There are many conflicts that, while not necessarily inconclusive, do not produce clear winners. The outcomes of the India-Pakistan conflict of 1965 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 involving Egypt and Israel are still being debated. Unless the assertion of the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, of Iran’s “unconditional surrender” is viewed as a considered war aim of the US, it is likely that there will not be serious disagreements over the outcome of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
In all fairness, the US should be included among the adversaries of Iran. Operation Midnight Hammer, which involved the targeted use of ‘bunker busters’ to decimate three nuclear facilities, including the one located in the forbidding terrain of Fordow, was a turning point in the war. Regardless of what has subsequently been claimed by the Islamic Republic and its friends about the stockpiles of enriched uranium being removed from Fordow before the 20-minute raid on June 22, the mere fact that Trump could announce the ceasefire the very next day is revealing. Although the Iranians conducted a largely symbolic, face-saving, retaliatory missile attack on an American base in Qatar on June 23, it was clear to Iran that persisting meant courting disaster.
Since there were no face-to-face encounters between the two sides and, unlike earlier conflicts in the Middle East, no gain or loss of territory, a different yardstick will have to be employed in assessing where Israel and Iran stand today. It is significant that both the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, have claimed victories, with Iran insisting it will not discuss the future of its nuclear programme with the US. As for Israel, the Islamic regime has not yet reneged from its position of wanting the complete destruction of the “Zionist entity.” The Israel Defence Forces may have destroyed the electronic countdown clock (of the destruction of Israel) in Tehran’s Palestine Square on the last day of the war — it has been replaced by a manual contraption — but the fantasy of the Ayatollahs liberating Jerusalem continues to motivate the shrinking band of the faithful in Iran.
The apparent unwillingness of the Iranian velayet-e-faqih (loosely translated as the rule of the clergy) to respond to the conflict with a necessary dose of realism owes greatly to the lurking fear of ‘regime change’. Although the idea of a foreign power liberating authoritarian regimes from tyranny stands utterly discredited following the US-sponsored misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the resulting civil war in Syria, ‘regime change’ has been bandied about quite loosely both in Washington and Jerusalem as a possible war aim. Trump suggested as much in one of his colourful social media posts, and Netanyahu addressed the same theme in his Nowruz address to Iran last year.
In the past year, the exiled Iranian Opposition has also been galvanised by the lobbying of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah who was removed from the throne after a mass uprising in 1979, in Western capitals. It is not that the return of an autocratic monarchy holds any attraction for the Iranian people who have developed a sophisticated political culture — much of it subterranean — by waging an intellectual guerrilla warfare with the custodians of the Islamic State and its strong-arm functionaries. The disparate community of exiles are predictably fractious, but a big section of them believes that the crown prince could be a cementing force in a constitutional monarchy. With the lapse of some 45 years since Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, the notion of a Pahlavi golden age has taken hold of the popular imagination, especially in the light of the hardships that have accompanied the US sanctions on Iran.
There are many sources of opposition to the regime in Iran. By far the most potent is the brewing frustrations of Iranian women. Apart from the institutionalised gender inequality that has constrained Iranian women, there is growing anger over the obligatory insistence on the hijab and its rigid and brutal implementation by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij. In 2022, it was the heavy-handed implementation of the dress code that led to the death of a young woman in police custody. The resulting mass movement against the regime was put down brutally and added to the alienation of a modern generation of young Iranians from the regime. This estrangement haunts the mullahs.
Whether or not those at the helm are aware of the regime’s social fragility is not known. However, a marked feature of the recent war was the remarkable extent to which Israel was able to bank on a network of Iranian dissidents to both pinpoint the movements of the Iranian leadership and set up drone facilities within the country, sabotaging Iran’s network of missiles. It is said that the regime arrested some 700 Mossad agents operating within Iran. Whether those arrested were really in the pay of Israel’s dreaded intelligence arm or were mere political opponents of the regime will never be known. However, Israel’s ability to establish an effective fifth column owed much to the disquiet against the regime. Maybe it is also a pointer to the fact that hatred of Israel isn’t a national consensus, either in Iran or in Lebanon and Syria.
For Iran, the war with Israel was much more than the death of 935 citizens killed in the bombing and the targeted assassination of the entire top echelons of its nuclear establishment, its intelligence agencies and the IRGC. The regime hasn’t admitted the extent of its leadership loss but the mere fact that the public funerals of the fallen leaders are still going on tells a story. The regime’s loss of face has been monumental. During the entire war, it (and the people) watched helplessly as the IDF demonstrated its total control of the skies.
Iran had banked on keeping Israel under permanent pressure through what it called the “ring of fire”. The plan was that the Hamas offensive on October 7, 2023, would be accompanied by attacks on the IDF along six other fronts: the Arab minority within Israel, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria (also called the West Bank), the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, a Syrian attack along the Golan Heights, a missile offensive from the Houthis in Yemen and, finally, missile attacks from Iran. Unfortunately for Tehran, the whole plan collapsed. The targeting of Hezbollah through rigged pagers and walkie-talkies was a masterstroke and neutralised the most formidable non-State adversary. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria was unanticipated but fortuitous and the Arab revolts in the West Bank and inside Israel never materialised. In the end, Iran was the last jihadi standing.