There is a particular kind of strategic trap arrogant powerful leaders repeatedly fall into. A war launched with limited objectives achieves early tactical success, but gets defined over time by the one goal it cannot achieve. In Vietnam, it was the collapse of the government in Hanoi. In Iraq, it was the creation of an obedient political order. In Afghanistan, it was to dismantle the Taliban as a political force. In the current US–Israel war against Iran, that ambitious objective is ‘regime change’.

Despite their overwhelmingly superior firepower, the aggressors have not managed to engineer a collapse of the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, the regime has consolidated around a harder line and gained from a surge of nationalistic sentiment in the face of foreign aggression.

The first phase of the war was framed as a campaign against the Iranian leadership and its military infrastructure. The assassination of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meant to be a decisive decapitation strike. Iran’s key command structures were targeted, its scientists and military officers killed, its alleged nuclear facilities bombed again. In the early hours of the conflict, it was still possible to argue that the campaign was directed primarily at the regime.

Many Iranians who have long resented the Islamic Republic might initially have seen hope in the strikes, seen the attack as a direct challenge to a government that has suppressed dissent and curtailed freedoms. But that sentiment evaporated fast. On the very first day of the war, the attack on an all-girls elementary school in Minab killed 186 students and their teacher. As the........

© National Herald