The first and perhaps last Iran-Israel war

Iran declared war in 1979 as one of the first acts after the Islamic Revolution. Along with declaring the aim of bringing about the demise of the United States, it embarked on a war of extermination against Israel. It has been relentless in building the capacity over the intervening five decades to realize its objectives. We are now seeing the start of the final, acute phase of that war in which Iran promises to exterminate Israel, and Israel – fifty year later – has moved to try to destabilize the Iranian regime.

In recent years, Iran persisted in developing its nuclear and ballistic programs to establish itself as a regional power to threaten not only Israel, but other continents. It also built a robust network of proxies to attack Israel, which it dubbed the “ring of fire.” Recently, it has also cultivated distant allies, such as Venezuela, Columbia, Chile, Brazil to begin to leverage gangs and drug pipelines to build a more limited version of the “ring of fire” to bear down on the United States itself.

On October 7, 2023, Iran activated the Middle Eastern network of proxies in the bone-chillingly bloody and depraved invasion. This represented a new phase in Iran’s war against Israel, since it signaled the beginning of what it believed would have been an acute, ongoing war of attrition on eight fronts rather than periodic along alternate acting fronts. This was Iran’s first miscalculation of Israel. Israel realized this war of attrition was in fact the final stage of an existential attack Iran was launching. As a result, it went beyond engaging in this war of attrition on Iran’s terms and embraced instead a war whose strategy was not conflict management, but total victory and defeat of these proxies.

After a series of devastating blows to the key proxy, Hizballah, and the killing of senior Iranian liaison officers to that proxy in Damascus, Iran miscalculated a second time on April 14. It launched the first direct missile assault on Israel from Iranian territory. This transformed the war from one of Israel against Iran’s proxies – a war against the proxy tentacles of the Iranian octopus – in a direct war between Israel and Iran.

This also transformed the war from a long-term war with the proxies into a twilight, direct struggle between the Iranian nation run by a tyranny that seeks to extinguish another – democratic Israel. After April 14, the containment of Iran and its management by deterrence was no longer vulnerable; it has become a showdown in which either Iran or Israel, but not both, would emerge not only as victor but as survivor.

This then led to Iran’s third mistake, or more accurately strategic delusion. It is the same misperception plaguing all of Iran’s proxies – which led to Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah to famously dub Israel as a mere, fragile spiderweb easily imploded – and its minions in the West protesting on campuses against the “white” Israel against the “indigenous people of color” of Palestine. The mistake is not that they underestimated Israel’s capabilities, prowess, nor that they misread its messy disunity and internal divisiveness on display almost daily as systemic collapse, but that they internalized their own ideology that Israel is a fake, fragile colonial entity rather than a deeply rooted civilization – one of the oldest and most solid, in fact. Israel has shown that despite its mistakes and setbacks, its internal strength and its “mystic chords of memory” (to borrow from Abraham Lincoln)  transcended that of any of their neighbors, especially their more recently invented Palestinian nemesis.

The cumulative effects of Iran’s miscalculations in this Iran-Israel war came home to roost and took a dramatic turn as a result of the last two weeks. The proxy “ring of fire” — the network of proxies surrounding Israel which Iran built — not only had an aggressive aim to choke Israel to death by initiating a violent war of attrition and isolation, including closing ports and ending international airline’s flying to Israel. It also acted as a defensive deterrent against Israel. The ring of fire — particularly Hizballah — shielded Iran from any potential Israeli proactive action against Iran directly. Indeed, so powerful was the Hizballah tentacle that Israel feared it more than the head of the octopus on Tehran. But the devastation wrought on Hizballah over recent weeks, starting with “Operation Grim Beeper”[1] which incapacitated or killed 5000 of the key commanders at the heart of the organization, after a second, similar blow with the exploding walkie-talkie radios and other electronic means of communication the next day, followed the third day with the airstrike that took out the entire surviving command of its elite ground forces, and then a week later losing its iconic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, overturned Iran’s entire strategy. Hizballah was the strategic linchpin of the proxy network at the center of the ring of fire. It was the greatest threat Israel faced. With its destruction, its deterrent contribution against Israel was erased. Iran was now left fully exposed to the full weight of Israeli power.

