The Paper Lions of Tehran…

I am writing this several hours after the ceasefire in the war between Israel and Iran was due to have taken effect. Now it HAS been a shaky start, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) fired two missiles towards Israel before the start time of the ceasefire but which only landed in Israel after the start time of the ceasefire. Either it was done in error or, just as plausibly, they were hoping to get some last licks in and hoping that Israel wouldn’t retaliate if the ceasefire was then in effect. But Israel did hit back (with explosions being reported in Tehran), much to the obvious chagrin of President Trump who seems incredibly keen to draw a line under the whole thing. His anger was pithily expressed in the following outburst…

“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Which maybe one of the few times he has actually accurately analysed a geopolitical situation. However, if this truly is the conclusion of the Iran-Israel War, this is a good time to stop and reflect on what has happened.

This reminds me in a way of the scare over the millenium bug that gripped us all at the end of the 20^th Century. Most of you I am sure recall the horror stories we heard of power grids shutting down, planes falling from the sky, the very fabric of society coming undone all because of a fundamental issue in the codes that powered our computer networks. As the clocks ticked past midnight on that New Year’s Eve, many of us held our collective breath as we waited to see which of the numerous predictions of disaster would come true.

And nothing happened. Now, while the truth of the matter was that months and even years of warning and preparation had seen the issue fixed in the background by teams of hard-working computer engineers and programmers, the general public had been promised armageddon and was almost disappointed to end up with nothing. They felt something had been greatly hyped up and when the actual moment came, it fell flat.

How is this relevant to the Iran-Israel war? Well, since the revelation in 2002 that Iran was working on a secret enrichment program there have been two facts that have underpinned the west’s response to it.

Firstly, Iran must not have a nuclear weapon (this is something I agree with by the way. I don’t particularly care for the excuse that as Israel has the weapons, other countries are entitled to them. Nobody should have these weapons, and the fewer countries that do the better and I would be far keener on seeing Israel disarmed of the bomb than even more countries getting them).

Secondly, using force to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon can only be a last resort. Iran would after all certainly respond with a massive barrage of ballistic missiles to set US bases in the region ablaze and those same bases would be placed under siege by militias loyal to Tehran. Rockets from their powerful proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas would rain down upon Israel, shattering their cities. The Iranian navy would mine the Straits of Hormuz, leading to further economic chaos. The United States and its western allies would be dragged into the quagmire of another Middle Eastern war, and war-weary populations who remembered the blood and treasure that were spilled fruitlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan made it very clear that they regarded such a prospect with horror.

You’ll find opinion piece after opinion piece after opinion piece from the past ten to fifteen years all painting variations of the same horrible tableau for readers and all building to the same conclusion. A diplomatic solution MUST be found with Iran because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. I found these opinion pieces credible and frightening and it informed my own thinking on the matter, surely Iran would wreak bloody vengeance on the world should their nuclear program be attacked?

Early on Sunday morning, it seemed as if decades of dread were about to bear fruit when the US, at the direction of President Trump, launched a massive attack on Iran’s three primary nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan in Operation Midnight Hammer.

The sites were either destroyed outright or, at a minimum, heavily damaged. While Iran likely managed to hide its stocks of enriched uranium before the facilities were attacked, the broad consensus is that their nuclear program has received a crushing blow.

Here it was then. The reddest of red lines had been breached. Iran’s nuclear sites had been directly targeted (and this article may partly explain just WHY the Iranians wanted to be able to enrich uranium on their own so badly if you are curious). We held our breaths waiting for all the horrors we had been warned about for years to be unleashed. I suggested to friends and family they should buy heating oil for the winter now, before prices spiked once the Iranians inevitably blocked the Straits of Hormuz. I wondered how long it would take for the US navy to clear the straits again, as they surely would feel compelled to do so. I wondered how large the barrage of ballistic missiles Iran would surely fire would be. How many American bases would be targeted. How many soldiers would die? Would what was left of Hezbollah target Israel? And would Trump’s inevitable response be further strikes, thus leading us into the all too familiar cycle of tit for tat, death for death?

After two decades of wondering just how bad it would get, we got out answer.

It was a heavily telegraphed missile strike on the American base in Doha, Qatar, which was intercepted by regional air defences.

The Iranians even told the Americans in advance where they were targeting.

Trump even THANKED Iran for that saying that it “…made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured”. He termed the attack “very weak” and furthermore said in the manner you would expect a parent to describe a child who is all tuckered out after having a tantrum that ‘They’ve gotten it all out of their system’.

Which is when I felt the exact same emotion I had felt a quarter of a century previously when I realised Y2K had failed to be the catastrophe everyone had seemingly predicted.

Kind of had.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am delighted that the war is drawing to a close, that death and destruction will cease and that people will be able to resume their lives. This maybe a best-case outcome for a worst-case scenario, but at the same time for the past two decades I have been fed a near relentless diet of doom on the potential consequences of just blowing up Iran’s nuclear program and when it actually happens the best Iran can muster in retaliation is a lightshow over Doha!

So, let’s actually sit back and review what has happened. If the war is over, this is a clear-cut Israeli victory. The current Israeli government, between operating an apartheid regime in the West Bank and conducting genocide in Gaza, is globally hated by millions and so many had seemingly been hoping that their adventure in Iran represented a hubristic overreach and that Iran would teach them a lesson but that has proven not to be the case. (On a personal note, anyone who was rooting for the Iranian regime on that basis would be advised to familiarise themselves with what the Iranian regime does to its own people to retain power. Disgust at the crimes of Israel should not translate into supporting another cadre of monsters).

The Iranian government has spent four decades chanting ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ as cornerstones of the ideology of their revolutionary regime. They sank hundreds of billions of dollars into both their nuclear program and in building the axis of resistance, hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on building up their impoverished country. And that level of sacrifice doesn’t even include the lost opportunity costs and wealth that decades under punitive sanctions extracted also. That price was borne because Iranians were essentially told it was necessary to make them a strong and independent country.

Actual result? It took Israel twenty months to undo what it had taken twenty years to build. The axis of resistance has been effectively dismantled. The nuclear program is either destroyed or badly compromised. Multiple senior Iranian commanders are dead. Iran’s anti-air defences and stocks of offensive missiles have been badly depleted and, worst of all, that precious sense of menace, that your country is too dangerous and powerful to mess with, has been well and truly shattered. I have little doubt that there are many Israelis today who deeply upset that the war is ending, mostly because I am sure they feel that with more time they could have destroyed even more Iranian military assets.

Iran still has a relatively formidable military. It still retains the option to close the straits of Hormuz (temporarily) and cause economic havoc. It may even still be able to resurrect its nuclear program as this article in Politico argues. It is still a country people will have to take account of, but once the rally around the flag effect the attacks generated fades, it will be interesting to see how the Iranian people react to their weakened ruling class. The most obvious answer as to why their retaliation was so pitiful as to what has been long threatened is that further escalation with the United States would have depleted the assets the Iranian regime will need to keep their own people repressed whilst they try and re-establish their authority. The internal Iranian story is far from over.

But the bald fact is, the Iranian threat that was presented to us over the past two decades, which required years of diplomatic investment in an attempt to manage, turned out to be a chimaera.

We’re at the other end of the long-feared war between Iran and Israel after a mere twelve days. Israel is now the undisputed hegemon of the Middle East, albeit an isolated and hated one and Benjamin Netanyahu can now get back to completing his genocide in Gaza, unperturbed by the paper lions of Tehran.