1. Background to the Iranian Israeli War
On 25th March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), reported to Congress under oath that none of the US intelligence agencies responsible for gathering intelligence on Iran were of the view that Iran either had a nuclear weapon or was in the process of developing one. She might also have added that, unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were permanently stationed at all its nuclear sites, all of which were fitted with cameras which recorded everything that happened within them. In all its annual reports over the last ten years, the IAEA has therefore been able to state with a considerable degree of confidence that Iran did not have a nuclear weapon and was not in the process of building one.
Based on this evidence and testimony, most people would therefore probably conclude that, as of 25th March 2025, Iran did not, in fact, have a nuclear weapon and would not be getting one any time soon. In the days and weeks leading up to the recent 12 day war between Israel and Iran, however, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, repeatedly stated that Iran was within weeks, if not days, of having a nuclear weapon and already had the ballistic capability required to use it against Israel. In fact, he has been saying this for at least two decades, as have most politicians in the western world, along with their associated media. As a result, most people in Europe and America also firmly believe that, prior to the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites on 22nd June this year, Iran was within days of having a nuclear weapon.
This then raises the question as to why Israel and the whole western establishment should want to us to believe something that is so clearly a fabrication. The answer, however, is not the one they, themselves, would have us believe: that the Iranian leadership is so fanatically driven by hatred of the West that, if it had a nuclear weapon, it is so irrational that, of all the countries in the world, it would actually use it, regardless of the dreadful repercussions for itself. After all, Israel also has nuclear weapons and would surely retaliate in kind.
This argument, however, is predicated on one of two assumptions, or possibly both. Either ordinary Iranians are so under the control of their dictatorial theocracy that they could not prevent it from embarking upon such a suicidal jihad or they are so intellectually deficient in some way that they cannot see that starting a nuclear war against Israel, or anyone else for that matter, is probably not in their best interest. Any country which has the scientific and engineering capability to develop a nuclear programme, however, must not only have a first rate educational system at all levels, but scientific institutions of a type and calibre that typically leads to collaboration with scientists in other such institutions around the world. This, in turn, tends to produce a thoughtful and open-minded strata within a society which doesn’t easily lend itself to hate-filled fanaticism, even when sorely provoked, and certainly doesn’t lend itself to irrational decision making within the country’s leadership.
Yes, the leaders of Iran have frequently given voice to an implacable and, some would say, somewhat incontinent hostility towards both Israel and the USA, which they rightly regard as being joined at the hip. On the other hand, they have good reason for this hostility. For it was the USA which, in 1953, engineered the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of the then prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who, having instituted a wide range of economic reforms, was very popular with the vast majority of Iranians. The problem was that one of these reforms was the nationalisation of Iran’s largely British-owned oil industry, which, in Britain and America, was seen as a move towards communism. This meant that, after the coup, more and more power was concentrated in the hands of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who not only undid most of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s economic reforms and restored the property rights of foreign-own oil companies, but passed laws which severely curtailed Iran’s democracy.
Worse still, he caused a massive shift in the distribution of wealth. For while, over the next 25 years, the exponential growth in the global oil market resulted in an equally astonishing rate of growth in Iran’s GDP, the principal beneficiaries of this increased wealth were the Shah, himself, the Persian elite who supported him, the foreign-owned oil companies which funnelled their earnings through the City of London and Wall Street, and various organs the state, including the army, which was expanded to become the fifth largest army in the world, and the Bureau for Intelligence and State Security, known as SAVAK, which was established in 1957 under the guidance of the CIA and quickly became notorious for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and murder of political dissidents, particularly followers of Iran’s exiled religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
By the 1970s, as a consequence, the Shah had become so hated by the vast majority of his own people that when, on Friday 8th September 1978, his troops opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Tehran’s Jaleh Square, killing more than a hundred and wounding over two hundred more, it was like flipping a switch. Rioters tore down the Shah’s statue in Tehran and around nine million people joined protests all across the country, leading western leaders in Washington, London and Paris to rapidly distance themselves from the whole affair, claiming that it had nothing to do with them or their policies and blaming it all on communists and religious fanatics. Having thus been deserted by all his so-called friends – people who had invited him on state visits as recently as 1973 – the Shah’s position consequently deteriorated very rapidly, with the result that, on 16th January 1979, before most people even knew what was happening, he was forced to flee the country.
What most people also didn’t realise, however, was that this wasn’t the end of the matter; it was just the beginning. For to most Iranians, the corruption, tyranny and repression which had come to symbolise their country was as much the fault of the Americans as it was of the Shah, which meant that the root causes of the revolution were not resolved by simply removing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family. Everything American also had to be removed, requiring a period of purgative cleansing which lasted throughout most of that year, culminating, of course, in the seizure of the American Embassy on 4th November 1979 and the capture of 66 of its staff, who were then held hostage for the next 14 months.
For most Americans, it was one of the most humiliating episodes in their history, ensuring that Jimmy Carter did not get re-elected as president the following year and establishing the profound enmity which many Americans still feel towards Iran even fifty years on. In fact, relations between the two countries are not much better today than they were then and, in some ways, may even be worse, having become more or less enshrined in policy by the Wolfowitz doctrine, which, as I have explained elsewhere, was first put forward in 1992 by the then U.S. Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, and his deputy, Scooter Libby, who argued that, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the United Sates should take pre-emptive military action against any country or regime that threatened its global supremacy, thereby laying down the philosophical and political foundations of what Americans now generally refer to as ‘neo-conservatism’ and making Iran a prime candidate for regime change from day one.