Which led Iran to commit its fourth big mistake on the last day of September: again directly attacking Israel, which opened the door for a material Israeli direct counterattack, which Israel had chosen – under great U.S. pressure – not to do in April. The result is that Iran will surely now feel the vulnerability to which it has exposed itself as Israel proceeds without fear any more of either Hizballah’s or Iran’s response. Jerusalem will take the war from the defensive to the offensive against Iran’s regime.

Nor is Iran in a good position to engage Israel. Iran’s strategy depends entirely on manipulation into paralysis of foes who possess far greater raw power. Until now by deterrence and use of a failed will of Israel’s primary ally, the United States, Iran felt it could manipulate Israel and even more so the United States to play by rules that delivered it great strategic advantage and ultimate victory. But a strategy of manipulation depends on facing a predictable adversary. As long as the Untied States and Israel restrained themselves within the rule that Iran had imposed on them, Iran’s far superior strategic acumen and the regime’s talent for strategic manipulation delivered for Iran a ramp leading to triumph. This then led to Iran’s fifth miscalculation: Israel changed the rules after October 7 and became unpredictable for Iran. For Iran, Israel was no longer controllable and restrainable, but a crazed wild man lashing out akin to the way a spraying firehose is flailing and uncontrollable. There is no strategy of manipulation that can harness this flailing firehose, one can only run for over or shut off the water leading to the nozzle. Iran now fears Israel and no longer knows how to handle it or its superior raw power.

⁠Iran has limited options but can be counted on to embark on three strategic responses.

First, it will try to “shut off the water” to the fire hose’s nozzle. This means that it will try to entangle the United States and threaten to raise the specter of a dangerous regional war to such vast and imaginary dimensions — far beyond any which it actually possesses the power to execute — that it unnerves and manipulates the United Stares into imposing a ceasefire, thus saving Iran from Israel’s counteroffensive against it. There already are signs of this strategy’s being implemented as some of the Iranian regime’s proxy voices in the U.S. echo this, such as Vali Nasr on Monday (Sep 29).

Second, Iran fears its own people and needs to frighten them into somehow rallying around the regime. The incompetence and impotence exposed by its proxies and itself in recent weeks threaten a regime whose tyrannical survival depends on projecting internally against its own people an insurmountable image of terror and omnipotence. It needs somehow to rally a people that both despises and begins to lose fear of it. As such, the regime will seek to transform the Iran-Israel war into a part of a great Sunni-Shiite conflagration. It will likely even attack Sunni Gulf Arab states to provoke them to respond and thus to stimulate the existential fears Iranians all harbor in their every fiber of the Sunni Arab threat.

Third, for the same reason of trying in despair to rally their own population which loathes it, Iran’s regime will instigate ethnic divisions in its own country — potentially even with high-profile self-inflicted false flag terror attacks — in order to establish among its populace that the survival of the regime is the sole barrier to the nation’s descending into a bloody internal ethnic civil war.

It is in the American interest – indeed in the interest of Western civilization – that Israel be allowed to press its hard-fought advantages and be allowed to gallop toward victory against the Iranian regime. Unfortunately, the current administration appears incapable of restraining itself from continually sabotaging Israel instead. Even so, Israel proceeds toward that victory, but more laboriously and turbulently than would otherwise be necessary if it had genuine U.S. backing.

And yet, one caveat. Israel should do so in ways that avoid tapping either the Sunni card or the ethic demon. Ironically, Israel’s attacking Iran as the representative of the Jewish people with which Persia and Iran has had a 2,500 years history of alliance and amity – Cyrus returned the Jewish people from Babylonian exile to the Land of Israel and funded the reconstruction of the second Temple – purchases for Israel great popular Iranian support as the agent of their liberation from tyranny as long as it is not seen as doing so in service of Sunni Arabs or ethnic divide-and-conquer schemers.

[1] The nickname was first originated by Mike Doran.