Although we may disagree – and disagree profoundly – with Erdogan’s Turkey, a state that has elevated geopolitical opportunism to an art form, that wears the Palestinian cause like a seasonal garment to be displayed at the UN and folded away when trade deals with Israel require discretion, that oscillates between NATO and Moscow with the loyalty of a weathervane in a hurricane, that harbors Muslim Brotherhood networks while selling drones to their enemies, and that wraps neo-Ottoman ambitions in the language of Islamic solidarity the way a con artist wraps a brick in gift paper – despite all of this, intellectual honesty is not selective, and when a serious man says a serious thing, the origin does not diminish the accuracy.

And Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, a former intelligence chief who understands the grammar of warfare better than any diplomat currently operating in the Middle East, has just delivered – in an interview with TRT Haber – the single most excoriating assessment of Iran’s strategic incompetence that any official in the region has had the courage to articulate publicly.

Fidan’s argument, stripped to its core, is mercilessly simple: if you have not developed cyber intelligence, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, space-based surveillance, aviation technology, advanced air defense systems, radar networks, and electronic jamming capabilities – if you have not done your homework across every one of these domains – then you have no business even entering a skirmish, let alone a war, with Israel and the United States.

Not a war. A skirmish. He was explicit: a state that contemplates confrontation with these two powers must achieve near-total competence across the full spectrum of modern warfare before it fires a single shot. Anything less is not resistance. It is suicide dressed in slogans.

Had any Arab official uttered these words, the Arab street would have branded him a coward, a traitor, a normalizer, a servant of Zionism. They would have quoted Quran – “How many a small company has overcome a large company by permission of Allah” (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:249) – and dismissed strategic planning as a lack of faith. This is the intellectual culture that has produced seventy-seven years of uninterrupted military humiliation at the hands of a Hebrew state smaller than New Jersey – five armies defeated in 1948 by a country with no air force, the Sinai lost in six days in 1967, the Yom Kippur surprise squandered in 1973, and every confrontation since ending in the same result: Arab defeat, Israeli expansion, and another generation raised on the promise that next time will be different.

This is the belief that divine favor substitutes for radar technology, that revolutionary fervor compensates for signals intelligence, and that – in the case of the Iranian regime – chanting “Death to America” for 47 years constitutes a defense doctrine.

Fidan’s words landed like a scalpel on an open wound because they describe, with clinical precision, exactly what happened to Iran on Saturday morning. In the first 60 seconds of Operation Roaring Lion, the Israeli Air Force killed 40 senior Iranian commanders in simultaneous strikes on two locations in Tehran. Among the dead: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, IRGC Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani, and four senior intelligence directors – the head of foreign intelligence, the head of the security unit, the head of counterterrorism, and the senior advisor on the war with Israel.

The entire command architecture of the Islamic Republic was erased in less time than it takes to boil an egg. Over 200 Israeli fighter jets – the largest strike formation in IAF history – struck roughly 500 targets across western and central Iran in the opening wave. By the second day, the IDF had dismantled most of Iran’s air defense systems across western and central Iran and established aerial superiority over Tehran itself. Concurrently, the US operation – Epic Fury – executed approximately nine hundred strikes in the first 12 hours alone, exceeding 1,250 targets within 48 hours. Israel dropped over 1,200 bombs on Iranian military infrastructure in the first 24 hours.

By Wednesday, the mathematics of war had replaced the poetry of martyrdom. US General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that Iran’s theater ballistic missile launches had dropped 86 percent from the first day of fighting, with drone launches down 73% – a regime bleeding teeth by the hour, its arsenal emptying faster than its rhetoric can replenish it. This is not a country at war. This is a country being disassembled.

And here is where Fidan’s other observation becomes lethally relevant. Speaking on TRT Haber, he described Iran’s strategy with a phrase that should be tattooed on the forehead of every resistance romanticist in the Arab world: “If I fall, I will take everyone with me.” That is not a war doctrine. That is the logic of a suicide bomber scaled to a nation-state – the confession of a regime that knows it cannot win and has decided instead to maximize collateral damage on the way down.