2. Israel: The Complicating Factor
That’s not to say, of course, that a military conflict between the two countries was inevitable. It is possible, for instance, that, after the hostage crisis had been resolved, they could have stayed out of each other’s way for a decade or so and that, eventually, relations between them could have returned to normal. That, however, is to ignore both the existence of the state of Israel and the fact that its relationship with the USA is not that which typically exists between a patron and a client, in which the bigger, more powerful patron protects its smaller client and the client basically does whatever its patron tells it to do.
Relations between the USA and Israel, however, do not quite work in this way, not least because of the existence, in America, of a very powerful Israel lobby, which is supported and funded, not just by Jews, but by various other individuals and organisations including, for instance, the arms industry, which makes a lot of money out of selling arms to Israel, paid for by the US taxpayer. Of even greater significance politically, however, are the various groups of evangelical Christians who believe that Zionist control over the whole of the land of Israel is a precondition of an event known as the ‘Rapture’, when it is believed that all true believers, both living and dead, will rise up ‘into the clouds, to meet the Lord of the air’.
With so many people with so much money thus supporting Israel, it is very difficult, therefore, for any American president to resist their combined pressure, which, in some cases, can have the effect of actually reversing the normal patron-client relationship, such that America ends up doing Israel’s bidding: the Israeli tail effectively wagging the American dog. This is especially so when Israel’s foreign policy and the neo-con agenda are closely aligned, as has become increasingly the case in recent years, as Israel has come to see that the neo-cons’ more aggressive approach to geopolitics is very much in its own interests.
To better appreciate this and the effect it has had on Middle East politics, consider, for instance, that as recently as 2000, Bill Clinton hosted talks at Camp David between the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, and the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, strongly suggesting, therefore, that although the USA has always been seen as Israel’s principal patron, having sponsored its recognition at the UN in 1949, in 2000 it was still largely regarded in the region as an honest broker. As the neo-cons have become more entrenched in Washington, however, America’s approach to the Middle East has become far more one-sided. For not only do the neo-cons regard any threat to America’s regional client as a threat to the USA’s global supremacy, to be met with pre-emptive military force, but Israel has vigorously supported them in this policy, happy to see all those regimes which once posed a threat to it – including those of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gadhafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria – brought down. In fact, the only remaining opposition to US-Israeli regional hegemony is Iran.
While this may make it seem as if being America’s regional client is a distinct advantage for Israel, however, it has also had some very negative effects, the most significant of which is that it has been able to wield power in the region well beyond its relative size. After all, it is a very small country, covering just 21,937 square kilometres, with a population of only 9 million, 2 million of which are Arabs. In comparison, Iran covers an area of 1,648,195 square kilometres – nearly 80 times the size of Israel – and has a population of around 92 million. Ordinarily, therefore, there is no way that Israel would have sufficient military-industrial capacity to fight a war against Iran. It can only do so because it receives billions of dollars in military aid each year from the USA. What this has principally done, however, is given it a false sense of invulnerability, with the result that, instead of finding a way to live in peace with its neighbours, it has let the running sore of Palestine fester and tried to solve all its problems through the use of force. Were the USA ever to abandon it, as a consequence, it could easily find itself with no friends and a lot of enemies, chief among which, of course, would be Iran.
In recent years, with both Russia and China now threatening the USA’s global supremacy, Israel has therefore become ever more anxious to see regime change in Tehran and thus remove its last remaining regional threat. What’s more, its neo-con allies in Washington share this ambition. For under the umbrella of BRICS, Iran has drawn ever closer to both Russia and China, thereby bolstering and helping to consolidate the new multipolar world order that is now emerging in opposition to the unipolar world order prescribed by the Wolfowitz doctrine.
The problem both Israel and the neo-cons have had, however, is that they could not just start a war with Iran for no other reason than to replace the current regime with one more amenable to their world view. As in the case of Iraq, Libya and Syria, therefore, they needed a pretext: a reason for going to war that would justify their actions in the court of public opinion, the obvious solution, of course, being Iran’s supposed development of nuclear weapons, of which there may not be any evidence but in which the public could be made to believe simply by dint of constant repetition. After all, there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in 2003, or that Muammar Gadhafi was committing genocide in 2011, or that Bashar al-Assad’s used chemical weapons against his own people in 2012, but people believed what their governments told them simply because that’s what most people do.
For Israel and the neo-cons, a far more intractable problem, therefore, was Iran’s simple refusal to do anything that would actually justify a military response. Not only did they comply with all IAEA inspection requests under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), agreed between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany and the European Union in 2015, but they continued to abide by this agreement even after the USA had pulled out. What’s more, they readily agreed to talks on a new deal when Trump was elected for a second term, with the first round of negotiations actually taking place in April. By the time Israel attacked Iran on Friday 13th June, in fact, five rounds of negotiations had been completed and, with only a few minor technical details still to be sorted out, it is possible that the deal could have been concluded during the sixth and final round of negotiations on Sunday 15th June. Had those talks on 15th June taken place, therefore, there is a good chance that the intended pretext for the war would have simply disappeared.
3. Course and Conduct of the War
While this undoubtedly lent a sense of urgency to the neo-cons’ desire for regime change in Tehran and may even have brought the attack forward, it does not however seem to have had much effect on Israel’s planning for the attack, which, given its complexity and the number of components which had to be co-ordinated, had probably been in preparation for months if not years.
