One month after the start of a war that US President Donald Trump said was going to last at most “four to five weeks”, it is obvious that it is not going to end anytime soon. Nothing has gone as Trump had expected. As of this writing, all US calculations, and most of those of his bosom friend Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, have gone awry.

Iran has all but destroyed all five US military bases in the Persian Gulf – the Al Udeid base in Qatar, the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia and a naval base in Bahrain that houses the US Fifth fleet, as well as logistics and training bases in Kuwait and the UAE. These will remain unusable for months if not years.

The war has destroyed the mystique of Dubai, once a home base for gold smuggling into India that had converted it into one of the richest countries in the world. Iran has driven the largest US aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, and its escort vessels a thousand kilometres into the Arabian Sea and kept them there by firing four long range missiles at it, of which the fourth was brought down only 600 yards from the ship.

Within Iran, the government has been able to shrug off the lethal “decapitation” strikes on three generations of leaders and their advisers, and it has launched progressively more lethal drone and missile strikes at Israel that have all but exhausted its interception capacity, leaving the country (Tel Aviv and Haifa in particular) at its mercy. What is still more unpalatable to Israeli civilians is that Israel’s military has all but exhausted its three layers of interception missiles, giving Iran the capacity to launch its most lethal missiles with impunity.

Today, the few videos of these attacks that have got out despite Israel’s draconian punishments for anyone who tries to report on the war, show that half or more are hitting their designated sites in Israel.

News reports that have leaked out of Israel show that the population of Tel Aviv and Haifa are in panic. Many families are now refusing to leave the air raid shelters even after the all-clear has been sounded. As a result, some families are having to stay in the open through the next bombardment, praying for their survival. Netanyahu and his advisers understand their plight. They have decided, therefore, to take out insurance against future electoral defeat by snatching a small victory from the war. To do this, Netanyahu announced that Israel would not only drive the Hezbollah out of south Lebanon but annex all of southern Lebanon till the Litani River.

But that, too, is not happening. For this time the Israeli forces find themselves facing not untrained Hezbollah guerillas armed with shoulder-launched missiles and small arms but fighters trained in guerilla tactics and armed with some of the missiles that Iran has held in reserve for the American ground forces when they land in Iran. Video footage, presumably released by Hezbollah, shows these........

© The Wire