Less than three weeks into the aggression against Iran since February 28, which the US President Donald Trump called a “little excursion”, the war is assuming a scenario that is the exact opposite of what he visualised. 

On Tuesday, Trump declared, “We will leave in the near future—pretty much in the very near future.” Indeed, Axios reported on the previous day citing a US official and “a source with knowledge of the matter” that a “direct communications channel between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has been reactivated in recent days.” [Araghchi of course issued a swift denial.] 

On the contrary, Israel is pulling all stops to make sure that the war will not end ‘prematurely’. Trump’s preference would have been to have an equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez, the erstwhile deputy to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, emerging in Tehran — a highly pragmatic leader. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has other ideas. 

He sees the war as a crusade to realise the Zionist dream of hegemony over the Muslim Middle East. The objectives Trump pursued were never really transparent or congruent with Netanyahu’s. 

Israel’s mission is far from complete. The ruthless decapitation strategy is a means to an end. In the Israeli expectation, in the aftermath of the killing of the top echelons of Iranian leadership at one stroke, the regime would simply collapse. But things didn’t work out that way. 

Whereas, Trump measures the war’s success on the scale of physical destruction the US air strikes caused to the state buildings, parks, schools, bridges, culverts, hospitals, military bases, etc. And he has reason to feel satisfied. He says there are no more any targets left to hit in Iran, and he could disrupt electricity supply all over Iran in an hour if he wanted.  

But Netanyahu’s is an altogether........

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