The first component, for instance, involved the delivery of drones and shoulder launched missiles to MOSSAD agents in Iran, whose job it was to assassinate around thirty senior military officers and government officials as well as eleven nuclear scientists, who, along with their families, were blown up in their beds in the small hours of Friday 13th June. Another component involved the infiltration of Israeli special forces into northern Iran from north eastern Iraq and Azerbaijan. Armed with antitank weapons, their job was to blow up air defence missile batteries in northern Iran as an insurance against the possible failure of a planned cyber-attack on Iran’s air defence network as a whole, which, as it turned out, was a complete success, putting all of Iran’s air defences out of operation for around eight hours.
Not that there was ever any plan for Israeli war planes to actually enter Iranian airspace. For not knowing how long Iran’s air defences would be out of action or how long their planes would therefore remain undetected, the Israelis had decided to employ stealth tactics rather than a direct assault in their initial attack. Instead of approaching Iran from the west, flying over Jordan and the Persian Gulf, they consequently took a more circuitous route, flying over northern Syria and Azerbaijan to the Caspian Sea, where they then turned south to approach Tehran from the north. Even more importantly, they actually deployed their weapons while still over the sea, out of range of Iran’s air defences, using a new generation of small cruise missiles which hugged the mountainous terrain of northern Iran and were themselves, therefore, very hard to detect and intercept.
At a tactical level, what’s more, it all worked perfectly. The problem was with what it was intended to achieve strategically. For while it is generally assumed that the decapitations strikes on the Iranian leadership were intended to produce a period of chaos in which the regime’s opponents could mount some sort of coup, if the Israelis really believed this would happen, then MOSSAD is not all it’s cracked up to be as an intelligence agency. For not only were Iran’s organisational structures far more robust than this strategy implies, with deputies quickly stepping up to fill the places of their assassinated former bosses, but the response to the attack among the general public was very similar to their response to the Shah’s troops opening fire on a crowd of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September 1978: they were enraged, not just by the Israelis, but by the duplicity of the Americans and Donald Trump in particular, who, just a few days earlier, had been talking very optimistically about the forthcoming negotiations, saying that he thought that they were very close to a deal.
The result was that Iranians came together in exactly the same way they had come together in 1978. Within 48 hours, they were on the offensive with a battle plan of their own, which was just as well thought out as the Israeli plan had been. The main difference was that, instead of trying to disable and then evade Israel’s air defences, the Iranians decided to use sheer numbers in an attempt to overwhelm them, firing around 550 ballistic missiles and more than a thousand drones over a period of just 10 days, launching them in concentrated salvos so large that the Israeli air defence batteries simply couldn’t cope with them.
This was made possible by the fact that there is a tactical design flaw in all missile based air defence systems, which were originally designed to shoot down manned aircraft, which, because of their cost if nothing else, are standardly used in smaller quantities. To better appreciate this flaw, take, for instance, the Patriot air defence system on which Israel’s famous ‘Iron Dome’ has been substantially though not exclusively built. The Patriot’s missile batteries typically comprise four launch vehicles, each of which has four launch tubes, which means that each battery is initially loaded with 16 PAC-2 or PAC-3 interceptor missiles. Given that it usually takes two interceptors to bring down one target, this means that, once a battery has taken out eight targets – half of a typical RAF squadron, for instance – it has to be reloaded, which takes some time.
How much time is something I have not been able to discover – such information being highly sensitive – but it is hard to imagine that it is a quick or simple matter. I have also not been able to find out how many such batteries Israel actually has – this information being highly confidential – but for the purposes of this exercise, I think it reasonable to assume that it would be on a par with a country like Germany, for instance, which is under less threat but has a much larger airspace to defend. And Germany has 12 such batteries. This means that, if Israel were forced by very large salvos of drones and missiles to unleash all 16 of its preloaded interceptors from each of its 12 batteries in quick succession, there would be periods in which it would be reloading up to 192 missiles at more or less the same time, leaving even some of its most strategically important targets vulnerable. And this is what seems to have happened. What’s more, the Iranians always sent in drones and older ballistic missiles first, knowing that these would be shot down, and only launched their newer, more accurate and powerful ballistic missiles when they knew the batteries were approaching empty.
This had two effects. Firstly, it meant that, despite Israel’s much vaunted air defence system, it suffered a significant amount of damage. How much damage is again unknown because the Israelis have been very careful not to make this information public. One estimate, however, suggests that up to a third of all the buildings in Tel Aviv were either destroyed or so severely damaged that they will have to be demolished and rebuilt. An even more serious problem, however, was the fact that, having had to defend against so many incoming missiles and drones each day, by the end of the first week, the Israelis had used up nearly half of their stockpile of interceptor missiles, which meant that, if they continued to fire them at the same rate, they only had about a week’s supply left.
Of course, one would assume that the Americans would have simply supplied them with more. After all, Donald Trump recently promised Ukraine 17 more Patriot missiles batteries, each with a full complement of missiles. No one asked him, however, where he was going to get the missiles from. For they are actually in very short supply.
This is because Lockheed Martin, which manufactures them for Raytheon, the manufacturer of the system as a whole, only produces a relatively small number of Patriot missiles each year. In 2018, for instance, the latest year for which I have actual figures rather than estimates, it produced just 350. In response to increased demand – especially from Taiwan and Ukraine – Lockheed Martin has since announced that it plans to increase production to 650 a year by 2027. According to ex-CIA analyst, Larry Johnson, however, its current annual production is still only around 500.
Even if Israel only fired one full round of 16 missiles from each of its 12 batteries a day, this means that it would have fired 1,920 missiles, or nearly 4 years of Lockheed Martin’s entire production, over the 10 days it was having to defend itself against Iran’s bombardment.
