Given the wall-to-wall coverage of the US and its war on Iran, it looks very much like Trump is the key player. He is not. The United States may have far more military power than Israel, but the key player is Benjamin Netanyahu.
Moreover, the Israeli prime minister has fallen into a trap of his own making, and is dragging Trump and the US military into that same trap. For Israel, and indirectly for the US, the war has to end in total victory. Anything less is pointless.
If it ends with the Iranian regime surviving but terribly damaged and with great loss of life, that cannot be enough for Israel. Iran’s crucial task then will be to concentrate its technical capabilities on developing and testing a crude nuclear device to prevent being attacked again in the future.
To make that impossible, Israel and the US would have to have such complete control of Iran that they would be able to access every part of the state. This would include the deeply buried bunkers and the stocks of semi-enriched uranium that survived last June’s attacks. Even further airstrikes, including B-2 stealth bombers flying from UK territories, would not be enough.
Meanwhile we are bombarded with claims that the war is almost won, even as the US navy prepares to deploy a third aircraft carrier strike group to the region.
From the start, this is a war that has not gone according to plan. The idea was to assassinate the supreme leader and as many of the religious and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership as possible, in order to damage the power of the state so the theocracy would collapse. That failed miserably, as one US intelligence assessment had predicted. The regime has a new leader and there will no doubt be one or more “reserves” already selected in case Mojtaba Khamenei is assassinated.
Meanwhile we are now into plan B, a strategy with two elements. The less significant is to weaken the state by working with minority groups such as the Kurds and perhaps the Baluchis to revolt and catalyse the fragmentation of Iran. That might have some impact, but the Kurds, for a start, will be cautious about trusting the Israelis – and even more so, a US under Trump.
The other element – much more significant – is concentrating more on Israel’s traditional approach in such circumstances: destroying an enemy’s domestic support. This is the Dahiya doctrine: if an insurgency cannot be ended or the leadership of a state cannot be subdued, the route to victory lies with the relentless punishing of the civilian population.
It is being used in Lebanon, as Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya gets under way, the suburb having given its name to the doctrine back in the 2006 war against Hezbollah.
Critics point out that the doctrine has been used on a huge scale against Hamas in Gaza over the past 30 months. That resulted in at least 70,000 Palestinians being killed, an even greater number wounded and most of the territory reduced to ruins. Yet Hamas survives, and parts of Gaza are still under its control.
Despite this, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the US air force are now applying the doctrine to the war on Iran, with mounting evidence of attacks on infrastructure. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, warned on Tuesday that it “will be our most intense day of strikes inside Iran”, and “Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing on day 10 of Operation Epic Fury”.
Drawing on the experience of Israel’s military approach in the recent past and coupling it with the US’s status as an especially belligerent superpower under Trump and Hegseth, we should expect to see widespread damage across Iran.
It is a massive task, and will take months to have a major impact on a country with a population of about 93 million, more than 40 times that of Gaza. Furthermore, it is almost certainly unworkable. An inevitable result would be the IRGC expanding its attacks on the oil and gas industries of west Gulf states such as the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. These would ensure a global economic impact quite possibly as bad as the disastrous years of 1973-4, during the OAPEC oil embargo.
It is just possible that a degree of sense will prevail. Trump’s claim that the war is already nearly won may be wishful thinking. There are, though, some suggestions that some Israelis may be having second thoughts and are looking for a way out. In Washington too, such heresy may be gaining ground. That may be very cautious optimism, but better than the current prospect which is weeks and months of this horrific, escalating war.
