“We’re living in a state of war now,” said a friend in the desert city of Kashan. She had been woken in the early hours of Friday by Israel’s aerial attack on the nearby uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Around the same time, in desirable north Tehran, the penthouse home of Ali Shamkhani, a key aide of the supreme leader, was neatly dissected by an Israeli missile. Shamkhani was killed and subsequent social media posts showed debris strewn across a hideous ballroom that bore the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic’s Empire style and fully deserved a precision missile. At around 10pm, Tehran time, a message landed from another friend in the capital: “Just now [the Israelis] hit a target close by, sending us up to the ceiling and down again.”
Netanyahu’s objective here isn’t simply to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme and its ballistic missiles. It is to embarrass and demoralise the Islamic Republic by flaunting Israel’s mastery of sabotage and subterfuge as his pilots roam unimpeded above the Persian plateau. The scope of the Israeli attacks was big, from Tabriz in the far north to Dezful in the south; the intelligence and precision, as with the campaign that decapitated Hezbollah last year, were impressive. Images released by the Israeli military showed shadowy figures, purportedly Israeli commandos, setting devices around Iran’s air defences that were detonated during the assault. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Air Force, was killed along with other senior officers in an underground command centre whose existence should have been a secret.
According to Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations the strikes killed 78 people and wounded 320. This is its biggest loss of senior military leaders since the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq War of the Eighties. A clutch of nuclear scientists were also assassinated. As Netanyahu promised in an unctuous address to “the proud people of Iran”, complete with a snatch of Persian delivered in his guttural Hebrew accent, “More is on the way.”
“Trump and Netanyahu seem to have stumbled into a good cop-bad cop routine.”
In return, on Friday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to show “no mercy” to the “evil, despicable, terrorist, Zionist” enemy. But he no longer has the tool kit to execute such threats. Until last year he would have mobilised Iran’s proxies in its “axis of resistance”, but Hezbollah and Hamas have both been maimed by Israel’s furious response to the attacks of October 7, while his client Bashar al-Assad was last year ousted from power in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s former bridgehead to the eastern Mediterranean.
He cannot lightly target military installations belonging to the US, despite holding it responsible for Israel’s actions, for that would bring Trump down on his wraith-like, 86-year-old head. Only American planes can deliver the biggest “bunker-buster” bombs that are capable of penetrating the mountainside that protects the Iranians’ as-yet impregnable enrichment facility, at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. It is best to avoid needless provocation.
Netanyahu has no such qualms, claiming to be clearing a path for the Iranian people to achieve “your objective, which is freedom”. In Tehran the roads are full of police guarding against the possibility of the popular insurrection that is the nightmare of dictators in war. Petrol sales have been capped at 20 litres per vehicle. A nation immiserated by sanctions, its once-thriving middle class pummelled back to the bread line, will suffer further. But the dignity of Iranians is resilient and there are few signs of panic among people that have lived with either the promise of war or its fully materialised reality ever since the revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979.
Many Tehranis left the capital when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles during the Iran-Iraq War, and, before then, when Britain and Russia invaded in World War II. But now the old people are staying, doggedly reluctant to up sticks, not, I think, from any particular animus towards Israel, whose precision and fastidious avoidance of mass civilian casualties has aroused their admiration, but a determination, now that the Islamic Republic may have begun its end game, to stay the course.
On Friday, with the night sky was alive with whizzing ordnance, from the rooftops, scattered female voices came together: “Death to Khamenei! Death to Khamenei!” The regime is a joke. Its most cherished icon, the compulsory hijab, has been smashed and there is nothing the authorities can do to force the women who have thrown off their headscarves to put them on again. Droll social media posts keep up morale. One shows a hairy man in a cocktail dress standing on the balcony of his Tehran apartment toasting the incoming Israeli missiles with what appears to be shots of vodka. Someone has posted a photo of Hossein Salami, the unlamented commander of the Revolutionary Guard, who was killed on Friday, with his hands held far apart and the legend, “I’m telling you, a missile this thick, right up my arse…” In contrast, there is some sympathy for Muhammad Bagheri, the country’s chief of staff, and another victim of the Israeli cull; he was reputedly troubled by the supreme leader’s use of the armed forces as agents of domestic repression and recently, and in stark contrast to his more blood-thirsty colleagues, issued a call for peace.
For its part, America is struggling to hold a consistent line on the attacks. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the Israeli strikes a “unilateral action”. But if Donald Trump didn’t approve the attacks, it would hardly strengthen his credibility as leader of the greatest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, would it? “I think it’s been excellent,” the President said of the very attacks he had tried strenuously to dissuade Netanyahu from launching. Offended by a journalist’s implication that he may not have been fully in the loop, he retorted, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was…we know what’s going on.”
Trump and Netanyahu seem to have stumbled into a good cop-bad cop routine, with the US President urging the Iranians to come swiftly to terms “before there is nothing left”. Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, had been due to meet in Muscat tomorrow for the sixth round of talks aimed at capping Iran’s uranium enrichment in return for a lifting of sanctions. But the President’s boasting that he was in on the Israeli attacks, the assassination of Shamkhani, who had been overseeing Iran’s negotiators, and Israel’s evident determination not to allow an Iranian enrichment capability of any kind have dampened Iranian enthusiasm. In the words of a foreign ministry spokesman, “You cannot claim to negotiate and at the same time…allow the Zionist regime to target Iran’s territory.”
If Trump did approve the Israeli action, as opposed to simply knowing about it, it may be that he thinks Iran will be bounced into accepting a complete cessation of enrichment. In fact, events of recent days, clearly aimed at toppling the regime, are more likely to suggest to Khamenei that only by going for a bomb can the Islamic Republic survive.
Iran’s route to do so is to further enrich its stockpile to weapons grade. Given that Natanz seems to be out of action — according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has visited the site often, it was “heavily damaged” in the Israeli attacks — the fuel needs to be moved to Fordow. Such a transfer, however, would make it a “sitting duck” for Israeli drones, according to a former US spy quoted in the New York Times, while Trump would presumably unleash his exceptionally heavy bunker busters if he learned that Khamenei had issued orders to go for a bomb. Not that Trump ever utters the name of his adversary, which tells us a lot.
Khamenei’s name is not dissimilar to the name of his predecessor, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. But distinguishing between the two is perfectly manageable if you put your mind to it. You would expect the Iranians to figure out the difference between, say, Thomson and Timpson, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if you dignify your adversary with a name, a personality, psychological traits, weaknesses and strengths follow naturally; your adversary becomes legible. But the current American administration is not interested in reading its foes. “Khamenei” is too much of a mouthful for them, so they call him, with cartoonish emphasis, “the Ayatollah”.
And so, 46 years since he played a small role in the victory of the Islamic Revolution, this man without a name who is in fact one of the most significant politicians of our age is running out of road. The current crisis is unlikely to end without him conceding the right to enrich uranium, which, to his mind, amounts to surrendering to the enemy he has spent his entire life fighting, and which might not, in any case, save the Islamic Republic. Flight is not an option. Unlike Assad, he would not accept a dacha outside Moscow. He would prefer to die in Iran. The Ayatollah is very old and he is surrounded by men who keep getting killed. To go for a bomb would be the last throw of the dice, and probably suicidal, and we are not quite there yet.