Of course, one might wonder why nobody saw this as a potential problem before it became so acute. What one has to remember, however, is that usage based demand for munitions is not constant. After all, most countries that have bought Patriot systems are not constantly at war and probably don’t fire more than half a dozen missiles a year for testing and training purposes, not least because Patriot missiles are not cheap. Even the most basic PAC-2 missile costs over $1 million while the top of the range PAC-3 MSE, which is much faster and has a longer range, comes in at around $4 million. Most countries are therefore very frugal in their usage. To avoid a large upfront capital outlay, moreover, most countries try to spread the cost over multiple annual budgets by only buying a few missiles each year, which they then gradually stockpile, ready for the day they are actually needed.
This also suits Lockheed Martin, which can tailor its own production to these regular annual orders. The only time a problem arises is when one of its customers suddenly uses up 1,920 missiles in 10 days. For in order to rapidly resupply the customer, it would have to keep at least this number in stock, which, in the case of PAC-3 MSEs, would mean maintaining an inventory worth around $8 billion, which even a corporation as large as Lockheed Martin would find it hard to finance. A trickle-feed annual contract with each of its customers, therefore, is the only economically viable model for this kind of business.
If Lockheed Martin couldn’t instantly replace Israel’s stockpile of PAC-3 MSE interceptors, however, the real problem was that no one else could either, not least because, for most of the last three and a half years, the USA and many other members of NATO have been sending all their ‘spare’ Patriot missiles to Ukraine. In fact, the way in which most of the military aid for Ukraine has been supplied is through donors sending their own stock to Ukraine and then placing replacement orders with the manufacturers for delivery over the next four or five years. Indeed, this probably accounts for at least part of the discrepancy between the aid Donald Trump claims the USA has provided to Ukraine and the aid President Zelenskyy claims his country has received. For while the Americans have generally sent older equipment and munitions to Ukraine, such as PAC-2 interceptors with a book value of just $1 million each, they have had to order new $4 million PAC-3 MSE interceptors from Lockheed Martin to replace them, which, because this represents the actual cost to the US taxpayer, is the sum stated in the aid budget. Because none of these new weapons has yet been delivered, however, the result is that stockpiles of most types arms and ammunition, from 155mm artillery shells to PAC-3 interceptors, are now at rock bottom levels in most NATO countries, making it impossible for America or anyone else to resupply Israel with Patriot missiles in its hour of need.
This therefore put Donald Trump, in particular, in a very difficult position. For given the amount of damage inflicted on Israel’s infrastructure and economy even when it had a fully functional air defence system, there is no telling what would have happened had it actually run out of air defence missiles. In a country as small as Israel, it is possible, indeed, that most of its few large cities could have been completely destroyed.
The only other option, however, was for America, itself, to directly intervene: an option which was also fraught with dangers. For not only does the USA have 10 military bases in the region, which, themselves, could have been overwhelmed by Iranian missiles strikes, but President Trump had also ordered two carrier groups to be stationed in the seas around the Arabian peninsula, which meant that they were also vulnerable, especially to Iran’s hypersonic missiles, which, while slower than their Russian counterparts, are still faster than any interceptor currently available.
This therefore raised the spectre of Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was effectively destroyed in 1980 when he authorised an attempt by US special forces to rescue the hostages held in the US embassy in Tehran, which failed when the rescue party’s helicopters were shot down. One can only imagine, therefore, what would have happened to President Trump if he had actually gone to war with Iran and lost even one of the aircraft carriers he had despatched to the region.
4. The Solution to Trump’s Dilemma
It is to his immense good fortune, therefore, that Trump wasn’t actually forced to choose between the two options with which he was apparently presented: that of attempting to save Israel – and very possibly seeing his own presidency destroyed – and that of allowing Israel to be destroyed, which, given the strength of the Israel lobby, would have also probably meant his political suicide. Instead, it seems that someone – we will probably never know who – came up with a third option, which, according to Alistair Crooke, a former British diplomat who spent most of his career in the Middle East and still has extensive contacts there, involved Qatar acting as an intermediary in the coordination of a piece of pure theatre, the details of which are now, of course, well known.
The first act involved the Americans launching a single air strike against three of Iran’s nuclear sites, at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, which they subsequently claimed to have totally destroyed, thereby achieving their strategic objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear programme and obviating the need to continue the war. In response, the Iranians then mounted a token retaliatory raid on America’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, allowing them to subsequently claim that they had forced the Americans to back down, thereby saving face. The two clearest signs that this exchange was entirely staged, however, are the fact that the Americans only struck three out of the twenty or so sites which the IAEA were monitoring, and that not a single casualty was suffered by either side during either of the raids.
The entirely fictional nature of this exchange is also evident from the choice of the three Iranian nuclear sites to be hit. Natanz, for instance, is a very old site, having been built during the reign of the Shah, and is completely above ground with very little security. Alistair Crooke says that he has actually driven passed it and saw only a chain-link fence and one solitary guard at the gate, strongly suggesting, therefore, that there was very little of importance going on there.
The site at Isfahan, in contrast, is far more important, housing a number of prestigious research facilities and institutes, including the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre and the Isfahan Nuclear Fuel Research and Production Centre. The site as a whole, however, had already been struck twice by the Israelis, after which much of its equipment had been relocated and most of its staff – the repositories of the scientific knowledge upon which its research is based – told to stay at home. All the Americans really did, therefore, was destroy a few buildings.
