a bellicose US.

None of this will be much consolation or of concern to the people of Tehran, or Isfahan, or Tabriz, or Mashhad, or any of the smaller towns or the many, many villages scattered across a great and historic and deeply cultured country. Even those who are in Tehran and under the bombs and watching the regime attempt to hold on are ambivalent. They talk of their fear and their hopes. In snatched conversations, when communications allow, they remember the thousands butchered on the streets of Iran by the regime’s security forces just over a month ago and look forward to a better time. Then, of course, they fear the great chaos and potential violence that a regime col­lapse could bring. They, as much as anyone else, know of the great variety and diversity of views, cultures, communities, and traditions within Iran. They know of the deep conservatism of some, of the effects of decades of radical ideological educa­tion on schoolchildren. They know of how eco­nomic divides reinforce cultural ones, and they know of how swiftly the old grievances of ethnic communities in the provinces can be inflamed against the centre.

We are very far from seeing the outlines of any new Iran. When the revolution of 1978 and 1979 came, astute commentators noted that the very word ‘revolution’ was understood differently by almost every Iranian. The same multitude of possibilities is open now too.

(As told to Sudeep Paul)