Early in Tehran on Monday morning, Israel’s Persian-language social media service came out with a most unusual announcement: “Dear citizens of Tehran, in the coming days the Israeli army will continue its attacks against military targets in the Tehran region… To ensure your personal safety, we ask you to stay away from weapons production facilities, military headquarters, and security institutions affiliated with the regime.”
Given the timing, this was a persuasive invitation for Iran’s actual rulers, the surviving Revolutionary Guard commanders who had thus far eluded Israel’s assassination campaign, to accept the double cease fire offered by Trump’s envoy in Qatar — between Iran and the US, and Iran and Israel. And for their own safety too: at this point, nobody in Iran’s hierarchy could ignore the fact that Israel’s Kidon (“sword”) operatives hadn’t descended with parachutes, but rather were living in bourgeois comfort in Tehran, with plenty of local accomplices who would spot targets for them, and cover their tracks.
In reality, though, only the ceasefire with Israel was still to be agreed: the ample warning Iran had given of its own missile attack against the US base in Qatar was the clearest possible signal that the regime’s rulers preferred to accept the loss of their vast nuclear installations, rather than provoke further US attacks.
But in any assessment of the events of the past few days, it is arguably just as instructive to consider events which did not take place, as well as those which did. For one thing, nobody on the ground was killed by the US bombardment. Because attacks on the nuclear plants in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow were fully expected, all three locations were evacuated of personnel. And, usefully, 16 trucks were watched arriving at Fordow to remove steel casks of highly enriched uranium before the bombing — finally revealing the top-secret location that the International Atomic Energy Authority inspectors had long suspected, but never been able to confirm.
Nor, more importantly, was Iran’s Khark island tanker loading terminal targeted. Long the prime source of the foreign exchange that paid for Iran’s Chinese rocket propellant, North Korean uranium-shaping tools, and all the other materiel needed to transform Iran into a nuclear-weapon power, this would have been an easy air strike, with a very big economic payoff. Iran’s pathetically small foreign-exchange reserves would have been exhausted in a matter of days without the wire-transfers sent to Iran’s central bank as soon as each tanker is loaded.
But a functioning Khark island is useful leverage. It has been kept intact to ensure Iran’s good behaviour with its Persian Gulf neighbours, ensuring it doesn’t escalate and target their oil infrastructure, including Saudi Arabia’s gigantic oil terminal at Ras Tanura, where more than eight million barrels of crude oil are loaded onto tankers every day.
It may seem odd that Israel is minded to protect Saudi, which has condemned it for the retaliation against Iran’s ballistic missile attacks. But in addition to a growing de facto cooperation between the nations — which started with El Al’s permission to overfly Saudi Arabia from 31 August 2020 — if Saudi oil exports were interrupted, the price of gasoline would sharply increase in the US, very seriously weakening President Trump and validating the isolationists.
Oil is a powerful player in the current war, affecting Iran’s calculus too. The semblance of a parliament in Tehran, headed by Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, who is much admired as an ultra-extremist by the extremist majority (even after his wife was spotted returning from an Istanbul shopping trip with 20 suitcases), has just voted “to close the Straits of Hormuz” to all exporters but Iran, including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates. Even Iran’s mostly inoperable warships could do that quite easily, by simply attacking a few tankers. But such a move would disrupt the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, cause oil prices to explode globally, and escalate geopolitical tensions, including antagonising China. Thus far Iran’s rulers have ignored their parliament’s recommendation. Another non-event.
Nor have we yet to see any US planning for military intervention in Iran, let alone an invasion. It seems that even the Right-wing militarists in the Trump administration have finally absorbed the lessons of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq II: the United States can do many things and quite a few of them very well, including destroying any target worthy of a bomb, but it cannot successfully operate in any country to protect or defeat its government — if only because of an incurable lack of accurate intelligence.
“Even the Right-wing militarists in the Trump administration have finally absorbed the lessons of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq II.”
Yes, Iran’s population has been terrorised by religious fanatics ever since February 1979, and they have been greatly impoverished by their very costly and now presumably wrecked nuclear adventures. But to enlist outside support, they must first act to save themselves by rising to attack their oppressors. The members of the Artesh, Iran’s regular army, were sharply diminished in status and means with the rise of the Revolutionary Guards and not all of them would fight for the Ayatollah and his regime. So a successful uprising is not at all impossible, but it would still require the vital spark that can only come from a few daring rebels — not from foreigners, however well meaning.
Not long before President Trump decided to ignore the anti-interventionists in his own MAGA movement to join Israel in fighting Iran, his once close associate Tucker Carlson solemnly warned that “the first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy. An attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose.”
But Trump was persuaded to enter the fight when he was told by Israel’s uniquely effective intelligence apparatus that all that would be needed to finish the job was one bombing raid by seven bombers with 14 bombs, and 24 cruise missiles. No boots on the ground. No casualties. And no nuclear bomb for Iran.