It is the site at Fordow, however, that is the most telling. For it is the facility at which Iran carries out most of its uranium enrichment. For safety as well as security, however, it is buried 80 to 90 metres beneath a mountain, which is 20 to 30 metres deeper than the maximum depth America’s GBU-57F/B “bunker busting” bombs are able to penetrate. Indeed, it is probably for this reason that it was later reported that the bombs were actually dropped down ventilation shafts, which demonstrates some fairly impressive precision bombing, especially when one considers that the GBU-57F/B weighs 13.6 metric tonnes, making it a very large bomb to be dropping down an air vent. It is even more impressive, however, when one also considers that the ventilation shafts at Fordow are built with 90° angles in them, precisely to prevent bombs being dropped down them. What really gives the game away, however, is the fact that, according to Alistair Crooke’s sources in Iran, all five of Fordow’s access tunnels, two of which were actually hit by tomahawk cruise missiles, had been packed with soil a couple of days earlier in order to prevent blasts penetrating deeper into the facility. To cap it off, the centrifuges and the enriched uranium which they had already produced had also been removed.
Of course, this is only one rather cynical observer’s take on what may or may not have happened and is based on what are probably very biased and possibly even invented accounts given to him by former or even current Iranian officials. Given that it is also so completely at odds with the official version of events published by the western media, one would therefore need considerable corroboration to put much faith in it. It is, however, consistent with other things we know about the raids, such as the fact that the American raid was completely unopposed by any Iranian air defences. Of course, one could put this down to the fact that the Americans used B2 stealth bombers flown in all the way from the USA to do the job, or that, by this stage, as Donald Trump claimed, the Americans and Israelis had complete control of Iranian airspace. Given the fact that there are independent reports of Iranian air defences shooting down Israeli ballistic missiles just the day before, however, this claim has got to be taken with a pinch of salt.
What makes this whole thing even more suspicious, however, is the fact that while aerial photographs taken after Iran’s retaliatory strike on America’s Al Udeid Air Base show that it suffered considerable damage, particularly to its radar dome and surrounding buildings, there were no US casualties, which is only possible if the base’s personnel had all taken shelter or been evacuated.
One also has to question why the Iranians only attacked one base and didn’t go after an aircraft carrier, for instance. For if the American raid had really damaged Iran’s nuclear programme and if the Iranians really thought that the USA would launch further attacks on other nuclear sites, wouldn’t they have struck back harder, if only to make the Americans question whether entering into a full scale war with Iran was a good idea. And why did the Americans stop at just three sites when they had to know that even if their original raid had done significant damage, even the total destruction of just three sites would hardly have put a dent in Iran’s nuclear programme let alone destroyed it?
The only answer that makes any sense, therefore, is that this whole thing was a charade, a pure piece of theatre staged so that everyone concerned could back away without loss of face and thereby avoid a potential world war, which is what it could so easily have become if the US had attacked Iran in earnest. Although this therefore means that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, this does not, of course, make it something reprehensible. Indeed, it’s possible that we should all be enormously grateful to whoever had enough sense to assemble this piece of fiction and to everyone else who had the good sense to go along with it. That does not mean, however, that it won’t have consequences, some of which may yet prove to be rather unfortunate.
5. Winners and Losers
One of these consequences, for instance, is the fact that, while the victor in any dispute or conflict usually knows that they have won and are usually quite happy in this knowledge, if some falsehood or lie is concocted to allow the loser to save face, this not only allows him to avoid admitting his defeat to the world, it can also allow him to avoid admitting the bitter truth to himself, with the result that he learns nothing from it and is therefore likely to repeat the same mistakes. This makes it incumbent on us, therefore, to ask who exactly were the winners and losers in this case.
The clearest winner, of course, was Iran. For not only was it able to defend itself against a well-armed opponent with superpower patronage, but it inflicted so much damage on this opponent that its patron was forced to sue for peace in order to avoid further embarrassment, both to itself and its client. An even more significant consequence of this victory, however, is the fact that, through it, Iran seems to have finally obtained its independence from the USA and the collective West. I say this because, while it may be thought that it had already broken away from America and the West in 1979, through sanctions and other coercive measures, we still managed to keep it subordinated to what we like to call the ‘international rules based order’, from which, up until now, it seemed to have lacked the confidence or moral strength to break itself free.
Nothing expressed this state of subordination more clearly, in fact, than the draconian regime imposed upon it by the IAEA under the terms of the JCPOA. So docile and compliant was it, in fact, that, as noted earlier, it continued to abide by the terms of the JCPOA even after the United States had pulled out. Its expulsion of the IAEA inspectors at the end of the war, therefore, represents one of the most emphatic declarations of freedom and independence one can imagine.
Because we cannot and do not accept that we, the collective West, lost the war, however, we do not understand this and so put the expulsions down to Iran’s ongoing resistance to the international rules based order. Worse still, because we expect those organisations which represent the international rules based order to be on ‘our’ side, rather than the impartial monitors they are supposed to be, we cannot see that the IAEA’s act of passing on detailed plans of Iran’s nuclear sites to MOSSAD is more than enough justification for Iran’s action. Worst of all, however, is the fact that because we cannot admit that we lost the war, we do not understand that we can no longer dictate to Iran what it must and must not do, such that the ultimatum given to Iran by President Macron, that it must take back the IAEA inspectors or else, is not just inappropriate but ridiculous, merely leading the Iranians to ask ‘Or else what?’
