There are victories that announce themselves with smoke, fire, and satellite photographs. And there are defeats that arrive later, in the small print of a ceasefire, in the verbs of a communiqué, in the prepositions of a diplomatic formula.

The recent exchange with Iran may yet prove to have been a victory of the first kind. Iran’s missile production was reportedly mauled. Its nuclear infrastructure was wounded. Its air defenses were embarrassed. Its industrial base was struck. Its regime, so long accustomed to subcontracting death through proxies, was made to pay in its own capital and on its own soil.

But after a war, the serious question is not merely what was destroyed. It is what was decided.

And here the answer is less reassuring.

Iran’s capabilities have been degraded. Its intentions have not. Its factories have been damaged. Its doctrine has not. Its leaders have been bloodied. Their appetite has not been cured.

Indeed, the regime that emerges from this round may be poorer in missiles but richer in grievance. It may possess fewer launchers but more reasons, in its own revolutionary mind, to seek the one deterrent it now believes can prevent another humiliation: the bomb.

This is the paradox now facing Washington and Jerusalem. Iran is weaker today in the measurable sense. But regimes are not spreadsheets. They are organisms of fear, pride, ideology, memory, and revenge. The Islamic Republic has survived the worst military scenario it could imagine: Israel and America acting together. It will draw lessons from that survival. Not moderate lessons. Regime lessons.

The first lesson will be to rebuild. The second will be to go deeper. The third will be to negotiate as the weaker party only long enough to become the stronger one.

That is the old Iranian method: lose on the battlefield, recover at the negotiating table. Concede in grammar, advance in geology. Accept inspections here, dig tunnels there. Trade time for legitimacy, legitimacy for money, money for centrifuges, centrifuges for leverage.

The West keeps asking whether this “war” was worth it. That is a natural American question, and a misleading Israeli one.

For Washington, a war is an episode. It has a beginning, a cost, an objective, an exit. The carrier group sails. The president speaks. The markets react. The midterms intrude.

For Israel, this is not an episode. It is a round.

Iran’s campaign against Israel is not a series of disconnected crises: Lebanon in 2006, Gaza, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq and Syria, missile barrages, nuclear advances, maritime threats, and now direct exchanges. These are not beads randomly dropped on the floor. They are beads on a string.

The string is the doctrine of muqawama — resistance as permanent........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)