Twelve days after Israel began its air offensive against Iran, the war ended as suddenly as it began, almost without notice. In Israel, apart from the 28 persons who died as a result of Iran’s missile barrage, scores of apartments lie in ruins mainly in Haifa and Tel Aviv. In Iran, apart from the shocking degradation of its top security brass that saw the killing of 30 high-ranking security personnel and three senior commanders, not to say surrendering to total and embarrassing Israeli air dominance, its nuclear and missile facilities were badly damaged. For the United States, whose president Donald Trump continues to hanker after a Nobel Peace prize, it displayed air razzmatazz that led to the bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan using 30,000-pound GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs of disputed efficacy. The war ended because all sides to the conflict declared victory and ceased hostilities.
The US was the quickest to declare victory after bombing the nuclear facilities, particularly Fordow, and announcing the facilities’ obliteration. Israel also declared that it had achieved nearly all its military and psychological operation objectives. After decapitating Iran’s proxy militias in Labanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas), in the recent war, it instantly controlled and dominated Iranian air space unchallenged, eliminated senior Iranian military commanders by a combination of commando raids and stunning espionage operations undertaken by their spy agency, MOSSAD, did not lose one combat aircraft, and set Iran’s development of a nuclear bomb back by an undetermined number of years. But Iran was also quick to declare victory despite suffering more than 600 military and civilian casualties by pointing at the apocalyptic photographs of ruined buildings in some Israeli cities, and boasting about the efficacy of its ballistic missiles and drones capacity to the delight of Iranians who took to the streets to celebrate Israeli citizens cowering in bomb shelters. The readiness with which Israel and Iran embraced ceasefire was, however, probably due more to US bullying tactics than anything else. Because of national pride, neither Israel nor Iran had seemed eager or able to stop hostilities.
Other than the speed with which Israel exposed the vulnerabilities of Iran, the country of less than 10 million people also exposed the illusion of those who seemed convinced that the Israel-Iran conflict was, broadly speaking, a religious or racial war. The conflict may be couched in religious terms, but the way it was fought, its antecedents, and how the supporters’ clubs were arrayed showed that it was more than anything else a regional power play. Some analysts may be taken in by Iran’s reasons for seizing upon the Palestinian cause to project power, but it is significant that Arab countries raised only a feeble voice against Israeli aggression. The latter understood what the whole war was all about. They understand that Iran is strictly speaking not Arab, and had for decades been bellicose towards its neighbours. Hardly any country in the region escaped Iran’s intrusions, whether Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states. They view Iran’s proxy militias as a ploy to undermine and subjugate them. And they know that unlike Iran, Israel has no territorial ambition beyond its biblical enclave. They, therefore, pined for a military power capable of stifling the reincarnation of Persian hegemony, and they saw in Israel an equalizer. There was no time in those 12 humbling days the war lasted that any Arab country robustly denounced Israel’s attacks. The message was clear: they distrust Iran more than they despise Israel. For them it was all politics, not religion.
Arab states have legitimate concerns about the rising profile of Iran under the rule of the Ayatollahs. But sensing a regional power vacuum after the humiliation and deposition of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and with no Arab country willing to bravely shoulder the Palestinian cause in the aggressive and proactive manner former Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had done, the Ayatollahs presumed to represent both the Arab and Islamic causes as well as make both causes one and the same. This fundamentally harked back to the theocratic basis of their rule: to deploy religion as a governing tool and imbue it with a combative and resonating regional ambition. The Iranian regional ambition is not an accident. But after the humiliation of the 12-Day war, that ambition may be in danger, if not in tatters. The US bombs may not have ‘obliterated’ what many tagged the ‘Islamic bomb’, but they have probably set Iran’s nuclear bomb project back by a few years. There are suggestions among Iran’s many regional supporters that the US-Israeli attacks may paradoxically stiffen the Middle Eastern country’s resolve to build a bomb, having enriched Uranium to weapons grade years earlier. Unquestionably, however, Iran will have to re-imagine its’ Persian empire’ dreams, modify or temper its rhetoric, carefully consider whether anchoring its political and regional ambitions on theocratic foundations as it has done successfully for many decades is as tenable in this century as it was considered normal in the distant past.