In a similar vein, President Trumps statement that Iran must now return to the negotiating table is equally preposterous. Nor is this simply because it was the USA that broke off the previously ongoing talks by engaging in an act of war, thereby clearly demonstrating that it was not previously negotiating in good faith and cannot therefore be trusted to negotiate in good faith in future. An even more cogent reason for the Iranians to simply ignore any orders President Trump gives them is the fact that, having gambled on the military option, his serious miscalculation in this regard has resulted in the USA losing a considerable amount of credibility, not just in the eyes of the Iranians, but in the eyes of just about everyone outside the blinkered West.
Nor is this simply because its client lost the war and did so largely because an air defence system built in the USA failed to adequately defend Israeli airspace. For the failure of the Patriot missile system to protect Israel from Iranian attacks is symptomatic of something rather more profound: a failure by the USA to realise that the world is no longer what it thinks it is. I say this because anyone who uses a limited supply of $4 million missiles to shoot down an endless supply of $40,000 drones is not only going to lose almost any war they fight but has essentially lost touch with reality: a state most commonly achieved by lying to oneself and swallowing one’s own propaganda, as is most perfectly exemplified by the neo-cons and the US military industrial complex, both of which believe, like Donald Trump, that the US has the best weapons and military equipment in the world and can therefore dictate to the rest of the world how things are going to be.
While this kind of overweening belief in one’s own superiority primarily makes the USA look just foolish, however, it also has some serious consequences, the most serious of which is that those afflicted by such delusions are typically prevented from adapting to a changing world, which is especially dangerous when the changes required are those necessary to fight a modern war.
We have all heard the old saying, for instance, that generals always prepare to fight the last war. Today, however, this seems particularly applicable to NATO, which still essentially bases its tactics and equipment on those used to fight World War II, where mobility and speed were the most critical factors in achieving success. As we have seen in the war in Ukraine, however, this is no longer the case. Due to a cluster of new technologies known collectively as ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), which uses satellites, drones and other aircraft to pinpoint targets on the ground and send their GPS coordinates directly to the targeting systems of strike weapons such as drones, missiles and glide bombs, the modern battlefield has been completely transformed. For with such precision guided weapons in play, anything actually moving around on the battlefield is now very quickly destroyed, especially such easily targeted objects as tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, of which the USA and NATO are so enamoured.
This is why Ukrainian battlefields look far more like the battlefields of the First World War than anything we have seen since, with networks of trenches and underground bunkers, which the Russians, being on the offensive, have had to learn a whole new set of tactics to overcome. For contrary to what is often written about them in the western media, they do not attempt to storm Ukrainian defensive positions using waves of human cannon fodder. Instead, they put them under siege, using tactics which actually haven’t changed much since Roman times. The first stage of both Roman and Russian sieges, for instance, consists of an extended period of bombardment, designed to both actually destroy the defences and soften up the defenders. For this the Romans used various types of ballista; today, the Russians use 155mm artillery, firing up to 60,000 shells a day during certain periods of the war. At the same time, small infantry units of between four and seven men attempt to encircle the position to cut it off from reinforcement and resupply. Only when the Ukrainians are sufficiently weakened and exhausted, do the Russians finally attempt enter the besieged town or village and, even then, they do so very patiently and methodically, withdrawing whenever they meet resistance and calling in drone strikes and glide bombs to level whatever positions are causing them problems.
In contrast, when the Ukrainians went on the offensive in the summer of 2023, they did so with a NATO trained army, using NATO tactics and equipment, which largely involved armoured brigades crossing open grass land in large formations which were instantly blown to pieces.
Fortunately, the Ukrainian battlefield commanders very quickly saw the futility of this, threw away their NATO training manuals and started copying the Russians, with the result that the two best armies in the world today at fighting this kind of war are the Russians and the Ukrainians. What’s more, the distance between them and the rest of the world is still widening, largely as a result of the increased use of battlefield drones on both sides, which has led to further reductions in the size of offensive formations, especially in forward reconnaissance units, where a typical squad now comprises just three or four men, four men being the largest offensive formation that is not usually targeted by drones.
This new way of fighting a war has also led to a reshaping of the battlefield. For if one can no longer concentrate troops in mass formations in order to punch a hole through the enemy lines, this means that the lines on both sides get stretched out – to around 1,500 kilometres in the case of Ukraine – with the result that there is not just one battle being fought at any one time, but thousands of micro-battles, fought over every farmhouse, every village, and even every clump of trees along the line of contact. This has also therefore led to changes in the operational structures of the two armies. For while strategic objectives may still be handed down from above, most of the tactical decisions are devolved to troops on the ground, which, in turn, has led to a new breed of operational commander, the most well-known of these being the famous Chechen general, Apti Alaudinov, commander of the Akhmat special forces, who is renowned for his proficiency in deploying and coordinating multiple semi-autonomous tactical units in the field.
The last and possibly most important element required to fight this new kind of war, however, is an adaptable and highly responsive military industrial complex. I say this because, when General Alaudinov says that he needs a new piece of equipment to deal with a new problem that has arisen on the battlefield, he doesn’t mean that he needs it in six or twelve months’ time, after his request has been passed up the chain of command and reviewed at several procurement committee meetings; he means that he needs it next week.
In fact, it is this level of flexibility and responsiveness that has probably contributed more to Russia’s victory in Ukraine than anything else, as is particularly well illustrated by the fact that, at the beginning of war, Russia produced hardly any military drones of its own and had to buy them from Iran. Today, in contrast, it is estimated that it manufactures more than a thousand drones of different types every day, including ‘intelligent’ anti-drone drones which are programmed to seek out and destroy enemy drones without the need of an operator. What’s more, the Russian army now has drone manufacturers embedded within the troops on the ground. Equipped with an array of programmable computer chips and 3D printers for producing the physical components, they constantly design new drones to meet new battlefield requirements.