Iran’s retaliatory strikes did not target the Israeli command centers that killed its leadership. They did not strike the airbases from which the bombers launched. They did not demonstrate the intelligence penetration or precision targeting that would signal a military capable of fighting a symmetric war. Instead, Iran fired missiles at Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan – countries that did not attack it, countries that in some cases actively opposed the strikes, countries whose only crime was hosting American military infrastructure that they did not invite for the purpose of attacking Iran.

Many have joked – and the joke lands because it is essentially accurate – that Iran’s targeting strategy amounted to pressing Ctrl+A on a map of the Middle East or clicking “select all,” because when you cannot hit the enemy who gutted your command structure, you hit everyone within range and call it resistance.

Tehran has now struck Azerbaijan and blamed it on Israel – a provocation so transparently reckless that it can only be read as an attempt to drag Turkey into the conflict, given that Azerbaijan is functionally Ankara’s closest strategic extension in the Caucasus, a second Turkey in all but name. This is not escalation management; it is escalation manufacturing by a regime that has concluded its only chance of survival lies in widening the war until the cost of continuing it exceeds Washington’s appetite.

To be clear: not all military strikes in wartime are meant to destroy. Some are designed to communicate. When Israel flattened the Assembly of Experts office building in Qom – the very institution constitutionally tasked with selecting the next supreme leader – it did not do so because the building posed a tactical threat. It did so to deliver a message more eloquent than any diplomatic cable: whoever sits in that chair next will meet the same fate as the man who just vacated it.

When the IAF strikes targets surrounding strategic installations without destroying the installations themselves, the logic is identical – not demolition but demonstration, a whispered promise that the capability exists and the restraint is voluntary. That is strategy. That is the calibrated application of violence in service of a political objective – Clausewitz rendered in munitions.

What Iran is doing bears no resemblance to this. Bombing Bahraini neighborhoods, striking Kuwaiti airports, setting fires in Dubai – none of this communicates anything to Israel or America except weakness. It communicates to the Gulf states that Iran considers their sovereignty expendable, and it communicates to the world that a regime which spent 47 years promising apocalyptic vengeance against the Jewish state, when the moment of truth finally arrived, could not touch the enemy and so turned its fury on the bystanders.

When a country loses its Supreme Leader, its defense minister, its chief of staff, its IRGC commander, and its entire senior intelligence apparatus within the first hour of a war and responds by bombing the Gulf countries, it is not prosecuting a military campaign. It is lashing out – blindly, indiscriminately, and desperately – at the softest targets within range, because the hard targets have proven invulnerable.

The dark humor circulating online writes itself: some have suggested Iran should simply elect its next Supreme Leader pre-deceased, to save everyone the time – a joke that would be cruel if the regime’s track record of keeping its leaders alive did not make it so uncomfortably close to prophecy.

The Strait of Hormuz threats, the strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure, the attacks on civilian airports – none of this is designed to defeat Israel or America. It is designed to inflict enough regional pain that the Gulf states pressure Washington to stop the war before the Islamic Republic collapses entirely. This is not the behavior of a military power. It is the behavior of a regime negotiating the terms of its own survival by holding its neighbors hostage.

Fidan understood this. He warned that any state contemplating confrontation with Israel and America must first achieve near-total readiness – and he knew, as every intelligence professional in the region knew, that Iran had achieved nothing of the kind. Forty-seven years of “Death to America” produced neither the air defenses to protect its own Supreme Leader nor the intelligence apparatus to prevent its entire command structure from being vaporized in a single coordinated strike.

What it produced instead was Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Shia militias of Iraq – proxy armies designed not to win wars but to fight them on someone else’s soil, with someone else’s children, so that Iranian territory would never bear the cost. And when the cost finally came home, on a Saturday morning in Tehran, the regime that had spent half a century promising to wipe Israel off the map could not protect the single most important building in its own capital.

The resistance was never a strategy. It was a performance – a four-decade theatrical production staged for an audience of Arab streets and Shia militias, funded by oil revenues that should have built an economy, and sustained by a mythology that confused incantations with capability and defiance with strength. Hakan Fidan, to his credit, said what every serious analyst in the region already knew but no one dared to say: if you are not ready, do not fight. Iran was not ready. And now the entire Middle East is paying the price for a regime that mistook 47 years of chanting for 47 years of preparation.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)