Iran’s aggressiveness and meddlesomeness in international relations led to the US and Israel, both nuclear powers themselves, swearing to ensure that Iran does not have the bomb. It may be arrogant and inequitable, but that oath probably reassures Iran’s regional competitors and tangentially dampens the morale of Palestinian freedom fighters. After the 12-Day war, Iranian proxies are unlikely to be revived on the scale they were before the punishing campaigns of the last few months. In the near future, the heavily degraded Hezbollah may be unable to recover its strength or relevance in the region, or in Lebanon in particular. Hamas, having observed the dissonance between Iran’s hype and its shocking performance in the 12-Day war, may enter into a face-saving deal in Gaza or allow itself to go down noisily. Whatever hppens, Iran’s imperial (Persian) dream may take much longer to revive, especially seeing how religion has been either incapable of driving that dream or ennobling it, as the Ayatollahs have started to suspect during the drafting of the ceasefire deal when they were sidelined. The Six-Day war of 1967 changed the face of the Middle East in a substantial way that has lasted till today; the 12-Day war that ended early last week may also fundamentally redefine power relations in the region.
Iran’s supporters are reluctant to acknowledge the real reason for its expansionary ambitions, a fact keenly understood by its neighbours, thus accounting for their indifference to its plight and humiliation. Iran’s religious leaders, it is obvious, are trapped in the past and have failed to learn lessons from the failure of Islamic State (or ISIL) and the caliphate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi attempted to establish after the collapse of Saddam Hussein and the chaos that enveloped Iraq. Leaders have a responsibility to study history and draw the right lessons in respect of ideologies, time, policies and associations. Few in the turbulent region saw Iran’s pursuit of the Palestinian cause as a strong reason for the creation and arming of proxy militias. All they saw was an attempt to create an empire or carve a large sphere of influence comparable in ideology and geographical scope to the Sunni Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE), the second caliphate after Prophet Muhammad. But the Umayyads presided over a large multiethnic and multicultural population, majority of whom were Christians. Iran under the mullahs exemplifies intolerance, irrational rhetoric, and genocidal fantasies, and does not even structurally and ideologically resemble their kindred Shi’a Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258). The Abbasids, who formed the third caliphate of the Islamic empire, were ironically more Sunni than they publicly acknowledged, but were destroyed by the Mongols in 1258. During their rule, they downplayed Arabism, espoused internationalism, and ensured that the caliphate was more political than Islamic. But once they ensured that religion no longer formed the core of their unity, the empire began to crack.
It is not clear why some of Iran’s fanatical supporters appear ready to singe the feathers of critics, especially citing religious reasons. Iranian mullahs have a clearer sense of history and understanding of power politics than their many impressionable supporters. Iran knows it is posturing in the Middle East and that war with Israel is all about politics and power. The Ayatollahs also know that it cannot sustain a repressive rule without deploying religion and military adventurism as tools and ideological propellant. Iran’s neighbours also know the name of the game, and are equally adamant about sustaining their independence and spurning subordination. They remember that the last person to attempt expansionism, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, came to grief in 2006 during the Second Gulf War (2003-2011). Saddam also seized upon the Palestinian cause to fire some 42 Scud missiles in 1991 into the same cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa which the Iranians attacked in the recent 12-Day war. Saddam had earlier rolled his army into Kuwait in August 1990. The regional power playbook is not new, except to those ignorant of history. Admittedly, there is nothing morally offensive about expansionism, or the deployment of Islamic ideology to birth or promote empire building. Equally, if Israel deploys its military to counter Iran’s imperial appetite, receives help from the US, and benefits from the connivance of Arab countries suspicious of Iranian expansionism, it is fair game. The combatants know the name of the game. More, they know the rules of the game.
For now, much more than Israel and US deflting Iran’s nuclear development programme, and regardless of the beleaguered country’s bluff and bluster, it knows that its imperial ambitions have become comatose. Having spent billions, if not trillions, of dollars on its nuclear programme and the funding of proxy militias, Iran’s mullahs must now contend with angry and hungry but repressed populace thinking warily of challenging their rulers. It is a prospect far more galling to the clerics than the humiliation it received in the hands of the combined forces that pummeled its nuclear and missile facilities. Whether Iran emerges from this humiliation or not will depend not on the choreographed street demonstrations carried out in support of the regime, but on how smartly the ambitious mullahs can rediscover Iran’s Persian roots and learn the appropriate lessons from the rise and fall of previous caliphates. There is, however, little to suggest they can, just like the incompetent and anachronistic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State who died at the age of 48 fantasising about the past. The Iranian mullahs lack the capacity, tact, tolerance and guile to appreciate the political and ideological nuances of their region. Indeed, under the mullahs, Iran has begun to resemble the Abbasids in their encounters with the Seljuqs in 1050, and, more apocalyptically, before the Mongol invasion of 1258.