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin continues to produce 500 PAC-3 MSE interceptors a year at $4 million each, not realising that the wars in Ukraine and Iran have rendered them obsolete and turned Lockheed Martin, itself, into a dinosaur on the brink of extinction. This, however, is precisely what the rest of the world has seen and why it is the USA, rather than Israel, that has been the biggest loser in the Israeli-Iranian war. For as a result of its ineffectuality in protecting Israeli airspace, the world is beginning to wake up to the fact that the big stick which it brandishes around the globe in order to keep its vassals in line may largely be for show. It may have 750 military bases in 80 different countries and 11 carrier groups patrolling the world’s oceans, but what are they actually for? Are they really necessary for the defence of the USA? Of course not. They are there to project power, which, as any bully knows, exists more in its perception than in actual capability.
It is the same with the price tags on its advanced weaponry. Does an air defence missile really need to cost $4 million? Of course not. But when people see the price tag, they not only think it must be good, but wonder at the madness of spending that much money on a single use weapon, which they know they could not do themselves, thereby placing the USA in a different league: one in which they know they cannot compete. When this extremely expensive weaponry fails to do its job, however, the perception changes. Not only are the weapons, themselves, seen as less good than their price tags suggests, but the madness of spending so much money on them is now seen as just that, making lesser nations wonder whether a country which is so out of touch economically can be as militarily powerful as they make themselves out to be.
Once brought into question, what’s more, a country’s credibility is not so easily restored. For once we have taken a peek behind the curtain and seen what’s actually here, we cannot unsee it. Indeed, it’s why, in the West, we are currently being prevented from taking that peek by a wall of media propaganda which insists that the US air force really did ‘obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear programme and that the threat has therefore been removed, even though our governments also continue to insist that Iran readmit the IAEA inspectors and resume negotiations on some sort of nuclear deal.
The trouble with lying to the world in this way, however, is not just that it’s hard to keep the lies consistent – which, in itself, can have an impact on policy – but that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the lies from the truth, even for those in government, who may genuinely believe what they are saying but, with either their geopolitical philosophy or their military confidence ungrounded in reality, may end up plunging their countries into disastrous and humiliating wars nonetheless.
6. The Dangers Ahead
One of the best examples of the mess one can get into as a result of the first of these issues – that of needing to keep one’s lies consistent – is the tangled web of deceit we have woven around the war in Ukraine, where, at the time of writing, the Russians are on the brink of total victory: something which would be a total disaster for the USA, of course. For while it may have been able to pretend that it did not lose the war against Iran, once Russian troops have reached the Dnieper river, it will be far less easy to deny that it has lost the war in Ukraine. For incoming president Donald Trump, therefore, it was undoubtedly a matter of some urgency that he end the war before this could happen.
The problem he had, however, was that in order to reach any kind of settlement with the Russians, he had to address what they regard as their legitimate concerns, both with respect to Russia’s security, should Ukraine become a member of NATO, and with regard to the rights of the 14 million Russians who were trapped inside Ukraine’s borders when it was granted independence in 1991: issues which the collective West has been very reluctant to address over the last three and half years, firstly because it would have entailed admitting that the Russians had legitimate concerns and secondly because this first admission would have further entailed admitting that it had been lying to its people throughout this time by telling them that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the entirely gratuitous and unprovoked act of an evil dictator.
President Trump’s initial response to this impasse, therefore, was to try to charm the Russians into simply accepting an unconditional ceasefire without any reference to the underlying causes of the conflict. When President Putin responded by saying that there would need to be substantial progress towards an actual peace settlement before he would even consider ending the fighting, Trump then tried the opposite tack of declaring how disappointed he was with Putin’s intransigence. When this had no effect either, he then did what all extortionist do when all else fails: he threatened Putin’s family, not literally, of course, but in the form of Russia’s allies, China, India and Brazil, whom he threatened with huge tariffs if Russia did not agree to a ceasefire within fifty days.
It was at this point, however, that someone in Trump’s administration almost certainly told him that Ukraine might not actually have fifty days and that he needed to act sooner. What actually triggered this reassessment of the situation is something we’ll probably never know. One possibility, for instance, is that it was prompted by the Ukrainian parliament passing a new law allowing men over 60 to be called up for military service, thereby making it fairly obvious just how few men the Ukrainians have left. Alternatively, it could just as easily have been triggered when a small Russian reconnaissance unit, probing the Ukrainian lines north of Pokrovsk, found a section of the line that was completely unmanned, allowing Russian troops to pour through the breach and launch encircling manoeuvres on both flanks, threatening to cut off both Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka from resupply.
Whatever prompted this change in Trump’s appreciation of what was actually happening in Ukraine, however, it presented him with yet another dilemma, one not dissimilar to the one he faced over Iran’s hugely destructive attacks on Israel. For, again, he had to choose between what appeared to be two equally unpalatable options. Either he could simply stand by and watch the Russians’ inexorable march to victory, for which he would almost certainly be blamed, having cut back on Ukrainian military aid, or he could do the unthinkable and agree to more meaningful negotiations with the Russians, for which he would be excoriated, not just by the neo-cons, but by his donors in the US defence industry. On this occasion, moreover, no one seems to have come forward to offer him a third option. The result was that, after vacillating for a few days, he finally chose what he almost certainly saw as the lesser of the two evils and sent Steve Witkoff to Moscow with an invitation to President Putin to start serious talks, which the Russians naturally welcomed.
I say this because, while they would settle for victory on the battlefield, a negotiated peace deal is what the Russians have actually always wanted. This is because, were they to reach the Dnieper river and occupy all of eastern Ukraine, their incorporation of any part of it into the Russian Federation would not be recognised by the international community. All it would achieve, therefore, is a frozen conflict and a new cold war, with a fortified Dnieper river replacing the Berlin Wall as its symbol. What the Russians would prefer, therefore, is a negotiated peace treaty, in which Ukraine’s neutrality and redrawn borders would be legally enshrined.
And for a few hours in Alaska on Friday 15th August, it actually seemed as if this might be possible. President Trump clearly accepted that there couldn’t be a ceasefire until the ‘root causes’ of the conflict had been properly addressed and President Putin duly invited him to the next round of talks in Moscow. By Monday evening, however, the neo-cons in Trump’s administration, along with President Zelenskyy and various European leaders had all got to him and the deal was off. After all, an end to the war would mean an end to both Zelenskyy’s presidency, which has only been extended beyond its fixed term by a declaration of martial law, and to the steady concentration of power in Brussels by both NATO and the EU. Even more importantly, the neo-cons in Washington, who have been using Ukraine to undermine Russia since before 2008, when they first suggested that Ukraine should join NATO, weren’t just going to give up because their erratic and uncertain president didn’t want another of America’s clients to suffer another catastrophic military defeat on his watch. So they introduced the idea that, as part of any peace deal, there would have to be security guarantees for Ukraine, which they knew the Russians would see as NATO trying to gain a foothold in Ukraine via the back door and would therefore reject, bringing all peace negotiations to an end.
The most likely outcome, therefore, is that the Russians will, indeed, reach the Dnieper river where the conflict will be frozen, giving rise to a new cold war. Of course, it’s possible that some European leaders, sufficiently deluded by their own propaganda, might actually attempt some kind of military intervention to prevent the Russians from actually crossing the river. Not only do the Russians have no interest in crossing the Dnieper, however – west Ukraine being full of Ukrainian nationalists who would bog them down in an endless and expensive campaign against insurgents and terrorists – but, contrary to what is constantly being said in the western media, they really do not want their Special Military Operation to escalate into a full blown war with NATO. The most likely outcome, therefore, will just be stand-off across the river.
A far bigger danger, in fact, is that the neo-cons in Washington, smarting under yet another defeat, will convince Donald Trump to reassert America’s global dominance, not by confronting Russia in Ukraine, which would almost certainly lead to World War III and nuclear annihilation, but by having another go at Iran.
The problem for Donald Trump, however, is that, this time, the USA would not be able to use Israel as a proxy. This is not only because the Israeli air force will not be able to mount a surprise attack over the Caspian Sea for a second time, or because most of its agents in Iran have been rounded up and executed, but because it is going to take a considerable amount of time to rearm its planes and replace its Patriot interceptors, especially as Lockheed Martin are still only producing 500 of them a year. More to the point, there is no reason to suppose that a second attack by Israel on Iran would have anything other than the same result, with even more damage being inflicted on Israel’s infrastructure and economy.
Even more importantly, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly knows this and has – at least for now – abandoned his quest for regime change in Iran in favour of conquering more of Syria, which he initially attacked with the professed aim of helping the Druze – who were then being systematically massacred by Syrian forces – but which was far more probably intended to deflect attention away from Israel’s defeat by the Iranians. After all, the Syrian regime of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa – also known Abu Mohammad al-Julani – has been killing Christians and Alawites in Syria ever since it came to power in January this year and at no time had Netanyahu previously demonstrated any concern for this widespread genocide. After all, the Israelis had actually helped install al-Julani in Damascus following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and, along with the Turks and Americans, had no great interest in publicising the regime’s ethnic cleansing.
The point I am making, however, is that, if Trump were to agree to intervene in Iran to reassert US power after its defeat in Ukraine, the Americans would have to do it on their own, with all the risks to American assets in the region I outlined earlier. If, on the other hand, he doesn’t agree to such an intervention, and if the Iranians persist in ignoring American demands that they readmit IAEA inspectors and restart negotiations with respect to their nuclear programme, he risks something almost as bad: looking weak, thereby diminishing US power still further.
There is, however, a significant asymmetry between the options in this third dilemma. For while a failure to take on Iran will make America look weak, if Trump actually decides to attack Iran, there is, of course, a possibility that the US could prevail, thereby restoring America’s status, authority and power in the region if not the world as a whole. Indeed, it is for this reason that I suspect that the neo-cons will convince him to attack. Their argument will be that, having allowed the Russians to win in Ukraine, if he fails to act on Iran, the era of America’s global supremacy will be well and truly over and BRICS will clearly be in the ascendency.
The problem with this argument, however, is that it depends on America really having the military capability to defeat Iran, whatever ‘defeat’ actually means in this context. Does it mean, for instance, actually invading a country the size of western Europe, or would it be enough to simply bomb it into submission? But what if the Iranians refuse to submit? They didn’t submit in 1979. Worse still, what if they actually give as good as they get? What if all those US assets in the region – all those military bases and carriers groups – aren’t really assets at all, but liabilities: targets to be destroyed?
Indeed, it is this last question that really sums up the USA’s impossible position. For if it is one’s policy to maintain sole global hegemony by projecting military power around the world, one leaves oneself extremely vulnerable if that projection is more appearance than substance. Putting it to the test, therefore, is always a gamble, which all empires eventually lose, making imperialism, itself, a bad bet as one’s foreign policy, as the founding fathers of the USA clearly understood but which Paul Wolfowitz clearly did not.
